Songoftheday 6/20/21 - I was just a young boy livin' in the hub city, Eastside Compton G...

 

 

"Westside" - TQ

from the album They Never Saw Me Coming (1998)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #12 (two weeks)

Weeks in the Top-40: 11

 

Today's song of the day comes from Terence Quaites, who grew up in the city of Compton abutting Los Angeles. Quaites started out with the vocal group Coming Of Age, whose self-titled debut album scored a top-40 R&B hit in 1993 with "Coming Home To Love", which just missed Billboard magazine's pop Hot 100, "bubbling under" the list at #101. After a second album in 1995, that act called it quits, with Quaites heading out solo under the recording moniker TQ. Signed to the Clockwork imprint of Sony/Epic Records, TQ released his debut solo single "Westside" in September of 1998. Written by the singer with Robert Ford, James Moore, and Mike Mosley, the track name-checks a list of hip-hop stars from the Los Angeles County area, including Ice Cube, DJ Quik, Ice T, and Eazy E, along with streets in the neighborhood, making it an anthem for the residents of the area, as well as for those into Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, whose rap-singing style he emulated with a formidable voice, despite the language...

"Westside" became TQ's first and only hit on Billboard magazine's official Hot 100 pop chart, only missing the top ten by a couple notches in October of 1998. The single did make that level at #10 on their R&B chart. Internationally, the single was a surprise success, reaching the top ten in the Netherlands (#3), the UK (#4), Ireland (#4), Germany (#8), Norway (#8), Sweden (#9), Belgium (#9F), Australia (#10), and New Zealand (#10). TQ's debut album, They Never Saw Me Coming, released in November of that year, climbed to #122 on the Billboard 200 sales tally in America, and #28 on the R&B Albums list in Billboard. 

In Britain, Europe, and Down Under, the song "Bye Bye Baby" was put out as the second single, and did decently, reaching the top ten in Germany (#6), the Netherlands (#6), and the UK (#7), But the follow-up single in the States, the ballad "Better Days", stalled down at #71 on Billboard's R&B chart, but in the UK landed a third top-40 hit at #32. A British Isles-only collab with boy-band Another Level, "Summertime", scored a top ten hit in the UK at #7, while peaking at #24 in Ireland. 

Something seems to have have happened with TQ and his label after this promising success. Preparing his sophomore effort, The Second Coming, the Biz Markie-sampling preview single "Daily" was released in 2000, where it popped into the R&B top-40 at #38. Internationally, the single made the top-40 in the UK (#14), the Netherlands (#23), Germany (#31), and New Zealand (#38), but while the album came out and made the top-40 in those countries, the release was shelved in the U.S. Even another collab in 2001, this time with German pop star Sarah Connor on "Let's Get Back To Bed Boy", which went all the way to #2 in Germany, top ten in Switzerland and Austria, and #15 in the UK, didn't help TQ in the U.S., and he left Epic to go indie. His final singles chart appearance came in 2003 as a guest on producer Swizz Beatz' (aka Mr. Alicia Keys) first charting single "Bigger Business" at #72 R&B. 

Since then, TQ has released six more albums, the most recent being 2019's Revolution. I'd love to see a TV-One Unsung about him to see what happened.

(7/10)

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and here's TQ performing "Westside" live for a British TV show...

Up tomorrow: Hot boyband assigns blame.