Songoftheday 12/12/21 - Hey come in here woman sit down come here 'cause we gotta talk, I don't care oh you just tense baby it gon' be all over tonight...

 

 

"Get Gone" - Ideal

from the album Ideal (1999)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #13 (one week)

Weeks in the Top-40: 16

 

Today's song comes from the R&B vocal group Ideal, who grew up together in Houston, Texas. With brothers Cedrick and Maverick Cotton joined by cousin Wayne Perry and childhood friend Jay Green, the group first appeared on the soundtrack to the movie Original Gangstas with a remake of the Marvin Gaye classic "Inner City Blues". It was released as a single, and spent a month on Billboard magazine's R&B Singles chart going to #94 in 1996. It would be another three years before Ideal, signed by Virgin Records' Noontime imprint, released their self-titled debut album. The lead single, "Get Gone", was written by Johnta Austin and Kevin Hicks along with producer Bryan Michael Cox, and had the guys dispatching a cheating lover post haste. It starts with the acoustic guitar that began the majority of R&B crossover hits at the time, with the vocal melody emulating the Darkchild/R. Kelly productions as well. It doesn't cover any new ground except providing the male counterpart to the plethora of the woman done wrong ballads flooding radio at the time...

"Get Gone" became Ideal's first and only top-40 hit on Billboard's Hot 100 chart in November of 1999. The song was big at urban radio, spending three weeks at #2 on the R&B Singles chart, while getting to #21 on the older-skewing Adult R&B format list. Internationally, the single was a minor hit in the UK at #76. The Ideal album, released in August of that year, went to #83 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, and #19 on the R&B Albums distillation of that list, going on to sell over a half million copies. 

The second single from the record was "Creep Inn", which was written and produced by the same team, with an interpolation of the Jacksons' "Heartbreak Hotel" with that same up and down vocal melody thing. The third offering from the set, "Whatever", featured rapper/singer Lil' Mo, and did a bit better, getting to #11 on the R&B Singles chart while nearly making the pop top 40 at #47. It did make the top-40 in the UK at #31, which makes sense, because it's their best of the lot. 

Despite this promising success, the group never released another record after this. An attempted follow-up in 2004 never materialized, and sadly Cedric was murdered this past February. 

(5/10)

(Click below to see the rest of the post)

Here's Ideal performing "Get Gone" on Live At The Apollo in 2000...

and lastly, another TV appearance that's miles better than the album version...

Up tomorrow: This former Mouseketeer brings in the holidays.