The Cassie Discography Rate - WE'RE AT THE HALFWAY POINT!

Hello Bad Bitches, Official Girls and Queens of Hearts - welcome to my very first rate! Here we will be ranking every song officially released by 2000's R&B legend Cassie!

Cassandra Elizbeth Ventura Fine, better known simply as Cassie is an underrated trailblazer and much-loved cult figure in the worlds of pop and contemporary R&B. She's an artist whose blend of pop, alternative R&B and hip-hop quietly pushed boundaries and always remained ahead of its time. Her icy cool, chilly, slightly ethereal vocals and smooth, hypnotic and equally minimal yet experimental beats immediately made her stand out in the crowd of R&B Girls making a bid for superstardom towards the later end of the mid-2000s. Her debut single “Me & U” was the sound of the summer of 2006 and still gets regular club play to this day, it still sounds as fresh as it did then with a murkier, minimal, darker, more menacing production style matched with Cassie’s icy, distant, sultry vocals transcending time itself, and not sounding a million miles away from the murky trap-pop currently ruling the airwaves. With an acclaimed and impressive US top 5 debut album - that again still sounds fresh to this day - and an expensive video filmed for the impossibly catchy Long Way 2 Go the future was her’s to write… or so it seemed. However, some less than stellar live performances and some leaked nude photos led to a ton of public backlash and Long Way 2 Go only just scraped the Hot 100 and tragically became her last Hot 100 entry as a lead artist. All of this sounds like the end of a perfect rag's to riches then back to rags again tale of a trip along the boulevard of broken pop dreams. But that wasn't the end.

Then there were forays into modelling and acting, rumours of being dropped by Bad Boy and then the promise of a second album, alongside serval lead singles - allegedly titled Electro Love and slated for a 2008 release, the album was greatly buzzed about by everyone from P.Diddy himself to Pitchfork - However the intended lead singles all underperformed and the album was pushed back further into 2009, then 2010 and then set to be "relaunched" in 2012 amgost a cloud of record label doubts and Cassie's own perfectionism … You get the idea. Sadly it remains unreleased to this day. However, literally hundreds of demos - which were more of the incredible, dark, oddball R&B electronic jams that Cassie had expertly nailed leaked online - and if an album from these sessions had seen the light of day, I have no doubt it would have been one of the best of its era. She became a cult figure, with a small but dedicated number of stans whose love for her only grew with each fleeting release. A remix EP dedicated to her was even released by the trendy underground electronic label Tri-Angle and a fan-made mixtape trilogy of tracks from these sessions became something of an urban legend. The Guardian even named Electro Love as the best pop album of 2008 despite never being released. Then came her 2013 Rockabyebaby mixtape that was the closest we ever got to a full follow-up - it was officially released (on DatPiff but we'll take the win) and showed a harder, more aggressive, darker, more hip-hop orientated sound that found her sounding more confident than ever before - singing, rapping and gliding over more brooding, bass-heavy, hard-hitting beats with more spacey, trippier soundscapes than ever before alongside some of Hip-Hop’s biggest names who all brought their A-game. It was a hit with the critics and adored by her fans… but cruelly ignored by the general public. However, at this point - did that really matter? Cassie knew she wasn't going to be the huge pop star she perhaps could and some would say should have been - and instead embraced being the cult icon that she is today. Her next release (apart from two excellent singles in 2017, that came alongside the promise of a new album on EPIC Records - which you guessed it - was scrapped) was the 2019 series of promotional singles called “Free Friday’s” - released as a playlist exclusively to streaming platforms following on from her split from a decade-plus long complicated personal relationship with P.Diddy and professional one with Bad Boy Records - these songs showed her exploring her newfound freedom with a more stripped back, neo-soul inspired, mellower sound with clearer vocals and more vulnerable lyrics than ever before. It showed another dazzling side to Cassie’s artistry and serves as the mark of an important new chapter in her life. She has not released an official project since then - but in between being a mother to two very young children, an Instagram model, fashion muse, NFT seller and wife to a very handsome fitness guru she seems to have her hands tied - she has however promised us new music “soon” - Who knows, maybe this rate will coax her out of the shadows and into our dancefloors and hearts once more…

So without further ado - let's get into it (yuh)

THE SONGS:
​

Cassie (2006):​

Me & U

Long Way 2 Go

About Time

Kiss Me

Call U Out

Just One Nite

Not With You

Ditto

What Do U Want

Miss Your Touch


Can’t Do It Without You

When Your Body Is Talking​

Rockabyebaby (2013):


Paradise (Featuring Wiz Khalifa)

Take Care Of Me Baby (Featuring Pusha T)

Addiction (Featuring French Montanna)

Numb (Featuring Rick Ross)

Sound Of Love (Featuring Jeremiah)

I Love It (Featuring Fabolous)

Rockabyebaby

I Know What You Want

Turn Up (Featuring Meek Mill)

Do My Dance (Featuring Too Short)

Bad Bitches (Featuring Esther Dean)

All My Love​

Free Fridays (2019):


Moments

Excuses

Hungover

Speaking Of

Rollercoaster (Featuring Ro James)

Don’t Let Go

Teach Me

Simple Things
​

Stand Alone Singles (2007-17)

Is It You?

