Songoftheday 2/12/21 - When the lala hits ya lyrics just splits ya, head so hard that ya hat can't fit ya...

 

 

"Going Back To Cali" / "Sky's The Limit" - The Notorious B.I.G. featuring 112

from the album Life After Death (1997)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #26 (one week)

Weeks in the Top-40: 5

 

Today's song(s) of the day come from the late hip-hop icon Christopher Wallace, aka "The Notorious B.I.G.", whose second album Life After Death had produced two #1 pop hits after his brutal murder with "Hypnotize" and "Mo Money Mo Problems". Two other cuts from the album also landed on the R&B Airplay Top-40 list in Billboard magazine with "Notorious Thugs" and "Lovin' You Tonight". The third commercial single released from the record had "Sky's The Limit" as the lead track. The song was written by Wallace and producer DJ Clark Kent (Rodolfo Franklin Sr.) with samples of adult soul singer Bobby Caldwell's "My Flame" and house music pioneer D-Train's "Keep On", which gave Caldwell and the group's Hubert Eaves and James Williams writing credit. It also featured R&B vocal group 112 singing on the chorus. The slick record was released with a music video directed by Spike Jonez, which cast kids to portray the late Biggie Smalls and his friend and mentor Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs...

The single entered the pop chart at #60, but only lasted a week, as radio stations suddenly favorite one of the "B-Sides" on the single, "Going Back To Cali". This time sampling Roger Troutman and Zapp's "More Bounce To The Ounce", Biggie and producer Easy Mo Bee (Osten Harvey Jr) deliver a cruising track about the current "east coast/west coast" conflict in rap that ended up resulting in his own death. It entered the top-40 with this track as the lead, even without a video...

"Going Back To Cali" became the Notorious B.I.G.'s sixth top-40 pop hit as a lead artist in January of 1998. The song climbed to #34 on Billboard magazine's R&B chart ("Sky's The Limit" made it to #34 on that list). Internationally, "Sky's The Limit" made the top-40 in New Zealand (#24) and the UK (#35). A final track from Life After Death promoted to radio without being released as a single, "Nasty Boy", made it to #43 on Billboard's R&B Airplay chart. 

 

In 1999, Combs' record company, Bad Boy, released Born Again, a collection of unreleased tracks and rhymes mixed with other artist. Two singles from the record reached the R&B top-40, with the Duran Duran-sampling "Notorious B.I.G.", featuring Puff Daddy and Lil' Kim, making it to #30, as well as going to #16 on the British singles chart.  The album was his second #1 on the Billboard 200 sales tally. Five years later, another posthumous release, Duets: The Final Chapter, came out. Lead single "Nasty Girl", which featured Combs (as "Diddy" now), Nelly, Jagged Edge, and Avery Storm, just missed the pop Top-40 at #44, while climbing to #20 on the R&B chart and going all the way to #1 in the UK in 2006. The only other "new" release from the late rapper was a "collaborative" record with former wife Faith Evans called The King & I in 2017, which popped on to the Billboard 200 at #65. 

Besides this, Biggie will appear in this series a couple more times, with featured spots in top-40 hits from Puff Daddy and former rival (and also deceased) Tupac Shakur.

"Going Back To Cali": (5/10)            "Sky's The Limit": (6/10)

Up tomorrow: Canadian country crossover star condemns crackbrained ideas.