Duice’s Salute to Hot Pants Burns Up the Pop Charts : Pop music: Most hit singles are lucky to last a few weeks on the Billboard Top 100, but ‘Dazzey Duks’ came within three weeks of the record.

“Frankly I’m sick to death of it,” grumbles Ira (L.A. Sno) Brown of Duice, referring to the rap duo’s hit single “Dazzey Duks.”

Who can blame him?

Performing it constantly around the country, Brown, 23 and his partner Anthony (Creo-D) Darlington, 25, have had plenty of opportunity to get fed up with the single, which has had a phenomenally long life.

Most hit singles are lucky to last a few weeks on the pop charts. But this one, a frisky, bass-heavy ode to the ultra-skimpy shorts saluted in the title, just completed 40 weeks in Billboard’s pop singles Top 100, three shy of the longevity record set in 1982 by Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love.” It’s sales are approaching 2 million.

About the single’s remarkably long chart life, Brown says: “Most hit singles get lots of radio airplay and national attention on video shows--and they peak after a few months. But this single never got that kind of attention. It has been breaking slowly city by city--which has stretched out sales over a long period of time.”

Brown, who was born in Compton, and Florida native Darlington were music-industry novices looking to break into rap when they wrote and recorded “Dazzey Duks” in the spring of 1992.

“We were just sitting on the porch one day, thinking about writing a song and we came up with the lyrics,” Brown says. “We wanted to write a song about those shorts that were named after that Daisy Duke character on that old ‘Dukes of Hazzard’ TV series. Those pants are hot in the South in the summer.”

What about complaints that the single is sexist?

“The bottom line,” he says, snickering at his pun, “is that our single is all in fun.”

This isn’t the kind of record you’d expect from someone like Brown, who sings in a church choir and has a strong gospel background. A former military medical photographer, he met Darlington, who had been in a high school rap group, while both were in the Army. As civilians in Augusta, Ga., they thought it might be fun to get into rap.

“We never dreamed of anything like this,” says Brown, still marveling at Duice’s success.

Originally released by a small Southern label in the summer of last year, “Dazzey Duks,” largely through club play, became a regional hit--big enough to interest Hollywood-based Bellmark Records, which got involved in the project last October.

Known for its singles marketing expertise, Bellmark has arguably the year’s most commercially successful single, Tag Team’s “Whoomp! (There It Is).”

Bellmark president Al Bell recalls first listening to “Dazzey Duks” on the recommendation of its producer, Nelson Curry. “I played it one time and it blew my mind,” he says. “I saw some things wrong--some things that needed to be improved in the mix, but it felt like a hit so I went after it.”

Getting the single off the ground wasn’t easy. One problem was that some radio program directors dismissed it as a novelty single. “That kind of single burns out fast so some stations don’t even want to play them,” Bell explains. “Convincing radio people that this wasn’t a novelty single was a big hurdle to leap over.”

But just the first one. The next was the regional bias against the Southern sound. “It’s that Miami bass sound that some stations outside the South just refuse to play,” Bell moans. “It’s a real fast dance tempo and it has a lot of bass in it. They claim their listeners don’t like it. After all this time the single is just catching on in New York. Radio people there called it dumb Southern music.”

But the single never leaped that final hurdle--resistance by MTV. “They didn’t like the single or the music and they’ve never played it,” Bell points out, still exasperated by the rejection. “They wanted some changes in the video and we even did that. It showed some rear shots of women walking on the beach wearing dazzy duks. We edited that scene--and they still wouldn’t play it. Getting it on MTV would have made it easier to market in some of these cities. It still doesn’t have the kind of national identity you’d expect from a single that has sold so many copies.”

MTV spokesperson Linda Alexander wouldn’t go into details about the rejection, simply explaining: “We get hundreds and hundreds of videos and we just can’t play them all--even some decent ones.”

The single’s slow-breaking pattern has apparently affected album sales. Duice’s “Dazzey Duks” album hasn’t attracted much attention since its release at the end of last year even though Bell reports sales are nearing the 500,000 mark.

“Most people don’t even know we have an album,” Brown complains. “It’s been a slow, steady seller. In all these cities, there’s so much attention to the single that the album gets lost in the shuffle.”

Brown hopes that will change with the new single, “Duice Is in the House,” which just came out. Meanwhile, Bellmark continues to milk the “Dazzey Duks” single.