Songoftheday 7/31/24 - I told her to drive over in your new whip, bring some friends you cool with I'm gonna bring the cool whip...

"Slow Jams" - Twista featuring Kanye West and Jamie Foxx

from the albums Kamikaze (Twista) and College Dropout (West) (both 2004)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #1 (one week)

Weeks in the Top-40: 19

 

Today's song comes from rapper Carl Mitchell, who records under the alias Twista, who grew up and got his musical start in Chicago, where he originally went by "Tung Twista" to allude to his rapid-fire rap delivery. He initially signed with the Loud Records label, an offshoot of BMG's Zoo imprint that housed the Wu-Tang Clan. It was there he released his debut album Runnin' Off at da Mouth in 1992, with the single "Mr. Tung Twista" getting some TV buzz but neither made any of the charts on Billboard magazine. From there he moved to Atlantic, where Mitchell dropped the "Tung" from his moniker for what was supposed to be his sophomore effort Resurrection, but troubles with the label caused the set had it see only a limited local release. But while he was in limbo, Twista was featured on the single "Po Pimp" from rap trio Do Or Die, which landed in the top-40 on Billboard's Hot 100 at #22 while hitting #15 on the R&B Singles chart and spending a week at #1 on the trade mag's Rap Singles list. That success kept Twista alive at the new label.

It would be three years for Twista to re-emerge, still on Atlantic but under the Creator's Way division of Big Beat Records, which itself had morphed from a dance-dominant label to a more hip-hop avenue. In 1997 his album Adrenaline Rush became his first true success, reaching #77 on the Billboard 200 sales tally and #13 on the R&B Albums list, eventually selling over a million copies. The first single from the record, "Emotions", which sported a downtempo beat that he double-time rapped over. The single hit #50 on Billboard's R&B Singles chart, while missing the Hot 100 by a notch at #101 on the "bubbling under" list. The follow-up, "Get It Wet", stopped at #62 on the R&B Singles chart, but did manage to crack the Hot 100 for the rapper for the first time as a lead at #96. A second disc on Creator's Way, Mobstability, was co-billed with his posse the Speedknot Mobstaz, and cracked the top-40 on the Billboard 200 at #34 and #9 on the R&B Albums list (though selling a lot less in the long run). 

For the next few year Twista would lay low on the Legit Ballin' label, releasing a couple of "mixtape"-type collections, one of which (2000's New Testament 2K: Street Scriptures Compilation) creeping on to the Billboard 200 at #150. 

It would be a chance encounter at a party that he wasn't at that would bring Twista back to Atlantic and scoring the biggest hit of his career. The soiree was held at the house of Jamie Foxx, a comedian turned TV star turned eventual movie star that had previously dabbled in the music biz himself in the early 1990s. Foxx, who got his big break on the comic emsemble sketch show In Living Color, released the R&B album Peep This on the Fox Label (the music subsidiary of the network airing the show) in 1992. The record made it to #78 on the Billboard 200 and #12 on the R&B Albums list, with the lead single "Infatuation" reaching the top-40 on the R&B Singles chart at #36 and popping on to the Hot 100 at #92. Also at the party was Kanye West, who was a very new up and coming producer that did work with Jay-Z, and was picked up by a former Roc-A-Fella (Jay's label) exec that moved to Atlantic. Pairing West with Twista and bringing on Foxx to sing the chorus, the resulting "Slow Jamz" was finished, which would appear on both Twista's and Kanye's albums. Written by the rapping pair with an interpolation of Luther Vandross' version of "A House Is Not A Home" (albeit with Luther's vocals "chimpmunked" up), which also gave Burt Bacharach and Hal David writing credit, the song starts with Jamie pillow-talking his way out of the club, saying the bevy of fast club tracks have worn the women out, and they need to bring the deeper soul of Luther, Anita, and Marvin to seal the deal. They continue the name-dropping throughout the song, with a playful and pre-fascist crazy Kanye slipping some shady lines like "She got a light skinned friend look like Michael Jackson, got a dark skinned friend look like Michael Jackson" and making a inside baseball reference to rapper Shyne, who is most known for (allegedly) taking the fall for Sean Combs in the shooting at a club at that time. Talk Soup/Friends/Whose Line Is It Anyway/Archer comic actress Aisha Tyler makes a cameo in the interlude before Twista comes in with his own name-dropping but at his usual frenetic pace. All and all, it's the R&B/Hip-Hop version of the country songs that use naming legends as a crutch, though this is at least more relevant and entertaining. 

"Slow Jamz" made it all the way to #1 on Billboard's Hot 100 in February of 2004, while taking two weeks atop their R&B singles chart and leading the Rap Singles list for seven weeks. On the radio, the song peaked at #11 on the Mainstream Top-40 chart, topped the Mainstream R&B airplay list for five weeks, and spent three weeks at #1 on the dance/R&B-oriented Rhythmic format. Internationally, the single hit the top ten in the United Kingdom (#3) and New Zealand (#9), and reached the top-40 in the Netherlands (#15), Australia (#26), and Ireland (#30). The Kamikaze album, released in January of that year, started out at #1 on both the Billboard 200 and R&B Albums sales tallies, going on to sell over two million copies. A month later, Kanye's debut album College Dropout came out, which spent three weeks at #2 on the Billboard 200 behind Norah Jones' Feels Like Home but went on to sell over four million records. At the Grammy Awards in 2005, "Slow Jamz" was nominated for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration (along with West's own "All Falls Down), losing to Usher, Ludacris, and Lil' Jon's unstoppable "Yeah!". 

Twista, Foxx, and of course Kanye will be back to the series, as well as the Kamikaze album.

(7/10)

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Twista took both his and Kanye's verses for his appearance on The Tonight Show...

Kanye did join Twista for Total Request Live on MTV...

The pair joined forces with John Legend (who was in the music video) for Twista's AOL Sessions...

Lastly, Twista reprised his verse in his biggest moment for VEVO earlier this year....

Up tomorrow: This big-voiced songstress is hearing things, possibly.