Songoftheday 12/6/21 -Boy your love's so good I don't want to let go,and although I should I can't leave you alone...

 

 

"Heartbreaker" - Mariah Carey featuring Jay-Z

from the album Rainbow (1999)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #1 (two weeks) 

Weeks in the Top-40: 14

 

Today's song is from Mariah Carey, whose first "hits" compilation, #1s, had included two new songs that made the charts with "When You Believe" from the Prince Of Egypt movie, a duet with Whitney Houston, and Mariah's top ten cover of Brenda K. Starr's "I Still Believe" in the spring of 1999. With one more album owed to her label Columbia Records, headed by her ex-husband Tommy Mottola, Carey quickly recorded her seventh studio effort Rainbow later that year. The lead single from the record was "Heartbreaker", written by Mariah and featuring rapper Jay-Z, who at the time was in the top-40 with his Ruff Ryderz cut "Jigga My N***a". The song was anchored by a sample of a remake of the classic 60s novelty hit "Attack Of The Name Game" by Shirley Ellis and Lincoln Chase which was done by teen R&B singer Stacy Lattisaw in 1982. Mariah's lyrics has her describing a boy that keeps doing them wrong but they keep going back, while Jay-Z spits verses calling the woman a golddigger and sending her back to her mom's house. The music video, which cost two and a half million dollars, has Mariah fighting herself in the bathroom of a cinema over Jerry O'Connell. 

"Heartbreaker" became Mariah's fifteen #1 pop hit, and the first for Jay-Z, in October of 1999. The song also spent two weeks at #1 on Billboard magazine's R&B chart, while the dance remixes of the track done by Junior Vasquez helped it spend two weeks at #2 on their Dance Club Play list. Internationally, the single topped the chart in New Zealand, and made the top ten in Spain (#2), Poland (#2), France (#4), the UK (#5), Canada (#5), Iceland (#6), the Netherlands (#7), Switzerland (#7), Greece (#7), Denmark (#8), Germany (#9), Belgium (#9W/#27F), and Australia (#10). The Rainbow album, released in November of that year, had her then biggest first week sales, though it entered the Billboard 200 sales tally at #2 behind Rage Against The Machine's Battle For Los Angeles. It ended up selling almost three million copies, which was a comedown from her previous sets, not helped by Columbia tossing off the promotion of the record. But Mariah (and Jay-Z) as well as this album will return to the series.

(6/10)

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There was a hip-hop styled remix of "Heartbreaker" that eschewed the Lattisaw sample for Snoop Dogg's "Ain't No Fun", while Jay-Z is replaced by female rappers Missy Elliott and Da Brat, and all three rappers appear in the video...

Mariah performed "Heartbreaker" on The Today Show to promote the album...

and here she is in concert in 1999...

and lastly, on her Caution world tour in 2018...

Up tomorrow: Canadian siblings grab the rays.