Songoftheday 6/4/22 - I'm effervescent and I'm off that crescent, nastier than a full grown German Shepherd...

 

 

"Shake Ya Ass" - Mystikal

from the album Let's Get Ready (2000)

Billboard Hot 100 peak; #13 (three weeks)

Weeks in the Top-40: 14

 

Today's song comes from Mitchell Tyler, aka Mystikal, a rapper that grew up in New Orleans, where he got involved with the hip-hop scene and was eventually signed to local independent Big Boy Records. After releasing a self-titled album with them in 1994, he moved to the biggies with Jive Records, where he released his major-label debut, Mind Of Mystikal a year later. The big single from the set, "Y'all Ain't Ready Yet", just missed the top-40 on Billboard magazine's R&B chart at #41 in 1995, while "bubbling under" the pop Hot 100 at #106. The album made it to the Billboard 200 sales tally at #103, while peaking at #14 on the R&B Albums list. 

After this success, Mystikal partnered with Master P's label No Limit for his next two albums in the late 1990's. Unpredictable, which arrived in 1997, shot up at #3 on the Billboard 200, and topped the R&B Albums chart for a week. The next year, his follow-up album, Ghetto Fabulous, also made the top 5 on the Billboard 200, as well as #1 on the R&B Albums chart. Both sold over a million copies despite not even having a top-40 R&B hit let alone a crossover to market from. But the rapper's profile was boosted by being featured on two top-40 hits from No Limit labelmates - "Make 'Em Say Uhhh!" by Master P and "It Ain't My Fault" from Silkk The Shocker. He also was a part of the No Limit "supergroup" 504 Boyz, which had another top-20 pop hit with "Wobble Wobble" in 2000. 

But at that time he left No Limit to return to having Jive handle everything (they distributed the former two sets) for his next release Let's Get Ready in the fall of 2000. The first single from the album was the party track "Shake Ya Ass", written by Mystikal with up and coming producers Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, known then as the Neptunes. Despite the "party" vibe the Neptunes brought with the loose funky production, Mystikal's verses are crude and violent from the beginning, addressing a stripper with "I came here with my dick in my hand, Don't make me leave here with my foot in yo' ass". There's praise for big butts, and threats of harm to guys and girls, along with a peppering of New Orleans pride, but with the bevy of edits to make this safe for the radio (making this change to "Shake It Fast"), I think a lot of new fans had no idea how crass the verses were, but it made MTV and radio grant Mystikal his first hit. It's the Neptunes that carry this with Pharrell singing the chorus, while Mystikal goes all into his crazy schtick where its even hard to decipher in the dirty version...

"Shake Ya Ass" became Mystikal's first top-40 crossover hit as a lead artist in October of 2000. The song spent four weeks at #3 on Billboard's R&B Singles chart, while making it to #7 on their Rap Songs list. Internationally, the single reached the British top-40 at #30. The Let's Get Ready album, released in September of that year, came in at #1 on the Billboard 200 and R&B Albums sales tallies, going on to sell over two million copies. At the Grammy Awards in 2001, "Shake Ya Ass" was nominated for Best Rap Solo Performance, losing to Eminem for his equally crude "The Real Slim Shady". Both Mystikal and the album will be back to the series.

(3/10)

(Click below to see the rest of the post)

Here's the cleaned up version of the track for radio, "Shake It Fast", to compare how much they excised...

Comedian Chris Rock gave Mystikal a venue to perform the dirty version on his late night show...

MTV had him with Pharrell and a live band for their Fashionably Loud show...

But I'll leave you with the song's best placement, at the beginning of Scary Movie 2...

Up tomorrow: A Backstreet's brother makes the cover.