Seconds before Tupac Shakur is killed in the hilariously dumb hip-hop biopic All Eyez on Me, he’s cruising down the Las Vegas strip with the infamous Suge Knight. They’re bumping the Outlawz and cracking bromance jokes like they’re Will and Martin in Bad Boys when Pac abruptly slips in a cassette of the 1996 single “Blackberry Molasses” by the Atlanta-based teen R&B group Mista. Produced by Organized Noize—Sleepy Brown, Ray Murray, and Rico Wade—just after they perfected their stoned Dirty South funk beats on Outkast’s Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik and Goodie Mob’s Soul Food, the track’s warped electric guitars and hypnotic drum pads send Pac into a full-body groove. Suge reacts like he’s never heard a soul record before. “Turn that shit off, we Death Row,” he says, as the boy band’s choir vocals swell. Pac gets animated and jokingly fires back at Suge, “There’s R&B out here that’s slamming! This is ghetto gospel.”

Don’t clown me for taking All Eyez on Me’s Wikipedia script too seriously, but Pac’s description nails the new-old rhythm of Mista’s minor hit: traditional tight harmonies with a sweaty-sexy bounce that made them seem like church boys spitting game outside of service. It’s ground the group never got the chance to build on, but when their frontman Bobby Valentino went solo nearly a decade later, he tweaked the blueprint for “Slow Down,” the sweetest-sounding catcalling anthem you’ve ever heard.

In 2005, the year “Slow Down” went from a word-of-mouth radio hit to a BET afterschool classic, R&B was in one of its ever-shifting states: The mainstream debuts of Chris Brown, Trey Songz, and T-Pain represented commercial male R&B’s hardened and digitized future, while at the same time the airwaves were still ruled by the beggars. Then, just like now, the genre was figuring out what its modern identity was supposed to be in the wake of the latest hip-hop makeover. Should the singers be on some gangsta shit? Should they sound straight out of the church? Did rap influence kill the soul? Or has the idea of soulfulness become too static? Bobby Valentino was a throwback vocalist with a slight hip-hop sensibility that popped in this exact moment of transition.

Bobby Wilson was a pastor’s son who grew up idolizing the kind of R&B dudes who could wail a praise song and then hit up Freaknik afterwards (think Jodeci and H-Town). By chance, he became the lead singer of Mista, who, after “Blackberry Molasses,” began tinkering on a second album with Illinois production team Tim Kelley and Bob Robinson. Raised on gospel and Earth, Wind & Fire, Tim & Bob were steady hands in superproducer Dallas Austin’s braintrust who hit it big doing a bunch of ballads on Boyz II Men’s diamond-selling behemoth II. Looking to get out from under Austin’s shadow, they started working with some groups on their own, including Mista. Together they cut an album, which was scrapped by the label, Elektra, and never released, though like damn-near every lost project it’s said that it would have fucked the game up.

Once the label cut ties, it was over for Mista: destined to be one of those one-hit wonder troupes that get eulogized in the YouTube comments section. Bobby dipped back home to Atlanta to play baseball and enroll at Clark Atlanta University, laying down vocals in the studio at night. Years later, because Atlanta is Atlanta, his demos found the ear of a red-hot Ludacris, who signed Bobby, under the name Bobby Valentino, to his Disturbing Tha Peace imprint for a couple of bands and a chain, which in the rapper world is like getting a pair of socks for Christmas.

Luda didn’t have much invested in Bobby, so Bobby had to rustle up an album on his own. He was searching for producers to record with when he remembered he had a good thing going with Tim & Bob before their time was cut short. In the years since, the duo had been working as production mercenaries, racking up plaques with era-defining jams like Tamia’s Hot 97 staple “So Into You” and Sisqó’s unhinged singalong “Thong Song.” Like a private eye, Bobby went out to Los Angeles to hunt them down. One day, without any notice, he pulled up to Tim’s doorstep in Topanga Canyon with the scraps he had been messing around with. Eventually Bobby moved in and their lives became a blur of strip club nights, workouts, and studio time as they pieced together the fragments of his debut album, Disturbing Tha Peace Presents Bobby Valentino.

