by Bob Stanley
TLC’s story felt like nothing much had changed since the days of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. They were mismanaged horribly, and somehow went bankrupt after selling twenty-five million albums. The feisty Left Eye turned out to be quite the Tasmanian devil, burning down her boyfriend’s house in ’94 and being very rude about the other girls, their producer and their record company. In 1999 she threw down the gauntlet in Entertainment Weekly. ‘I challenge Tionne “Player” Watkins [T-Boz] and Rozonda “Hater” Thomas [Chilli] to an album entitled “The Challenge” … a 3-CD set that contains three solo albums. Each [album] will be due to the record label by October 1, 2000. I also challenge Dallas “The Manipulator” Austin to produce all of the material and do it at a fraction of his normal rate. As I think about it, I’m sure LaFace [TLC’s label] would not mind throwing in a $1.5 million prize for the winner.’
On her own, Left Eye quickly scored a UK number one (‘Never Be the Same Again’ with Melanie C in 2000). She hosted MTV’s The Cut,2 the precursor to X Factor and American Idol, and was talking to David Bowie about working on a fourth TLC album when the jeep she was driving came off the road in Honduras and she was killed. Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes was thirty-one.
Swingbeat was still small change compared to mainstream R&B. En Vogue were a full decade ahead of their time. They were put together by Oakland, CA, producers Denzel Foster and Thomas McElroy, soul fans who were equally fond of Prince, Funkadelic and Digital Underground. Foster and McElroy had previously grafted contemporary urban productions onto vintage soul structures for the oddly named trio Tony! Toni! Toné! (Feels Good, US no. 9 ’90). With En Vogue, they wanted to create a latter-day Supremes, but from the start Terry Ellis, Cindy Herron, Maxine Jones and Dawn Robinson looked more like forties Hollywood vamps, straight out of the cast of The Women, than Brewster-project urchins; their hits (‘Hold On’, US no. 2, UK no. 5 ’90; ‘My Lovin’’, US no. 2, UK no. 4 ’92; ‘Don’t Let Go’, US no. 2, UK no. 5 ’96) were similarly lush, leggy and glamorous, and MTV fell at their feet. It was too bad that Robinson quit in ’98 and the group quickly fell off the map, just as their influence was being felt with the rise of Destiny’s Child. They deserve to be remembered most favourably.
Bigger – much bigger – than either TLC or En Vogue were a pair of singers with maximum lung power and backings smooth and shiny enough to skate on, and they ruled the nineties like no one else in pop. Whitney Houston had it in her blood – mum was soul singer Cissy, and Dionne Warwick was an aunt – and from childhood she was regarded as a special talent, caged and protected like Kate Bush until she was fully feathered, at which point she was released, flew – ‘Saving All My Love for You’, her debut single, was a transatlantic number one – and never came down. All that cosseting and pampering, though, left Whitney without a sense of judgement, and mostly she was foisted mush. Once in a while, though, she really clicked: ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’ (US and UK no. 1 ’87) had a natural electro glide and her whoops were as ecstatic and infectious as anything Motown or Stax had ever come up with. ‘How Will I Know’ (US no. 1, UK no. 5 ’86) was a comic-strip romance – you can picture Whitney’s quizzical face as she sings, cartoon thought bubbles appearing from it. Whitney’s success – she scored seven consecutive US number-one singles – meant she was a phenomenon, and the hunt was on for singers to follow in her slipstream. Melisma, multiple notes on a single syllable, became the new guitar solo, gauche in all but the most capable hands – though even those hands were no guarantee of quality.3
By the end of the eighties the NME had firmly tied its colours to hip hop. Mariah Carey’s emergence in 1990 presented it with a problem: how would rock fans and indie kids – freshly sold on hip hop as the authentic sound, the future sound of black America – relate to this new black consumer pop? Things seemed to have gone into reverse. What the hell was going on with ‘Vision of Love’ (US no. 1, UK no. 9 ’90)? It was finger-clicking smooth, a waltz-time canvas for Carey to paint with canary-coloured vocal trickery.
In the way that blue-collar American rock fans gravitate towards the gritty and workmanlike, the sweaty hard-grafting lumberjacks Nickelback and cowhands Lynyrd Skynyrd, so people admired Houston and Carey for their acrobatic skill. You got your money’s worth. Did Harry Nilsson’s version of ‘Without You’ reach quite as high as Mariah’s? Could it shatter glass like the lady in the Memorex ad? No, sir, it could not, and all other considerations (subtlety, mostly) were marginalised. When either singer aimed for the dancefloor, the results were spectacular, notably Mariah’s ‘Fantasy’ (US no. 1, UK no. 4 in ’95), and Whitney’s ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’ and ‘It’s Not Right but It’s OK’ (US no. 4 and UK no. 3 in ’99). Unfortunately they both majored in gloopy ballads with chocolate-box keyboard sounds and swimmy reverb tracks, as blank as possible (save for a carefully placed thundercrack snare) to leave maximum room for the ornate, excessive and self-admiring vocals. When Whitney Houston sang the Atlanta Olympics anthem ‘One Moment in Time’ (US no. 5, UK no. 1 ’88), it was the closest pop music and sport had ever got.4 Naturally, she got a 10 for technique.
