Babyface and Reid weren’t interested in the Braxtons as a group, but they thought Toni could be a solo artist, and they extracted her. “Good Life” might not have hit, but it did get Toni Braxton noticed by Babyface and LA Reid, who’d just launched their label LaFace as a partnership with Arista. Amazingly, this did not scare Braxton off. Pettaway approached Braxton with this idea when she was pumping gas at the Annapolis gas station where Pettaway worked. She dropped out when she met the songwriter Bill Pettaway, who’d heard her sing and who wanted to write for her. Toni went to Maryland’s historically Black Bowie State University, where she studied to become a music teacher. Toni and her four younger sisters harmonized together in church and, later, on the local talent show circuit. Toni loved R&B, but her parents disapproved of the secular, and she only got to sneak episodes of Soul Train when her parents weren’t home. Their father also worked at a power company, and their mother had been trained as an opera singer. (When Braxton was born, the #1 song in America was the Box Tops’ “ The Letter.”)īraxton’s parents were both pastors. Tupac Shakur spent four years in Baltimore as a kid, but I haven’t really gotten a chance to write about a Baltimore native in this column since Billy Griffin replaced Smokey Robinson as the lead singer of the Miracles and took the group to #1 with 1976’s “ Love Machine (Part 1).” On behalf of my hometown, I will happily accept Toni Braxton as one of ours.
Severn isn’t Baltimore, but it’s close enough. Toni Braxton was the oldest of six siblings in a strict Methodist family in suburban Severn, Maryland. But Braxton could also turn just about anything into a torch song, and there’s a beautiful arched-eyebrow playfulness to the way she delivered “You’re Makin’ Me High.” It wasn’t what Toni Braxton sang it was how she sang it. She sounded like she had her shit together, which is why her songs about romantic devastation were so affecting. She always sounded self-assured and knowing. Braxton could do all the fluttery melisma runs that were so popular in ’90s R&B, but she would deliver them in a deep, husky alto murmur. Toni Braxton grew up in a deeply religious household, and she didn’t really want to sing about sex, but she was good at it. Both of those chump-ass lines come from “You’re Makin’ Me High,” Braxton’s first #1 hit, and Braxton sold them. If you can find the right singer, even the dumbest sex lines can work. This one is pretty bad, too: “Can’t get my mind off you/ I think I might be obsessed/ The very thought of you makes me want to get undressed.” But context is everything.
A lot of the time, people writing songs about sex can come off like creepy hornballs or like Steve Carrell in The 40-Year-Old Virgin saying that boobs feel like “bags of sand.”Ĭonsider, if you will, this line: “I’ll always think of you inside of my private thoughts/ I can imagine you touching my private parts.” That’s a stupid line! It looks ridiculous on paper! It’s very, very difficult to imagine anyone using that line as a sincere come-on. (There are plenty of love songs, too, but a lot of those love songs are really sex songs in disguise.) But despite all the millions and millions of songs about sex, it’s hard to write about sex well. That’s a vast over-generalization, but there are probably more pop songs about sex than about any other subject. 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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