Recorded near the end of these sessions, “Slow Down,” Bobby’s debut single, is one of the great begging-ass songs of 2000s R&B. It’s a love-at-first-sight story about Bobby spotting a girl with a butterfly tattoo, a bellybutton piercing, and a fat butt who makes him fall so hard that he starts throwing Hail Mary pick-up lines: “I saw you walking, down on Melrose/You looked like an angel, straight out of Heaven, girl,” he croons like he’s living in a dream. He’s practically got drool rolling down his chin, ogling her body like the teen boys in Porky’s. Out of context, it’s awkward and silly and a little creepy (“I was blown away by your sexiness/Now all I have to do is catch up to you”) but the out-of-time Tim & Bob beat turns the mood into something more magical.

In the high-budget CD era, Tim & Bob were used to label meddling, but since they’d put up nearly all of the money for Bobby’s new music, they got the kind of creative freedom they were rarely afforded. One particular inspiration was the S.O.S Band’s “Even When You Sleep,” which has this psychedelic extended intro—guitar riffs out of a mirage; hushed flexatone effects—that gives the entire track the feel of a hallucination. “Slow Down” isn’t far off from that; Tim’s pitched-up sample of the dramatic strings from Hans Zimmer’s The Last Samurai soundtrack, combined with Bob’s gentle guitar plucks, sound straight out of a fairytale. The beat builds without drums for only a little more than 10 seconds, but I barely ever notice the brevity because the feeling of intense infatuation makes time stop.

The romanticism of Tim & Bob’s beat suggests that “Slow Down” isn’t just a song about wanting to fuck but about a meet-cute so powerful that it’s almost like a rebirth. Deepening the mood are drums that rumble like an erratic cartoon heartbeat, a twitchy bounce that Tim had been fooling around with since he was introduced to the MPC drum machine by Mario Winans in the 1990s. I used to think this combo of cross-cultural sampling and quick-tempoed hip-hop grooves sounded like knockoff Timbaland—you know, stuff like “More Than a Woman” and “Big Pimpin’”—yet they’re different: Timbaland made instrumentals that felt like visions beamed in from the future, while Tim & Bob’s “Slow Down” is a rosy-eyed memory.

“Slow Down” has an old soul not just because of Tim & Bob’s instrumentation, but also Bobby’s gently stacked vocal harmonies and mannered gospel yearning. His singing makes it seem like he wants to just hold hands with her in the park, despite a lot of the compliments having to do with her ass: “So slow down, I just wanna get to know you/But don’t turn around ’cause that pretty round thing looks good to me.” He strikes a balance between sincere desire and lowkey thirsting that a lot of modern R&B is nostalgic for. I am, too.

“Slow Down” blew up on West Coast radio so fast that Bobby and Tim & Bob went back into the studio to do it again with “Tell Me,” which is nearly as enchanting. Growing up I’d watch the videos for “Slow Down” and “Tell Me” on 106 & Park so much that I can remember certain specific details better than I can memories I actually lived: that round belt buckle the size of a dinner plate in “Tell Me”; him watching the girl that caught his eye through the reflection in a store window in “Slow Down.”

After Bobby Valentino, Bobby V. (as he later became known for legal reasons) ended up on the fourth edition of the Scream Tour, alongside names like Pretty Ricky, Bow Wow, and Omarion. As much as I have a soft spot for the Word Up! magazine all-stars, none of them had anything like “Slow Down.” There’s an old BET Access Granted episode that I used to watch that goes behind the scenes of the tour, and every time the DJ faded out the beat during his performance of the hit, the screams were deafening. It’s the greatest song of that teen idol era.

By the time Special Occasion, Bobby’s second album, rolled around in 2007, he was trying hard to keep up with the changing sound and themes of commercial male R&B, but that didn’t suit him. That year, hypersexed R. Kelly 2.0 acolytes like The-Dream and J. Holiday hit the charts; Bobby’s new-old valor was swiped by Lloyd; and a new roster of singing rappers was well on the way. In 2009, So Far Gone hit the internet; it’s hard to comprehend that “Slow Down” was only four years earlier, almost like they exist in completely different eras. “It’s tough because all the rappers are singing now,” Bobby admitted to Essence in 2009. “They are really making it extra hard for a brother.” He was steamrolled by the fast-moving trends of R&B but for a brief moment in time that worked in his favor: While the genre rushed to modernize, to develop a tougher edge, Bobby Valentino was moving at his own pace.

Additional research by Cullen Fagan.