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1027. ‘Nasty Girl’, by Notorious B.I.G. ft. Diddy, Nelly, Jagged Edge & Avery Storm

/ UK #1s blog / 5 Comments

In 2005, we had a belated, posthumous #1 for 2Pac. In early 2006, another famous, and very dead, nineties rapper makes their first and only appearance on top of the charts: the Notorious B.I.G.

Nasty Girl, by Notorious B.I.G. (his 1st and only #1) ft. Diddy (his 3rd and final #1), Nelly (his 4th and final #1), Jagged Edge & Avery Storm

2 weeks, from 29th January – 12th February 2006

It’s fitting, in more ways than one, that six months elapsed between their turns at number one, as that’s how long passed between their deaths. 2Pac’s murder came in September 1996, before Biggie was slain in March 1997 in a similar drive-by shooting. Rumours abound that their deaths were related, given the feud between the two that had gone on since 1994.

Unlike 2Pac, whose ‘Ghetto Gospel’ was hard-hitting social commentary, ‘Nasty Girl’ doesn’t have such worthy ambitions. The title gives a big hint, and yes, this is filth. I remember the soulful groove, and the catchy chorus from the time (this was my 20th birthday #1), but I don’t remember it being so dirty. I must have been hearing the radio edit…

B.I.G. delivers the first verse, a sample from a song of his originally called ‘Nasty Boy’. Fingers in your mouth, Open up your blouse, Pull your g-string down south… is one of the cleaner lines, but it’s my favourite of the three main verses. Biggie has a brilliantly languorous flow, that makes him sound like he’s rapping direct from the bedroom, presumably in a silk nightgown.

Plus, he’s not Diddy – topping the charts for the third time under a third different name – whose verse makes for pretty icky listening knowing what we know now. Women wantin’ to bone Sean Combs… he brags. Nelly does the third, and again he can’t match the effortless smut of their dead partner. Both these men were appearing on their final chart-toppers.

Elsewhere in the credits – the longest for a number one single up to this point – we have vocal group Jagged Edge, who sing the chorus, while R&B singer Avery Storm gets to harmonise in the background. This makes it one more act than Christina Aguilera et al and their version of ‘Lady Marmalade’.

The video is even more stacked with luminaries: Usher, Pharrell Williams, Fat Joe, Naomi Campbell, and surely many more I don’t recognise, dancing in a club in honour of Biggie. I assumed that William’s must have been involved in the record’s production, as the beat sounds very Neptunes, but he wasn’t.

I do like this song, as despite the vulgarity it’s silly enough, and it does have a very danceable, disco-soul beat. It probably goes on a minute too long, though. It was from an album called ‘Duets: The Final Chapter’, B.I.G.’s second posthumous album. Like 2Pac, he wasn’t short of people making a buck off his legacy, in this case P. Diddy himself, who was the project’s executive producer. Some complained that the rappers he was ‘duetting’ with on the album were people Biggie didn’t care for in real life, but obviously he had no say. Diddy, whose career breakthrough had come thanks to his tribute for Biggie (‘I’ll Be Missing You’), had no qualms.

It’s worth noting that ‘Nasty Girl’ was not a big seller, and in its second week at #1 it recorded sales of fewer than 25,000. Just a month after Shayne Ward selling three quarters of a million to make Christmas number one, we’re on our way to hitting a record sales low…

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980. ‘I Don’t Wanna Know’, by Mario Winans ft. Enya & P. Diddy

/ UK #1s blog / 4 Comments

Normal service is resumed on top of the charts. Sort of.

I Don’t Wanna Know, by Mario Winans (his 1st and only #1) ft. Enya (her 2nd and final #1) & P. Diddy (his 2nd of three #1s)

2 weeks, 6th – 20th June 2004

At least this isn’t a bitch-fest, with Mario Winans listing the ways his ex-lover has wronged him, cheated on him, done the dirty… In fact, the crux of the song is that ignorance is bliss: I don’t wanna know, If you’re playing me, Keep it on the low, Cause my heart can’t take it anymore… But it’s still a mopey break-up song, in a year that has already seen its fair share of mopey break-up songs. Forget ‘I Don’t Wanna Know’; make that ‘We Don’t Wanna Know’, Mario. Just keep it to yourself.

What makes this track actually quite interesting is the sample from Enya’s eerie ‘Boadicea’, which gives it a real obsessing-in-the-middle-of-the-night atmosphere. Winan’s knew the sample from the Fugees’ 1996 #1 ‘Ready Or Not’, but unlike on that track Enya actually agreed to re-record the sample, receiving a credit and a second chart-topper, sixteen years on from ‘Orinoco Flow’.

Listening now, I wonder how this record would have sounded if they had just stuck with the ‘Boadicea’ sample, and the piano line that enters later? Instead a fairly basic, jittery hip-hop beat comes in, and spoils the desolate feeling. I suppose it might have sounded too similar to ‘Ready or Not’ otherwise, but still. The middle-eight picks things up a bit, as Winans harmonises nicely with himself, but much of is bland and mushy.

I also wonder how this would have sounded without P. Diddy’s rap. Not just because he’s now persona non grata, but because it’s such a non-event. I guess, like the hip-hop beat, they asked him to phone it in and stuck it on because it was the done thing for an R&B track in the mid-‘00s, and because he was a name and Mario Winans wasn’t, rather than because it adds much to the song. Still, it is Sean Combes’ second of three UK #1s, all coming under different pseudonyms.

For Mario Winans, this was his only UK Top 10 as a lead artist. He is more prolific as a producer and songwriter, having worked with Destiny’s Child, Jennifer Lopez and The Weeknd, among various others. He is also the nephew of Bebe Winans, who guested on Eternal’s 1997 chart-topper ‘I Wanna Be the Only One’, and part of the extended (and apparently quite important in the gospel music world) Winans Family.

One other thing to note before we finish is that like the gruesome twosome he knocked off number one, ‘I Don’t Wanna Know’ inspired its own answer song. ‘You Should Really Know’ by the Pirates ft. Shola Ama, Naila Boss and Ishani (and Enya, of course) is actually quite good, with an interesting Indian flavour to it, and made #8 later in the year.