Songoftheday 10/27/23 - Young cat got back did a little bid, now he hard he buff he tough doo rag and Timbs...
"Fabulous" - Jaheim featuring Tha Rayne
from the album Still Ghetto (2002)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #28 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 9
Today's song comes from R&B singer Jaheim, whose debut album Ghetto Love had scored a pair of top-40 crossover hits on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 with "Could It Be" and "Anything". At the end of 2002, he released his sophomore effort Still Ghetto. The lead single from the set was "Fabulous", which featured Tha Rayne, a female vocal act put together by Naughty By Nature's Keir "KayGee" Gist. Originally a trio when they sang backup on Jaheim's debut, by the time they signed with Arista Records, they were just the duo of Elizabeth Bingham and Shaquana Elam. Tha Rayne had released a couple singles in 2002, but they went pretty much unnoticed. "Fabulous", written by Mary Brown, Balewa Muhammad, and producer Gist and Eddie Berkeley, uses a sample of the soul-disco classic "Wake Up Everybody" from Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes, giving credit to writers Gene McFadden, John Whitehead, and Victor Carstarphen. The lyrics are pretty simple, extolling the virtues of love in the "lower classes". The production uses a children's chorus to lighten the load, but Jaheim's tough but velvety voice is the best thing here, with Tha Rayne only serving as background noise. The music video also brings in Mary J. Blige for star power...
"Fabulous" because Jaheim's third top-40 hit on the Hot 100 (and Tha Rayne's only one) in January of 2003, while climbing to #7 on Billboard's R&B Singles chart. Internationally, the single stopped right under the top-40 at #41. The Still Ghetto album, released in November of 2002, peaked at #9 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, and #3 on the R&B Albums list, going on to sell over a million copies.
Tha Rayne, adding new member Qiana Drew, went on to release another single in 2003, "Didn't You Know", which popped on to Billboard's R&B Singles chart at #76. They didn't survive much past that.
As for Jaheim, he and the Still Ghetto album will be back to the series.
(5/10)
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