But it’s never been available on streaming services. The track cracked the Top 20 on the Hot 100 and remains the singer’s highest-charting hit. “That took me from shows with 150 people showing up to nearly 3,000 people showing up in six months,” Tank says. Listeners could apparently relate: The song became a breakout hit.
“Maybe I deserve/For you to stay out with him all night.” In R&B, it’s customary for the singer’s conviction to grow as the song progresses, so Tank’s imagery becomes increasingly vivid, but here, all his firepower is directed inward - by the end of the track, he’s practically begging his partner to lie to him, cheat on him, put him through hell, just to even the score and alleviate his guilt. This track is a triumph of self-torture: “Maybe I deserve/For you to go out and find some other guy,” Tank sings. Tank returned the next year with “Maybe I Deserve,” a single as durable as it is minimal - just a few scattered, gospel-leaning piano notes and a dusting of drums. The song just wasn’t that good, and I didn’t know it.” To make matters worse, radio execs kept seeing Tank’s posters - “the word ‘freaky,’ me with my shirt off, looking mean” - and deciding he was a rapper, putting him in an awkward position when he showed up at the stations’ shows ready to croon.īut a hit has a way of erasing all that came before it. “That’s the record I want people to forget and act like it never existed. “‘Freaky’ was almost the beginning of the end,” he says. It was a start, just not the one he hoped for. Next came the visual: “We spent like $500,000 shooting an elaborate video, blowing shit up, setting shit on fire, 10 dancers, crane shots, racing old vintage vehicles,” the singer recalls. He spent months and months writing songs he lined up a single called “Freaky,” which he released in 2000.
After a 60-date arena tour as a backup vocalist for Ginuwine and Aaliyah in 1997, Durrell Babbs, the singer now known to R&B fans as Tank, was ready to venture out as a solo act. But in the 1990s, building that type of name recognition often took years. Today an unknown artist can post a snippet of a song on TikTok on a Friday and be famous 48 hours later.
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