Songoftheday 10/19/21 - Friday night you and your boys went out to eat, then they hung out but you came home around three...

 

 

"It's Not Right, But It's Okay" - Whitney Houston

from the album My Love Is Your Love (1998)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #4 (one week)

Weeks in the Top-40: 15

 

Today's song of the day is from Whitney Houston, who after "under-performing" with her superstar duet with Mariah Carey "When You Believe" (making the top-20 is a relative flop), she rebounded in the spring of 1999 with her #2 pop/#1 R&B hit "Heartbreak Hotel". Both of those songs appeared on Houston's fourth studio album My Love Is Your Love, which brought the singer back to R&B radio audiences. The third single from the record would be its most remembered cut, "It's Not Right, But It's Okay". Written by producer Rodney "Darkchild" Jenkins with brother Freddie, Toni Estes, LaShawn Daniels, and Isaac Phillips, the original version was a midtempo neo-soul number with the usual shuffle heard on many an R&B song from the time. Houston is singing to her lover she found cheating and kicks the louse out (somebody call Bobby Brown). The lyrics are smart and memorable (the "credit card" line is classic), but the production is busy in a weird way and distracting...

The thing is, while this version was getting played on urban radio, mainstream pop stations chose instead to play an edited version of one of the dance remixes of the track. Thunderpuss 2000 (Barry Harris of Kon Kan and Chris Cox) transformed the song into a club anthem that elevating both Whitney's vocal performance and the melodic flow of the song, just like Deborah Cox's similar "Nobody's Supposed To Be Here" from the year prior. The vocal house music throwdown not only amplified the drama, but was able to both highlight Whitney's runs on the song and the lyrical content, making the single a gay club anthem of the year...

The combined popularity of the original and remixed versions of "It's Not Right" helped it rise to the top ten on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 in July of 1999. The song also rose to #7 on Billboard's R&B chart, which the remixes of the track helped it spent three weeks at #1 on the Dance Club Play list. Internationally, the single took a week at #1 in Spain, while making the top ten in the UK and Iceland at #3, and reaching the top-40 in the Netherlands (#12), Sweden (#12), Germany (#14), Italy (#18), Switzerland (#18), Austria (#20), France (#21), Ireland (#21), New Zealand (#33), and Belgium (#40F). At the Grammy Awards in 2000, where Whitney was nominated in four different categories, "It's Not Right" gave her the only win for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance. Houston and this album will be back to this series.

Original: 7/10     Thunderpuss 2000 Remix: 10/10

(Click below to see the rest of the post)

Here's Whitney performing the song at the Soul Train Awards in 1999...

For her My Love Is Your Love tour, Houston went quickly into the remixed version....

 

 

Back to Whitney doing the original version at the Grammy Awards in 2000...

 

 Houston got her dance groove on at the VH1 Divas cast...

Lastly, in 2012, the song was featured in the musical show Glee, with Darren Criss singing Whitney's classic. His version reached #92 on the Hot 100...

Up tomorrow: Rapper shouts out his first big hit.