Almost hit of the week 6/24/24 - Bad Boy's Da Band's "Bad Boy This, Bad Boy That"...
"Bad Boy This Bad Boy That" - Bad Boy's Da Band
from the album Too Hot for TV (2003)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #50 (two weeks)
This week's "almost hit" (I can't in good conscience say it was robbed) comes from a reality show that was the collaboration between MTV (which already was swaying away from the music video business) and record label Bad Boy, run by Sean "P. Diddy" Combs. It was marketed as the "second reiteration" of Making The Band, in which the first produced the boyband O-Town, which did end up scoring a pair of top ten hits on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 in 2000-2001. (That version had Lou Pearlman as the studio exec mentor, but his story did not end well.)
This version started in the fall of 2002, with Diddy forming what would be "Da Band" by the end of the second "season". The original 40,000 claimed auditioners were pared to four men and two women, with one of each sex being the singer and the rest rappers. After a series of humiliating stunts which the most famous which was getting a cheesecake (don't ask), the group released an album together, Too Hot for TV, in the early fall of 2003. The lead single pulled no branding punches with the self-congratulatory "Bad Boy This Bad Boy That". With an intro from Combs and the four rappers taking turns on the verses, with "Babs" right off the bat with the stunning line "I'm back and I'm hittin' em hard, Tits don't sag, I dont need no push-up bra". This and a chorus made of two lines - the title along with "Bad Boy will beat you down wit a baseball bat". Lord. You know when you see someone really trying to act tough, but it comes off cringe, well here you go. And considering the allegations going round right now about Combs, I can only imagine what blackmail had been accrued on them to even make these kind of boasts. The production is what Combs wanted to pay for, though the addition of flutes is a notable improvement, but not enough to elevate this brazen shill. The music video takes the chorus dig and turns it into a weird baseball game, I guess to "soften" them up for MTV...
While "Bad Boy This Bad Boy That" climbed to #15 on Billboard magazine's R&B Single chart, and #13 on the Rap Songs list, it stopped halfway up the all-genre Hot 100 in November of 2003. On the radio, the song made it to #13 on the Mainstream R&B chart. The Too Hot For TV album, released in September of that year, did better, spending a week at #1 on Billboard's R&B Albums chart and getting to #2 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, going on to sell over a half million copies.
After a second single, "Tonight", stiffed, Combs disbanded Da Band, trying to make two of them, Babs and Ness, a thing which didn't happen.
But this won't be the end of MTV's Making The Band and Combs will return to the charts.
(2/10)
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