Comedian/actor Jamie Foxx’s recording career was officially launched when Kanye West’s “Slow Jamz”, on which Jamie was heavily featured, rose to the top of the charts. He followed that by doing his Ray Charles impersonation on both West’s “Gold Digger” and Ludacris and Field Mob’s “Georgia”, before finding his own voice for the smash album “Unpredictable”. True, that voice often sounds borrowed from his stand-up days–it’s difficult to take serious straight-faced babymaking lines like “Blame it on the Goose/Got you feeling loose/Blame it on ‘Tron/Got you in the zone” in his ode to social lubrication, “Blame It” (especially with T-Pain¬ tailgating with “Couple more shots/You’ll open up like a book”)–and he has the vocal chops to do without the Auto-Tune, but Jamie Foxx is known for utilizing all his skills in every performance.

by Mark Emge