Ayo! (Mýa song)

"Ayo!" is a song by American recording artist Mýa. It served as a promotional single for her fourth studio album Liberation (2007) and featured Washington D.C. native DJ Kool. Initially, released as the first intended single from Liberation however though the single failed to pick up as Harrison was going through transitioning from former label Interscope to her current label Universal Motown. The song was written and composed by Harrison, Christopher “Deep” Henderson and Charlie Smalls. It sampled an interpolation from the composition He’s the Wizard written by Charlie Smalls.

The song received generally positive reviews from contemporary music critics comparing the song’s production to TLC’s classic ‘90s album "CrazySexyCool". Ayo! became a minor hit on Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart peaking at number seventy. No music video was released for the song due to it not being picked up as a single.

Background

Ayo! samples an interpolation of He's The Wizard by Thelma Carpenter from the soundtrack to The Wiz. The Wiz is an adaptation of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz which features an entire African American cast. The film starred Diana Ross and Michael Jackson as well as Thelma Carpenter playing the role of Miss One, the Good Witch of the North. The song is sung by Carpenter and The Munchkins when Dorothy Gale (Ross) and Toto arrives in Oz. The song was originally written by Charlie Smalls for the musical and film, so therefore he is credited for the sample recording.

Ayọ

Ayọ (born as Joy Olasunmibo Ogunmakin, 14 September 1980) is a Nigerian-German singer-songwriter and actress. She uses the Yoruba translation Ayọ or Ayo. of her first name Joy.

Her debut album Joyful, which was first released in 2006, reached Double-Platinum status in France, Platinum in Germany and Poland, Gold status in Switzerland and Italy and Greece. The album was released in the United States on 20 November 2007 by Interscope Records.

Ayọ was born in Frechen near Cologne, Germany. She has a son, Nile, who was born in late 2005 and a daughter, Billie-Eve, born July 2010, with the Afro-German reggae singer Patrice, from whom she is now separated. At the end of 2007, she moved with her family to the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan in New York City. At present she lives in Brooklyn, New York with her children.

Then-president of UNICEF France, Jacques Hintzy, announced on 4 February 2009 that the singer was named patron of UNICEF to promote the right to education for all children in the world.

Skit

Skit may refer to:

See also

Hip hop skit

A hip hop skit is a form of sketch comedy that appears on a hip hop album or mixtape, and is usually written and performed by the artists themselves. Skits can appear on albums or mixtapes as individual tracks, or at the beginning or end of a song. Some skits are part of concept albums and contribute to an album's concept. Skits also occasionally appear on albums of other genres.

The hip-hop skit was more or less pioneered by De La Soul and their producer Prince Paul who incorporated many skits on their 1989 debut album 3 Feet High and Rising.

The Hip Hop Skit although dominant throughout the 90s and the early 2000s began to be phased out in the later half of the 2000s and the early 2010s. Reasons for this include the popularity of MP3 as well as the invention of the iPod Shuffle, which could only play tracks in a random order.

Writing for The AV Club, Evan Rytlewski opined that skits may have originally been in vogue because an expanded tracklisting would look more appealing to would be buyers, although he noted that their first inclusion on a De La Soul record was most likely just them being "eccentric".