Official Girl (Featuring Lil’ Wayne)

Must Be Love (Featuring P.Diddy)

Let’s Get Crazy (Featuring Akon)

Radio (Featuring Fabolous)

Make You A Believer (Featuring Jadakiss)

King Of Hearts

Balcony (Featuring Young Jeezy)

Love A Loser (Featuring G-Eazy)

Don’t Play It Safe​

Collabrations and Extras (2007-22):

Addiction (With Ryan Leslie and Fabolous)

Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll (With Planet VI)

Sound Of Love (With DJ Komori)

Warning Shot (With Machine Gun Kelly)

Fly With U (With Far East Movement)

The Boys (With Nicki Minaj)

End Of The Line

Diced Pineapples (With Fabolous and Trey Songz)

Weak (With Los and Wiz Khalifa)

Hit It (With Jonte)

In The Mood (With Lola Monroe)

Indo (With Solange)

Joint (No Sleep)

Obvious (With Edan Prince)

Muse/About Ava (With The Code)

Big Shoes (Remix) (With The Cast of Empire)

Time (With Black Coffee)

Not Love (With Colin Munroe)

YOUTUBE PLAYLIST
​

Spoiler: PM List

Me & U
Long Way 2 Go
About Time
Kiss Me
Call U Out
Just One Nite
Not With You
Ditto
What Do U Want
Miss Your Touch
Can’t Do It Without You
When Your Body Is Talking

Paradise (Featuring Wiz Khalifa)
Take Care Of Me Baby (Featuring Pusha T)
Addiction (Featuring French Montanna)
Numb (Featuring Rick Ross)
Sound Of Love (Featuring Jeremiah)
I Love It (Featuring Fabolous)
Rockabyebaby
I Know What You Want
Turn Up (Featuring Meek Mill)
Do My Dance (Featuring Too Short)
Bad Bitches (Featuring Esther Dean)
All My Love

Moments
Excuses
Hungover
Speaking Of
Rollercoaster (Featuring Ro James)
Don’t Let Go
Teach Me
Simple Things

Is It You?
Official Girl (Featuring Lil’ Wayne)
Must Be Love (Featuring P.Diddy)
Let’s Get Crazy (Featuring Akon)
Radio (Featuring Fabolous)
Make You A Believer (Featuring Jadakiss)
King Of Hearts
Balcony (Featuring Young Jeezy)
Love A Loser (Featuring G-Eazy)
Don’t Play It Safe​

Addiction (With Ryan Leslie and Fabolous)
Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll (With Planet VI)
Sound Of Love (With DJ Komori)
Warning Shot (With Machine Gun Kelly)
Fly With U (With Far East Movement)
The Boys (With Nicki Minaj)
End Of The Line
Diced Pineapples (With Fabolous and Trey Songz)
Weak (With Los and Wiz Khalifa)
Hit It (With Jonte)
In The Mood (With Lola Monroe)
Indo (With Solange)
Joint (No Sleep)
Obvious (With Edan Prince)
Muse/About Ava (With The Code)
Big Shoes (Remix) (With The Cast of Empire)
Time (With Black Coffee)
Not Love (With Colin Munroe)




/SPOILER]

​

THE RULES:
I'll assume most of you will have participated in rates before and know the format but just in case you don't - the idea is that you rank every sing listed from 0 - 10, you are allowed to give one song an 11 - this means that this is your absolute favourite song in the whole rate. Then send the scores - with any commentary you wish to include, which is more than welcome by me via PM to me by Monday 14th of March 2022 - this gives you a full four-week month if there is enough demand for it - this could be extended by a week or so if it's needed, I know how much life can get in the way of these things - but it's the date I'm personally aiming for. Please do not troll with your votes or they will be immediately thrown out, also I'll allow decimals to the nearest point but please don't do anything too crazy with them since this is my first rate and I'd like to keep things relatively simple.

