(Maybe those shirts were popular everywhere? I don’t know, but I can tell you that long shirts were a huge deal in Baltimore. In 2004, when the crunk era was still at its peak, Dem Frachize Boyz, a group from Atlanta’s rough Bankhead neighborhood, signed with Jermaine Dupri’s So So Def label and got to #79 on the Hot 100 with “White Tee,” an ode to the gigantically long plain-white T-shirts that were ubiquitous in Black Southeastern cities at the time. and Jeezy didn’t intersect much with the people who made dinky, faddish club tracks, but those artists often came from the same neighborhoods, and they often had similar criminal histories. Jeezy’s highest-charting lead-artist single, the 2005 Akon collab “Soul Survivor,” peaked at #4. Jeezy will eventually be in here as a guest. In the post-Outkast era, the city had a few stars who seemed to be cut from the Jay-Z mold and who demanded to be taken seriously, guys like T.I. In the mid-’00s, Atlanta was only just coming to its own as the new global capital for rap music. The D4L song is an Atlanta club-rap record, and Atlanta club-rap has its own particular history. “Laffy Taffy” has a whole lot of context to it. I generally find stories like “Laffy Taffy” a whole lot more interesting than the meticulously planned superstar moves that usually dominate the pop-chart conversation. Its success was an accident, a fluke of timing and fate. “Laffy Taffy” was not a song that was engineered to reach #1 on the Hot 100. For 90% of the people who heard the song, “Laffy Taffy” was a travesty. On top of all that, there was the little matter of “Laffy Taffy” being just widely despised - the type of song that perpetually haunts snarked-out “worst song ever” lists years later. It’s easy to picture boardrooms full of panicking suits asking each other how they were supposed to sell this. After the popularity of “Laffy Taffy” died down, D4L promptly ceased to exist. Their one album didn’t really sell at all. Also, people were buying tracks like “Laffy Taffy.” D4L, an Atlanta rap group, had been total nobodies before “Laffy Taffy” blew up. Nobody bought CDs anymore, and while people were buying tracks on iTunes, those tracks were only earning the record labels 99 cents at a time. If I can summarize the widespread reaction to that event, it would be something like: This? And maybe also: What? The record business was in freefall at the time. In the larger music business, D4L’s “Laffy Taffy” didn’t cause an existential crisis until it reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. In New York, heads looked at “Laffy Taffy” the way English villagers might’ve once looked at Viking longboats. If this song could become a success - a track with a barely-there beat that sounded like a toddler pushing buttons on a touchtone phone and guys rapping about sex and candy in ways that were only barely coherent - then what had rap become? Where was it going? I was still pretty new to New York when this was happening, and New York was still pretty new to the idea that rap’s birthplace was no longer its focal point. It had its own traditions, its own sense of prestige and importance, and “Laffy Taffy” violated all of that. By 2005, rap was a vast and varied landscape. Simply by existing, D4L’s “Laffy Taffy” caused an existential crisis in the rap world. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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