Robbed hit of the week 4/4/22 - Black Rob's "Whoa!"...
"Whoa!" - Black Rob
from the album Life Story (2000)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #43 (one week)
This week's "robbed hit" comes from rapper Robert Ross, who recorded under the name Black Rob. Rob, a Harlem, New York native, he has started in hip-hop as a pre-teen, and eventually came under the wing of Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs' Bad Boy label in the mid-1990's. After guesting on remixes from labelmates like 112 and Total, Black Rob made the R&B and pop charts for the first time as a featured rapper on Mic Geronimo's single "Nothin' Move But The Money", which went to #31 on Billboard magazine's R&B singles chart and #70 on the pop Hot 100 in 1998. Later that year, Rob contributed a song to the movie Slam, and the result, "I Dare You", spent a week on Billboard's R&B Airplay chart at #75.
In the spring of 2000, Black Rob released his own debut album Life Story. The lead single from the record, "Whoa!", was written by the rapper and produced by Anthony "Backwild" Best. With a sampled cribbed from a French pop song by Francois Valery, the track uses the "like whoa" tag to end every line, and the early mention of Doctor Strange is cancelled out by the use of the homophobic f-word on it (at least the radio version took that out). The high-budget music video had Puff Daddy as the co-star hauling ass on a semi truck...
While "Whoa!" climbed to a respectable peak of #9 on Billboard magazine's R&B chart, and #8 on their Rap Songs list, the single stopped a few rungs short of the pop Hot 100 top-40 in April of 2000. Internationally, the single also stopped short of the British top-40 at #44. The Life Story album, released in March of that year, spent a week at #3 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, while topping their R&B Albums list for two weeks, going on to sell over a million copies.
Despite that success, the follow-up single, "Espacio" ("Space"), which featured rapper Lil' Kim, completely stiffed at both R&B and pop stations, and missed both charts. He would eventually make the top-40 (and make my SOTD list) again with the help of Combs on the single "Bad Boy For Life" the following year.
Black Rob's second album took five years to emerge, and while The Black Rob Report made the Billboard 200 top-40 at #40 and the R&B Albums list at #10, the lead single "Ready" stalled down at #49 on the R&B Singles chart.
Unfortunately, Rob derailed his career by being a criminal, and was imprisoned for four years for grand larceny for stealing jewelry in 2006. Dropped by Bad Boy, he didn't come back with another album until 2011's Game Tested, Streets Approved on the indie Duck Down label, which spent a week on the R&B Albums list at #44. In 2021, Black Rob died of a heart attack. His most recent release before his death was the independently-released Genuine Article in 2015.
(4/10)
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