Songoftheday 9/7/22 - Boys and girls wanna hear a true story? Saturday night I was at this real wild party...
"What Would You Do?" - City High
from the albums Life (Original Soundtrack) (1999) and City High (2001)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #8 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 25
Today's song comes from the group City High, two high school friends/lovers (Claudette Ortiz and Robbie Pardlo) from Willingboro, New Jersey who were put together with Ryan Toby (a former child actor who was in Sister Act 2) by ex-Fugees head Wyclef Jean. Signed to Wyclef's vanity label Booga Basement on Interscope Records, the trio recorded a song for the 1999 movie Life starring Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence as convicts that would eventually be used as the lead single from the group's debut album City High when it was released two years later. "What Would You Do?", produced by Wyclef and written by Pardlo and Toby on a foundational sample of Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg's hit "The Next Episode", the song is a back and forth with the guys rapping about confronting a stripper they knew from school, with Claudette answering back that she did what she had to do to provide and protect #1) her infant child and #2) her younger sister who was being raped. I mean, the intentions of the song are quite noble, though the delivery, on a jangly retro track that seems pulled from Lisa Lisa's "Lost In Emotion" era, is a little out of place, and the bridge with the "Next Episode" sample where the guys "mansplain" is well, wrong. Nevertheless, the trio pull no punches here, and the public responded favorably, rewarding the group with their first and biggest hit, and the second top ten pop hit from Life after Maxwell's "Fortunate" two years prior...
"What Would You Do?" became City High's first hit on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 chart, reaching the top ten in May of 2001. The song went to #13 on the R&B Singles chart, but did the best on Billboard's Rap Singles list, where it spent six weeks at #1. Internationally, the single was a big success, making the top ten in Australia (#2), Ireland (#2), the United Kingdom (#3), Norway (#5), and Switzerland (#7), and hit the top-40 in Sweden (#12), the Netherlands (#14), Denmark (#14), Belgium (#14F), Canada (#19), New Zealand (#20), and Germany (#24). The City High album, released in May as the song was cresting, peaked at #34 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, and #23 on the R&B Albums list, going on to sell over a half-million copies. At the Grammy Awards in 2002, "What Would You Do?" was nominated for Best R&B Vocal Performance, losing to Destiny's Child for their "Survivor". City High and this album will be back to the series.
(6/10)
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Here's the trio performing the song on BET...
They put their all in for Live At The Apollo...
And as a post-script, I had to include this takedown of the song from the Amber Heard Show from 2020...
Up tomorrow: This Canadian has lofty feelings.
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