Corey Clark, the future American Idol contestant, was also in Envy, and they once got viciously booed offstage on Showtime At The Apollo. (Michael Jackson’s “ Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” was the #1 song in America when Ne-Yo was born.) As a teenager, Smith adapted the stage name GoGo, and he formed a Jodeci-style R&B group called Envy - no relation to the great Japanese post-hardcore band of the same name. Shaffer Smith, the son of two musicians, was born in Camden, a small Arkansas city about 100 miles from Little Rock, and he grew up mostly in Las Vegas. These days, Nashville country songwriters jump to lead-artist status every so often, but even there, the Chris Stapleton/Maren Morris story is pretty rare. It happens sometimes with rap producers, though that’s a different thing, since rap producers are almost never expected to fill studio-functionary roles. It happened fairly often in the Motown system, where everyone worked closely together to crank out as many hits and possible. Most of the people involved in those industries, up to and including Max Martin, wanted to be pop stars themselves at one point or another. There are entire industries dedicated to generating potential hit songs for pop stars. Dazed-looking apartment-building tenants milled around, as did video technicians and Ghost’s handlers. (He was writing for Vice at the time.) Members of Ghost’s Theodore Unit crew basically demanded to be interviewed and then rapped into my tape recorder, which was fun. Dave 1 from Chromeo was there, waiting for a Ghost interview just like me. Ghost was shooting the video for “Back Like That,” the first single from his great Fishscale album, and there were interesting people all over the place. One very cold night in Jersey City, I spent four hours on the rooftop of an apartment building, waiting for what would turn out to be a 10-minute conversation with Ghostface. But the Wu-Tang member who made me work the hardest was Ghostface Killah. I got Cappadonna on the phone, which felt like a coup I think he was still driving a gypsy cab in Baltimore at the time. I spent two hours waiting outside a restaurant for Inspectah Deck he never showed. I talked to an animated U-God outside a comic book store. I think I interviewed five of them, along with a few important figures from the group’s inner circle. The nine surviving individual members of the Wu aren’t exactly easy to round up on the best day, and a few refused to talk to me after I wrote something that they deemed insufficiently reverent. In January of 2006, the Wu-Tang Clan were getting back together for their first tour since the death of their comrade Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and I tried to interview as many Wu-Tang members as possible for a Village Voice feature. 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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