Songoftheday 5/8/20 - Silly like I'm hype off candy gotta big thick chick named sandy, In the farm in the middle of the barn where everybody's feelin crazy...
from the album The Final Tic (1996)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #18 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 10
Today's song of the day comes from the hip-hop group Crucial Conflict, who came together in Chicago in the early 1990s. With rappers Coldhard, Kilo, Never, and Wildstyle, the group released their debut album The Final Tic in the summer of 1996. That was preceded by the spring single "Hay", a pot-lovers anthem written by the group and produced by Wildstyle (with a little help from MTV's Fab 5 Freddy). Built on a sample of George Clinton's Funkadelic number "I'll Stay", that snippet gave the track a 70s retro vibe that they laid some drug-induced lyrics...
"Hay" became Crucial Conflict's first and only pop hit, reaching the top-20 in America in July of 1996. The song also rose to #10 on Billboard magazine's R&B chart, and got to #2 on the Rap Singles Chart. Internationally, the single was big Down Under, peaking at #3 in New Zealand. A second song from the album, "Ride The Rodeo", again tried to capitalize on the vague "farm" theme, and wasn't released as a single to try to juice sales of the album, but the track stalled down at #62 on the R&B Airplay chart and missed the pop Hot 100 Airplay list altogether (though it was a second top-40 hit in New Zealand at #26). The Final Tic album did peak at a respectable #12 on the albums sales chart (and #5 on the R&B albums list), and sold over a half-million copies.
The thing is, that would be it for the group on the radio. Second album Good Side, Bad Side was a top-40 placer at #38, and #10 at R&B, but no singles hit the sales or airplay charts in 1998. Dropped by Universal Records, it took a decade for their third indie album Planet Crucon to arrive, and it barely made a mark, stopping at #73 on the R&B albums list. They still perform together though, and their single albeit a one-hit wonder is still revered in the rap world.
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Here's the group appearing on Showtime At The Apollo in 1996...
...and lastly, in concert in 2019...
Up tomorrow: Late great rapper heads for the Thunderdome.
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