Song Information
Written by Kanye West, Keith Harris, Estelle, will.i.am, John Stephens, Caleb Speir, Josh Lopez, and Kweli Washington and produced by will.i.am, the song uses samples from "Impatient" from will.i.am's 2007 album Songs About Girls as well as "& Down" by Boys Noize. American Boy was released as the second single from Shine. It was released in the UK, as a download, on 21 March 2008 and physically on 24 March 2008.
After quickly dropping in Billboard rankings, on 9 September 2008, Shine reappeared for purchase in the U.S. iTunes Store. As a result of accumulated demand during the period of unavailability, "American Boy" quickly re-entered the top 100 songs chart, which prompted the song to jump four spots on the Billboard Hot 100 from #57 to #53.
American Boy reached a spot in the top 6 of iTunes "Top Songs" by 13 September 2008. Those sales levels in iTunes added the 10,000 copies of Shine sold in the now-reversed album-only experiment. During that time, the Shine album still generated 5,000 sales per week through offline sales, the UK iTunes, and non iTunes digital music channels such as Amazon which agreed to continue album sales while abiding by the publisher's wish to block sales of the single. In addition, a cover version of the song, performed by "Studio All-Stars", shot up the charts while the original was unavailable as a single.
The song was nominated for Song of the Year and won in the category of Best Rap/Sung Collaboration at the 51st Annual Grammy Awards. This song was #7 on Rolling Stone's list of the 100 Best Songs of 2008. American Boy was the 33rd best selling single of 2008, selling 1,582,000 downloads.
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