Songoftheday 5/11/20 - But I gotta be strong girl you did me wrong, I thought we were down...
from the album Keith Sweat (1996)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #2 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 35
Today's song of the day comes from new jack swing artist Keith Sweat, whose third album Keep In Comin' had scored the R&B singer his fourth top-40 pop hit with "Keep In Comin'" in the beginning of 1992. But even though his next album in 1994, Get Up On It, had given Keith his fourth #1 R&B album and third top ten all-genre album at #8, and spun off three singles, the best any of them could do was stopping short of the top-40 at #48 for "How Do You Like It?", even with a feature from Lisa "Left-Eye" Lopes from TLC. (All three did make the R&B top-40, with that aforementioned single going to #9). After that, Keith went back in the studio with co-producer Eric McCaine for his next project, which would prove to be his most successful. The lead single from his self-titled fifth disc was "Nobody", which feature the female vocal group he had been mentoring for quite a while, Kut Klose (they even had a top-40 pop hit of their own in 1995 with "I Like"). Written by Sweat, McCaine, and Kut Klose's Athena Cage, Lavonn Battle, and Tabitha Duncan, the downtempo jam updated his sound from that new jack swing frenetic vibe to a bass-heavy track about being messed up by a bad relationship. The music video was pretty dramatic as well, a mini-movie about murder , deception, and justice that was just right for MTV, and in the end Keith had the highest-charting pop hit of his career...
"Twisted" rose all the way to the runner-up spot on the American pop chart in August of 1996. The song also landed Keith's fifth #1 R&B hit, spending three weeks on top (his best). It also made it to #9 on Billboard magazine's Adult R&B radio chart, and topped their Rhythmic format list for fourteen weeks. Internationally, the single took six week at #1 in New Zealand, reached the top ten in Australia (#9), and hit the top-40 in Canada (#16), the Netherlands (#17), Iceland (#35), and the UK (#39).
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A second version of the track, titled the "Flavahood Sexual Mix", interpolated the melody from Marvin Gaye's 1982 classic "Sexual Healing"...
Next up is Keith live in concert in 1996...
And finally, Sweat along with Kut Klose at a show...
Up tomorrow: Bad boy Cali rappers count their numbers.
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