Songoftheday 1/17/23 - Take your shirt off twist it 'round your hand, spin it like a helicopter...
"Raise Up" - Petey Pablo
from the album Diary Of A Sinner: 1st Entry (2001)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #25 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 11
Today's song comes from rapper Petey Pablo, who grew up Moses Barrett in North Carolina. He had already been in prison by the time he was starting his twenties, before moving to New York and getting discovered and signed to Jive Records. It was there Petey Pablo recorded his debut album Diary Of A Sinner: 1st Entry, which came out in the fall of 2001. The lead single from the set was the club hype track "Raise Up". Written by Barret with producer Tim "Timbaland" Mosley, the chorus is a simple chant over and over again about taking your shirt off and swinging it over your head, a move any dunce can do, before the verse that has the trope I dislike the most, when a newcomer boast about the wealth he clearly doesn't have, then goes on to list off Carolina towns and the jails his friends are in. Not a statement on the injustice towards black America, but more of a brag. In the meanwhile, Timbaland is trying to recreate the sound of Nelly's "Country Grammar" groove and reappropriate it as from Carolina. The sample of Egyptian artist Hossam Ramzy's "Enta Omri" attempts the drama but it's too short and circular to mean anything. But the regional identity-pushing worked, and Pablo found himself with a huge rap hit that crossed over to the pop charts...
"Raise Up" became Petey Pablo's first top-40 pop crossover hit in November of 2001, while making it to #9 on Billboard magazine's R&B Singles chart. But its biggest success was on the Rap Singles chart, where it spent ten weeks at #1. On the radio, it also reached #7 on the dance-oriented Rhythmic Airplay list. The Diary of a Sinner album, released in November as the single was cresting, peaked at #13 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, and #7 on the R&B Albums list, going on to sell over a half-million copies. At the Grammy Awards in 2003, Diary Of A Sinner was nominated for Best Rap Album, losing out to Eminem's The Eminem Show.
The second single pulled from the debut, "I", was also a Petey-Timbaland affair, but without a dance move to go with it, it stalled down at #62 on Billboard's R&B chart, though it became his only minor hit in the United Kingdom at #51 (he would top that country's list as a guest on a Ciara record I'll be covering). That was followed by "I Told Y'All", which did a little better, rising to #55 on the R&B Singles chart and making it to the Hot 100 at #94. Pablo will be back to the series.
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There was a second version that substituted all the North Carolina towns with cities across the country, which national stations clung to more...
And the third and definitely worst version was an attempt to tie into the 9/11 kumbaya craze...
Up tomorrow: A cavalcade of 2000s hitmakers come together to raise AIDS awareness.
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