Songoftheday 4/9/21 - Come on ya'll it's a big booty party get all ya'll day in day, chillin' in the M to the I to the A makin' hits with Luke this way...

 

 

"Raise The Roof" - Luke featuring No Good But So Good

from the album Changin' The Game (1997)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #26 (two weeks)

Weeks in the Top-40: 11

 

Today's song of the day comes from rapper and label head Luther "Luke" Campbell, who was the leader of the lasciviously seminal group 2 Live Crew in the 1980s. At the turn of the decade, Luke departed on a solo career, just as the group had their highest-charting hit with "Banned In The USA" in the summer of 1990. The same-titled album was even originally credited to "Luke featuring the 2 Live Crew". 

Two years later, Campbell returned with his first completely solo disc I Got Shit On My Mind. Lead single "I Wanna Rock" made the pop Hot 100 at #73, while reaching #39 on Billboard magazine's R&B chart, along with followup "Breakdown" at #29 on the R&B list. In the next four years, Luke released three more albums, all reaching the Billboard 200 albums chart, but none really scored any big hits. In 1997, Campbell put out his fifth solo set Changin' The Game. The featured single on the record was "Raise The Roof", written by Luke with DJ Darren Rudnick which was built on a sample of John Barry's score theme to King Kong, giving him writing credit. The track had former Luke dancers turned rappers No Good But So Good, who dominate the verses on the track also feature in the music video, which was made to bring the comedy out in full form and featured a ton of A-list cameos. And now that "Miami Bass" music was in the mainstream with hits from INOJ, 95 South, and most importantly Tag Team, the combination of the sound plus the dance the record was supposed to promote (which is just pushing your hands up to the sky), and the rapper found himself in the pop top-40 for one more time...

 

 "Raise The Roof" became Luke's final top-40 pop hit (and No Good But So Good's sole one) in May of 1998. The song also climbed to #20 on Billboard's R&B chart, and spent a week at #1 on their Rap Singles chart. But despite this being his biggest hit in years, the Changin' The Game album, released in November of 1997, was his first set that failed to make the Billboard 200 sales chart, and stalled out at #49 on their R&B Albums list. 

Since then, Luke has released two more solo studio albums, the most recent being 2006's overambitious three-disc My Life and Freaky Times, which got to #35 on the R&B Albums chart. As for No Good But So Good, member John Strachtan departed the group, with Derrick Hill and Tracy Lattimer continuing as simply "No Good". The duo's next single, "Lizard, Lizard" which had Luke guesting on, made it to #66 on the R&B chart. In 2002, they returned with "Ballin' Boy", which topped Billboard's Rap Singles chart for a week and peaked at #54 on the R&B list.

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And here's a clip of Luke doing "Raise The Roof" in concert in 2019...

Up tomorrow: Time flew for one more time for this rap duo.