Songoftheday 3/12/21 - Out on the dance floor I'm holdin' you so tight, gotta make you feel me gotta press your body tight...
"Body Bumpin' (Yippie-Yi-Yo)" - Public Announcement
from the album All Work, No Play (1998)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #5 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 20
Today's song of the day comes from the R&B vocal group Public Announcement, who started out as the backing singers and dancers for R. Kelly. His first album, Born Into The 90's in 1992, was credited as "R. Kelly & Public Announcement", and had spun off four top ten R&B hits, with two of them reaching the pop top-40: "Honey Love" and "Dedicated". However Kelly ditched them to record as a solo artist after the debut disc. Out of the three original members - Andre Boykins, Earl Robinson, and Ricky Webster, only Robinson continued on, bringing on Feloney Davis, Euclid Gray, and Glenn Wright to make Public Announcement its own vocal quartet. Signing with A&M Records (previous home to Janet Jackson), the group released their album All Work, No Play in the spring of 1998. The lead single, released in January, was a slinky and sexual jam "Body Bumpin' (Yippie-Yi-Yo)". Written by Davis and Gray with Monica Gray, and produced by Robinson, the song has Davis doing his best Kelly-ish croon while the others back up with a cadence that reminds me of the fluid rolls of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. With the music video accentuating the title's tag as promising to ride you like a mare, and surprisingly for a "backup group" act this ended up doing quite well (I'm sure the Kelly connection at the time helped)...
"Body Bumpin'" became Public Announcement's first and by far biggest hit, reaching the top five on the American pop chart in May of 1998. The song also climbed to #4 on Billboard magazine's R&B chart. Internationally, the single became a top-40 hit in New Zealand (#11) and the UK (#38). The All Work, No Play album, released in March, peaked at #81 on the Billboard 200 sales list in America, and #14 on the R&B specific tally.
A second offering from the record, "It's About Time", followed the same template, though it was written externally by producer Travon Potts (and was a little smoother). It wasn't released as a commercial single, but the song got enough urban radio love to make it to #23 on the R&B Airplay chart, spending 20 weeks on that list.
(5/10)
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Here's the group performing the song live for television promoting the album...
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