Crazy Like a Foxx

Does he think he's blind now, too? No wonder he always wears sunglasses indoors.

I've been meaning to post this for a while. You see, I thought I had reached Détente with Jamie Foxx. When last we checked in with him, it appeared he had finally given up his Ray Charles schtick. It appeared. I was ready to move on. He wasn't.

So, a couple weeks ago, just before The Grammys, I turned on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Jamie Foxx was the guest. This is some of what he had to say:

I’m gonna tell you why this CD is number one. For one, we did a movie called Ray Charles [sic]. And when we did Ray Charles [sic], a young man by the name of Kanye West who is so genius and myself and Kanye are kinda like the Batman and Robin of number one songs [shouldn't he say "Kanye and myself" because honestly, in that analogy, Jamie Foxx is Robin at best], you know, and after we did that, Kanye was looking at the movie when we were doin’ [sings:]“Well, I got a woman, uh uh, way over town, uh uh, that’s good to me.” And he took this “She take my money, uh, uh…” so he took that and made a special hook called “Gold Digger” as you know, [sings:]“I’m not saying she’s a gold digger, but she ain’t messing with no…” you know the rest…

Okay, so he still doesn't solve the mystery of who sings on the "Gold Digger" hook. Though this article from MTV News might (via Wikipedia):

"He did that beat a while before the movie ['Ray'] was even thought of," West's A&R rep, Patrick "Plain Pat" Reynolds, said of the song many [including, apparently, Jamie Foxx] thought was conceived after West saw Foxx's Oscar-winning performance as Ray Charles.

...

The idea to make Jamie Foxx a part of "Gold Digger," which had initially used a sample of Ray Charles' "I Got a Woman," came after West went to see "Ray" with his friend John Mayer.

"It was the natural thing," Pat explained. "If we couldn't clear the sample, we were going to use Jamie. There's actually a version with Jamie singing all the way through the song. It's good, but it didn't feel the same because we had to replay the instruments too.

So, there you go. Finally!

Anyway, back to Jamie and Ellen:

Yeah, so that’s why it’s so special that it’s number one because Ray’s album came out, after he passed away, it was the number one album in the country without a number one song. And this album is the number one album in the country without a number one song. So it’s because of that.

Um, what?

Ellen responds:

That's incredible.

Uh, yeah. It certainly is. Incredible.

Jamie to Ellen:

Thank you.

Then later, Ellen brings up how he's up for a Grammy. He makes it sound as though he's up for more than one:

We were nominated for “Slow Jamz”, but this one is… I mean “Gold Digger”’s like the national anthem right now. So it’s up for, like, you know, Best Song of the Year [actually, it was up for Record of the Year and Best Rap Solo Performance, not Song of the Year, but that's an easy mistake to make] and also we did a tribute to Luther Vandross and so we’re up for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance [that category, he got right].

Now, he never outright says that he is nominated for his work on "Gold Digger" (he wasn't), but he certainly implies it.

Oh, and one last exhumation of his Ray Charles persona: Near the end of his performance of "Unpredictable" he tosses in this line:

I'm gonna make it do what it do, baby

Anything but unpredictable. Oh, and I just discovered that there's a song on his album called "Do What It Do."