Songoftheday 12/12/22 - Baby, you're such a typical everyday one night thing, it's a physical I'ma f**k you tonight thing...

 

 

"Livin' It Up" - Ja Rule featuring Case

from the album Pain Is Love (2001)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #6 (one week)

Weeks in the Top-40: 23

 

Today's song comes from rapper Ja Rule, who had broke big in the mainstream music world with his sophomore album Rule 3:36, which spun off the crossover top-40 hits "Between Me And You", "Put It On Me", and "I Cry".  In the summer of 2001, he was hired on to help rework Jennifer Lopez' single "I'm Real", which ended up going all the way to #1 on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 in September. That version would also appear on Ja Rule's third album Pain Is Love the following month. The second single from the record would pair Ja Rule up with R&B singer Case, who was just coming off his own biggest hit "Missing You", which made the Hot 100 top five that spring. The result was "Livin' It Up", written by the rapper with producers "Lil' Rob" Mays and "Irv Gotti" Lorenzo using a interpolation of Stevie Wonder's 1982 hit "Do I Do". The song mentions the perks of the high life, but is more a dirty call to the women of what he plans to do with them. Case sings the "Do I Do" chorus, and being prime 2000s Pauly Shore is the big celeb cameo in the music video...

"Livin' It Up" brought Ja Rule and Case back to the Hot 100 top ten in December of 2001, while reaching #4 on both their R&B Songs chart and Rap Singles list. On the radio, helped by the momentum of "I'm Real", the song reached #8 on the Mainstream Top-40 airplay chart, #4 on the R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay list, and #4 on the dance-oriented Rhythmic format. Internationally, the single hit the top ten in the United Kingdom (#5) and Australia (#6), and made the top-40 in Ireland (#20), the Netherlands (#29), France (#32), and New Zealand (#32). The Pain Is Love album, released in October of that year, spent two weeks at #1 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, and topped the R&B Albums list for three weeks, going on to sell over four million copies. At the Grammy Awards, "Livin' It Up" was nominated for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration in that category's first year, losing to Eve and Gwen Stefani's "Let Me Blow Your Mind". The Pain Is Love album was also up for the Best Rap Album Grammy, which went home with Outkast for their Stankonia album. This will be Case's final time in the series, but Ja Rule will be back rather shortly, both with the album and as a feature.

(5/10)

(Click below to see the rest of the post)

Here's Ja Rule appearing at the MOBO Awards in 2002..

And lastly, live with a band in New York in 2019...

This will be my final Song of the Day for 2022. I need to get ready for the holidays as well as finish tabulating for my year-end countdown of the biggest hits on my weekly chart. Please hold tight and check back and I'll be starting that as soon at I can. Thanks for stopping by my corner of the interwebs!