I'm absolutely buzzing to celebrate the legacy of one of my personal favourite artists with you - so Don't Play It Safe and let's make this rate a Paradise for good taste!​

 

Reserved xx

 

Reserved just in case

Okay, you can guys can post now!

 

There are way more songs than I expected. Here for all the discoveries.

 

While researching I was pleasantly surprised at how many songs she had. There are some real gems in there - I hope you enjoy discovering them!

 

Perched for this! I love most of Cassie's discography, but a good part of the extras section is new to me, curious to discover those.

 

The shade! Is he problematic?

 

I kinda forgot she only had (1) official album so I was a bit taken aback scrolling down and seeing the 7 year gap between the self titled and the mixtape dd. Damn the struggle was real as a Cassie fan!

Excited to do this!

 

I genuinely have no idea who he is outside of this song ddd.

 

*Jadakiss voice* AH HA!

 

Ready for King of Hearts supremacy!

 

To breathe some life back into this thread I will be posting my personal reflections on each era and giving some info I've found on them. In other news Cassie's legacy was once again proven when Charli XCX put the brilliant funk-infused deep cut (and at one point single contender) Miss Your Touch on her R&B Diva's BBC Playlist.

 

Taste! Miss Your Touch has always been one of my favourites.

 

So I was about to start this and I just realised the PM List is missing the entire stand alone singles section.

 

Oh shoot! Sorry, I'll adjust that now. I know I've been somewhat of a neglectful rate host but *life* ended up getting in the way. Hoping to drum some interest up *soon*!

 

Oh, wow, votes are due next Monday! Time to get cracking.

 

I was going to post about this
but I'm pretty sure I'll be extending the deadline by a week or so! Just to give folk more time and hussle for some more votes. This month just seems to have flown by! My debut era write up should be up tonight or tomorrow too!

EDIT: It turns out I'm actually going away next Monday for a few nights - so I'll definitely be extending the deadline by at least a week, maybe two? I do feel like I've slightly neglected this rate and want to build some hype, I've just become unexpectedly busy latley. But I'm 100% commited to making it happen!

 

Hello little Cassettes - I've taken the decision to extended the deadline by a week, giving you until MARCH 21st to get your ballots to me, also, as promised here is the first era "essay"/relfections post I will be making - I put blood, sweat and tears into this - so I hope it's appreciated!





In late 2005 when Cassie's debut single Me & U began making waves in German clubs and on MySpace, the world of pop music was a strange place, veering into new, relatively unknown territory. Caught between the world's of the CD boom and the Download era - labels were struggling to keep up with file-sharing sites such as Limewire (we all crashed family computers with that) and the internet - as acts like Cassie herself, began to crop up, seemingly out of nowhere. Me and U is often credited as being the first true internet crossover smash. Paving the way for the next decade-plus popstar trajectory.


While Rihanna was just a teenage girl from Barbados whose debut single Pon De Replay was beginning to go from the top of the charts to the Woolworths Bargain Bins, Beyonce was coming down from the high of a Destiny's Child victory lap - and plotting her next step towards world domination - as the world watched to see with bated breath if she could follow up the blockbuster Dangerously In Love era and with Britney in the middle of a well-publicised musical break - the pop girl world was lacking in some new stars. There was a gap in the market for someone to come along and capture that lightning in a bottle magic that so many chase but can rarely be found. Cassie came along with a single that wasn't an all gun's blazing "I'm here bitches" massive banger like Crazy In Love. She came along with a song that sounded unlike anything else out at the time - it didn't smack you across the face with huge vocals or a huge wash of synths or horns. She came along with a song that instead opted to slowly work it's magic - with a dark, minimal, lush beat that slowly sneaks up on you - and a vocal performance that brimmed with both a subtle confidence and a raw vulnerability, never fully leaning into either emotion but rather floating - with a noticeable distance between them - like her voice was being beamed in from another planet. From that first "you've been waiting so long..." You're instantly being commanded to attention, not in the "look-at-me-I;'m-all-guns-blazing-best-thing-since-sliced-bread" type of way. She wasn't the girl in the club in the sequin dress, slut dropping in the spotlight and screaming for attention and asking for drinks. She was the girl in stylish sneakers and a black hoodie with a smokey eye - at the back of the club with all the boys, under a cloud of heavy weed smoke and hidden under the strobes. She didn't seek out your attention, she didn't need too. If she wanted you to have it, you would know about it - and fall under her spell. There is a sneaky, hypnotic charm to her delivery on Me & U, and in fact - every other song on the album. What she lacked in technical ability (though to quote Diddy “she can sing”) she more than made up for in a subtle yet unmissable swagger and a charisma that wasn’t exactly obvious but at the same time was hard to ignore.