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That’s the problem with most R&B today; it doesn’t reflect the masses. When I started to write I tried to combine that Motown way of putting feeling into people with the way that some rap people, say Melle Mel or Run-DMC, were able to get across an idea. It’s a science.
Chuck D, 1988
If R&B was too proud to make a move on hip hop, that didn’t stop the situation working in reverse. The same year TLC released their first album, Mary J. Blige emerged from the new-jill-swing mass as a protégée of emerging east-coast hip-hop producer Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs, who, at the time, was just nineteen and doubling up as an A&R man for Uptown Records. She had a husky voice reminiscent of early-seventies strongwomen like Millie Jackson – you wouldn’t pick a fight. Combs was smart enough to see her as Mick Jagger to Mariah’s Paul McCartney. Mary J. was always seen with a baseball cap, combat boots and baggy clothes – no tiara. She had both class and lack of class. Uptown Records proclaimed her to be the ‘Queen of Hip Hop Soul’, and – as there was no competition – it was hard to argue. The opening track on her ’92 debut What’s the 411? was no more than a succession of answering-machine messages over a drum-machine groove, which then ran into the intense minor-chord balladry of ‘Reminisce’; there was scat and there was melisma, but it was immediately obvious that Blige was not shiny or chic, and you could detect her miserable upbringing in a South Yonkers housing project – you were meant to. ‘They think this is entertainment,’ Blige told Ebony magazine. ‘This Mary J. Blige thing is not entertainment. This is my life and I put it out there on the line for everybody.’
What’s the 411? went three times platinum and, once the ‘hip hop soul’ idea was proven to be a winner, new-jill-swingers ditched the crashing drum machines and shrill eighties synths, taking Mary J.’s more emotive, more sample-heavy route: a more soulful girl-group R&B – SWV’s ‘Right Here’ (UK no. 3, US no. 2 ’93), with its sweetly placed sample from Michael Jackson’s ‘Human Nature’, and Jade’s ‘Don’t Walk Away’ (UK no. 7, US no. 4 ’93) – came in its wake, as did a rollicking collaboration between Salt-n-Pepa and En Vogue (‘Whatta Man’, US no. 3, UK no. 7 ’94) and TLC’s switch from bubblegum rap to the dark beauty of ‘Waterfalls’. Mary J. was also year zero for a crop of new, more glamorous singers waiting in the wings – Aaliyah, Beyoncé and, beyond them, Ashanti and Amerie – all of whom might have plumped for the Whitney/Mariah career model without Mary J.’s breakthrough.
On the west coast, as Puffy and Mary J. were working on her ‘broken street kid’ soul, Dr Dre’s The Chronic had brought real instrumentation into hip hop. He still used samples but was under the influence of smooth late-seventies and early-eighties soul, which led Dre to drafting R&B and funk session musicians into the Solar Records studio in LA, and ushering in a microgenre all of its own called G-funk. The pinnacle of the G-funk sound was Warren G’s Regulate �
�� G Funk Era album in ’94, which fused Kool and the Gang-style synth lines, R&B vocal harmonies care of the Dove Shack, buttery Fender Rhodes electric piano and the bear-with-a-sore-head mumbled stylings of singer Nate Dogg. All of this would have won the approval of Luther Vandross and Whitney Houston fans – if only it wasn’t for those pesky lyrics. By ’96 Dre was working with Teddy Riley’s post-new-jack-swing R&B boy band Blackstreet on the insistent piano groove of ‘No Diggity’ (US no. 1, UK no. 9), and the blend was complete. Now hip hop and R&B had realised they were kissing cousins, it was finally possible for the latter to move on.
‘It’s Not Right but It’s OK’ was Whitney Houston’s last great record. For once it didn’t have a beige backing, but instead something entirely different: it stuttered, drily, eerily, with Whitney calm and collected as she lists her man’s indiscretions over a burbling xylophone hook. It didn’t swing but it wasn’t meant to – this combination of tinderbox percussion, algebraic rhythm and soulful vocal was the product of another auteur, a Teddy Riley-schooled prodigy called Rodney Jerkins.
Reality, whether in Nevermind, Different Class or The Chronic, had been the rule of the day for most of the nineties, but people missed Prince and Michael Jackson; they wanted a little optimism and eccentricity. Rodney ‘Darkchild’ Jerkins was just nineteen when he produced Brandy and Monica’s R&B landmark ‘The Boy Is Mine’ (US no. 1, UK no. 2 ’97); the herky-jerky beat of ‘No Diggity’ was gone, there was no semblance of hip hop’s familiar 4/4. Jerkins pulled the rhythmic rug and it became apparent that the work of Jam and Lewis, Teddy Riley, and Babyface and L. A. Reid had all been a slow build to something as new and thrilling as jungle had been in Britain. And, being American, this new R&B had the glamour to score very heavily.
