If not for a nightclub shooting, the Florida rapper Plies might’ve been the one to release “I Wanna Love You.” But Akon took the song back for himself, found a more stable guest star, and took the track all the way to the top. Akon almost gave that song away to somebody else. Finally, Akon arrived at the top spot in the closing days of 2006, and he did it with a simple and hypnotic track about the things that he wanted to do to a stripper. Akon was just the slightly enigmatic guy who made hits. Akon had been circling that #1 spot like a shark, but songs from larger-than-life celebrity types kept blocking his tracks out.

The public never knew too much about Akon, but the hits kept coming.īy the time Akon first reached the top of the Hot 100, he already had plenty of hits. Many of Akon’s big money-making ideas were absurdist bullshit, but when it came to the business of popular music, the man was a professional. When Akon did speak, he sometimes said absurd and off-putting things - still does - but he usually couched them in the bland and empty language of the international investor caste. Akon never gave much of himself, either in his music or in interviews. But the backstory might’ve been a fabrication nobody was quite sure. The Senegalese-American singer Akon had an elaborate backstory, and the backstory was key to at least the first hit. The voice was mysterious, and so was the man behind the voice. Often, the voice seemed to subliminally blend all those different genres, until they became the same thing. That voice moved freely from genre to genre - rap to dance to reggae to R&B to down-the-line centrist pop music. But the voice always carried just a hint of melancholy, even when its lyrics were standard party-time boilerplate.

The melodies were always simple, and so were the lyrics. The voice had an accent, but it wasn’t an accent that most Americans could place. It was sleek and calm and just slightly otherworldly. It seemed to glide, frictionless, out of every radio. 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.įor about five years, that high, keening, ghostly voice was everywhere.

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