Songoftheday 9/16/21 - Baby just tell me just how you feel, we livin it I'm just givin it to you real...

 

 

"What's It Gonna Be?!" - Busta Rhymes featuring Janet Jackson

from the album E.L.E. (Extinction Level Event): The Final World Front (1998)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #3 (one week)

Weeks in the Top-40: 13

 

Today's song comes from rap artist Busta Rhymes, whose 1997 sophomore effort When Disaster Strikes had spun off a pair of top ten pop hit singles with "Dangerous" and "Turn It Up/Fire It Up (Remix)", along with another track, "Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Can See", which went to #2 on the R&B Airplay chart and the pop airplay top-40.  A year later, Busta returned with his third album with the precariously long title E.L.E. (Extinction Level Event): The Final World Front. The lead single from the set, "Gimme Some More", sampled the theme from Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho, and sported a high-budget music video tailor made for MTV. But somehow that didn't translate to big success, with the single stalling at #29 on Billboard magazine's R&B Singles chart, and missing their pop Hot 100 altogether, only "bubbling under" at #105. (The single did much better overseas, reaching #5 in the UK.) However Busta brought out the big guns for the follow-up, and when I say big guns I mean one of the biggest stars in pop and R&B at the time, Janet Jackson. Janet, who at the time was releasing music under just her first name, was coming off her critically-acclaimed album The Velvet Rope, which had scored both a #1 pop ("Together Again") and #1 R&B ("I Get Lonely") single. The collaboration, "What's It Gonna Be?!", with written by the rapper with producer Darrell Allamby and R&B "song doctor" Antoinette Roberson. Trying to show a "softer" side of himself, albeit still with the machine-gun-speed delivery he's famous for, Busta is trying to bed a prospective Janet, who coos the multi-tracked chorus like a sensual response. He veers into braggadocio, but with the words flying out so quickly its hard to keep up and you just end up riding the flow to the chorus yet again. With the music video, Busta and Janet attempt to outdo their respective previous big-budget extravaganzas, putting every computer special effect on display while the pair end up writhing with each other (I gotta say, Janet reached the peak of her sexual fierceness on this clip)...

"What's It Gonna Be" returned Busta (and Janet for that matter) to the pop top ten in April of 1999. The song became Busta's first #1 R&B hit, and so far only one as a lead artist, as well as having topped Billboard magazine's Rap Singles list. Internationally, the single made the top ten in the UK (#6) and New Zealand (#7), and reached the top-40 in the Netherlands (#29). The E.L.E. (Extinction Level Event) album, released in December of 1998, went to #12 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, and #2 on the R&B Albums chart in Billboard, going on to move over a million copies. At the Grammy Awards in 2000, "What's It Gonna Be" was nominated for Best Rap Duo/Group Performance, which was won by fellow rap-sung nominees the Roots and Erykah Badu for "You Got Me". "Gimme Some More" was also up for Best Rap Solo Performance (his fourth consecutive nomination), which went home with Eminem for his breakthrough single "My Name Is". Lastly, the E.L.E. album was nominated for Best Rap Album that year, his first and only time in that category, which also went to Eminem for The Slim Shady LP. 

Busta's next single from the album, "Party Is Goin' On Over Here", was combined with "Tear The Roof Off" in his next music video. However, neither of them hit big - "Party" spent twenty weeks on the R&B chart but only got to #72, while "Tear" only made it to #75, and neither reached the pop Hot 100. Another track from E.L.E., "Do The Bus A Bus", managed to climb to #43 at R&B and "bubbled under" the Hot 100 at #118. But Busta will return to the series, as will Janet Jackson.

(5/10)

Up tomorrow: Irish girl-group learns some French.