Songoftheday 3/4/21 - Since the Mona video you been trackin' me down, tryin' to figure out how I look impersonal...

 

 

"If You Think I'm Jiggy" - The Lox

from the album Money, Power & Respect (1998)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #30 (one week)

Weeks in the Top-40: 5

 

Today's song of the day comes from The Lox, a trio of rappers who came together in Yonkers, a northern suburb of New York City, in the mid-1990s. Styles, Sheek Louch, and Jadakiss were schoolmates, and had been performing together since then, it wasn't until Mary J. Blige hooked them up with Bad Boy label head and hip-hop artist/producer in his own right Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs that their recording career got started. Signed to the label, the group released a tribute song to the late Notorious B.I.G. called "We'll Always Love Big Poppa", which managed to get to #57 on Billboard magazine's R&B Airplay chart in 1997.  At the beginning of the following year, they appeared on Puff Daddy's top ten pop hit "It's All About The Benjamins". Concurrently, the LOX released their debut album Money, Power & Respect, which included the Big Poppa tribute. The lead commercial single from the record was "If You Think I'm Jiggy". A play on the title of the song prominently sampled on the track, Rod Stewart's #1 disco-rock jam "If You Think I'm Sexy", the track was produced by Puffy protege Dame Grease. The lyrics of the verses were a lot of bragging about wealth and libido, devolving to a point where they proclaim their allegiance to Biggie Smalls (the Notorious B.I.G.'s alias) and in the very next line say they're not down with "fat ladies". Wow. But with the radio-friendly sample, and Combs and Bad Boy's dominance at the time, the trio scored their first pop and R&B hit...

"If You Think I'm Jiggy" became the Lox's first top-40 pop hit in February of 1998. The song also made it to #21 on Billboard's R&B chart, while making the top ten on their Rap Singles list at #9. Internationally, the single peaked at #16 in New Zealand (an early big audience for hip-hop). The Money, Power & Respect album topped Billboard's R&B Albums chart, and came in at a respectable #3 on the all-genre Billboard 200 sales tally, going on to move over a million copies.

(2/10)

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As rough as that single was, somehow the Lox found themselves appearing on the children's comedy sketch show All That to perform it...

 

 Up tomorrow: Rock band is up all night.