R.I.P: New Jack Swing's Hip Hop/R&B Hybrid
FUSE TV - R.I.P: New Jack Swing's Hip Hop/R&B Hybrid
The big genres—rock, hip hop, dance—aren't going anywhere, but smaller, more niche genres come and go, defining a particular place and time before becoming a musical footnote. In our new feature Obituary for a Genre, we eulogize and resurrect these forgotten musical moments. In this edition: New Jack Swing.
In a December 1990 Baltimore Sun article previewing hip-hop/R&B group Bell Biv Devoe’s upcoming New Year’s Eve gig, member Ricky Bell described his group’s music as “mentally hip-hop, smoothed out on the R&B tip, with a pop feel appeal to it. We want to be the first to express this kind of music.”
They were a few years too late on the whole “first to express” thing, but Bell’s definition encapsulates the preeminent urban genre of the late-1980s and early-1990s: New Jack Swing. Started in earnest with Janet Jackson’s 1986 behemoth third album Control, the genre fused the hard-hitting rhythms and raps of hip hop with smooth R&B and radio-friendly pop and would eventually dominate mainstream music.
Before New Jack Swing, hip hop and R&B agreed to disagreed. Hip hop barely existed on R&B radio and the only R&B tracks you’d hear on hip hop albums was the occasional Side B ballad (Exhibit A: LL Cool J’s 1987 track “I Need Love” from Bad).
More than anyone, former Guy member and uber–producer Teddy Riley destroyed that. A producer since his teens, by the time he was 21, he had, as writer Michaelangelo Matos put it, “long since altered the entire nature of R&B. He did it by refusing to act as if it had been different than that of hip-hop.”
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