Me & U may not have sounded like a conventional debut single - it wasn’t even supposed to be one - but it did the job anyway. Remaining far and away Cassie’s biggest hit and signature song. It’s still regularly played in clubs - in both the main, sparkle filled, four-to-flour rooms and the dark, sweat-drenched, strobe filled backrooms, sounding simultaneously in place and like a breath of fresh air in both of them. Though Cassie didn’t go into her career with an all-guns-blazing, in-your-face declaration of fierceness, doesn’t mean she didn’t have one. Long Way 2 Go, the album’s second single - and second track - command’s your attention instantly with Cassie sounding more direct than ever before, commanding your attention directly - only to instantly dismiss it like she was just toying with you in the first place, like your just a fly in her web. As she raps some fiery bars about a suitor who just isn’t up to her standards with the untouchable swagger that only a late teen who knows she is the shit can deliver, over an instrumental that sounds so frantic it wouldn’t sound of place on a mixtape like Pop2, Speaking of which - though not so much directly, Charli has obviously been influenced by Cassie’s brand of minimalist future pop, regularly including both Me & U and various deep cuts on her BBC Sounds Playlist’s and playing them at her DJ sets. She’s just one of the many “future pop” pioneers who you can obviously hear this album’s influence on. What’s more - this album could drop today and I firmly believe that it could still make huge waves - possibly even bigger ones than it made at the time - performing decently in the US and the UK but not pulling the blockbuster numbers it could have - and I would say should have. It doesn’t sound like it came from 2006. It doesn’t sound like it came from 2016. It doesn’t sound like it came from 2026. It has a timeless quality to it that’s rare to come across and hard to put your finger on. That could be partly why - 16 years and no official albums later (that still stings to type) - she still has a loyal fanbase, that is slowly but surely growing. Sitting with a comfortable 3,373,763 monthly listeners on Spotify (a significantly larger amount than many of her peers from the time) - despite a periodic output and her essentially treating her music career as a hobby more than anything else.


The album never overstays it’s welcome at ten songs with one interlude (though some editions contain two extra tracks that were used as B-Sides, the straight-up slow jam “When Your Body Is Talking” and the subtly hypnotic guitar-based “Can’t Do It Without You” - both worthy additions to her catalogue and worth a spot on the album, especially the latter) - there are never any straight-up ballads to ruin the vibe, though slower moments like the gorgeous Just One Nite and Not With You (Cassie’s personal favourite on the album) provide a break from the synth domination, instead embracing elements of OPM Music (Orginal Philipoino Music, paying tribute to Cassie’s heritage ) such as harps and gentle simple soft harmonies to keep things interesting, they show a more human side to Cassie, the girl behind the hip-hop beats and spacey synths - her sweet, slightly ethereal voice taking centre stage while still staying loyal to her beats, working with them not against them at all times on the record. This more human, slightly stripped back yet still interesting style was something she played with much more across her unreleased and released Discography, even on her latest project “Free Friday’s” on tracks like Hungover and Excuses.


Elsewhere on the album, it experiments a lot, taking in classic smooth Destiney’s Child samples (on Kiss You, the first song she ever wrote and recorded), bhangra beats and electric guitars (on What Do U Want, written with an obscure New York-based all-female punk band) and even wonky-funk on the irresistible fan favourite closer Miss Your Touch. All of these feel like they shouldn’t work but definitely do. With Cassie’s still developing yet effortlessly charming vocals gliding effortlessly over Ryan Leslie’s experimental yet simple production. It’s an album that pulls off the rare feat of having every song having its own distinct sonic identity while still sounding incredibly cohesive. On last note - many see this album simply as a project by Ryan Leslie with Cassie as simply a vessel for it, I disagree with this statement passionately (it’s also probably rooted in misogyny but that’s an essay for another day) as it’s Cassie’s vocals that stick the whole thing together and wrap it up beautifully. Another singer may not be able to pull of lyrics like “You will never catch me asleep, I’m awake, Homie)” Without sounding like a flat out piss-take but Cassie makes them work beautifully, in a way many others could not. Simply put, these songs wouldn’t work without her. If this is the only official (girl) album Cassie ever puts out, she can comfort in the fact that many artists with massive discographies never come close to creating something this brilliant.

 

Great write-up! I don't know what would have seemed more unlikely back when the album was released - that it'd still be beloved an influential over a decade and a half later, or that it'd be the only album Cassie released dd

 

That's what makes her so brilliant. And so frustrating to stan ddd.