Since disco’s demise, most of R&B’s voices had been coastal, but its future was decidedly Southern. From Virginia, up stepped Tim ‘Timbaland’ Mosley, Missy Elliott and the Neptunes. The latter’s Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo had been discovered by the omnipresent Teddy Riley at a 1991 high-school talent contest, when Pharrell and Timbaland were playing together in a school band called Surrounded by Idiots. Pharrell’s grounding was not in the industry (like Puff Daddy) or in classic soul (like Whitney Houston). All of the Virginians had grown up with hip hop and rock and Motown on the radio, and they were bold enough to step out of their peer group and admit to listening to a group with a C86 heritage and a love of outmoded synthesizers – Pharrell’s favourite band was Anglo-French pop experimentalists Stereolab.
In the turnaround year of 1997 Timbaland produced Missy Elliott’s debut album Supa Dupa Fly. Like ‘The Boy Is Mine’, it performed rhythmic gymnastics, possibly drawing on drum and bass but adding a relaxed swagger and lyrical non sequiturs. Unlike the glamorous golden girls Brandy and Monica, Missy was definitely a woman – all of twenty-five, no need for hair extensions, and capable of taking on any men in the field. Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs, now calling himself Puff Daddy, had a UK and US number one in 1997 with a dismal eulogy to Tupac Shakur, ‘I’ll Be Missing You’, that sampled the Police’s stalker anthem ‘Every Breath You Take’; it couldn’t have thrown the lightness of touch on the Jerkins and Timbaland productions into sharper relief.5 The game was on, and auteur producers dared each other with outlandish hybrids, dry, salty beats and outré instrumentation. There was plenty of new talent to work with: Aaliyah had the sweetest voice; R. Kelly cribbed from doo wop and Sam Cooke, adding priapic self-belief; the chivalrous, much screamed-at Usher wore a diamond-encrusted wrist shackle because he was ‘a slave to the rhythm’;6 Outkast were a crackpot dandy duo, one of whom was a teetotal vegetarian who read Pushkin, while the other bred pit bulls in his spare time – you could pretty much tell this was the case when you heard their baby-mama saga ‘Miss Jackson’ (US no. 1, UK no. 2 ’00).
1999 belonged to Kevin ‘She’kspere’ Briggs, with TLC’s ‘No Scrubs’ (US no. 1, UK no. 3) and Destiny’s Child’s ‘Bills Bills Bills’ (US no. 1, UK no. 6), on which the chorus rhythm sounded like a cartoon cat burglar tiptoeing downstairs. 2000 brought champion pouter Kelis, with her multicoloured fright wig and ‘I hate you so much right now! Grrrrrrrr!’ roar on the Neptunes-produced ‘Caught Out There’ (UK no. 4, US no. 54). A year later Missy Elliott took things to a cosmically minimal level with ‘Get Ur Freak On’ (US no. 7, UK no. 4), a six-note riff on an Indian tumbi, with a hand drum not heard since the Shadows’ ‘Apache’; that was pretty much the only instrumentation. And in 2003 came former Destiny’s Child singer Beyoncé’s first solo megahit, ‘Crazy in Love’ (US and UK no. 1), a phenomenal party record, driven by continuous build-up and release via a Chi-Lites horn sample and a cheeky ‘uh oh uh oh’ hook. ‘Crazy in Love’ marked the point at which this super-modern R&B started to take on more straightforward pop traits – there’s that driving bassline on the chorus, straight out of northern soul, and a hint of Blondie in its glossy, retro-futurist structure. Six years on from ‘The Boy Is Mine’, R&B’s experimental bent needed a rest and, for once, a golden era went out with a bang rather than a descent into novelty. ‘“Crazy in Love” was one of those classic moments in pop culture that none of us expected,’ Beyoncé told Billboard. False modesty would have been entirely inappropriate.
Together these singers and producers recalled an older language: R&B before it became codified as soul. Bo Diddley’s rhythmic daring, Leiber and Stoller’s use of arcane instruments, Dee Clark’s falsetto. Of course, this blew any smart-arsed critic’s cosy theories about a millennial pop doomsday out of the water, but who cared? R&B’s sloth-like progress since disco had been continually hampered by conservatism and division. Belatedly, happily, it remembered that the interdependence of living musical forms is essential for great pop.
1 Early line-ups of the Time also included Madonna producer Jellybean and (when they were still called Flyte Tyme) soul singer Alexander O’Neal. They were the Byrds of eighties pop/soul.
2 Though it only ran for one series, The Cut managed to unearth Anastasia, arguably a bigger star than any talent-show discovery since.
3 The melismatic style had spun out of gospel, which had first impacted on the charts in the Jesus Freak era – in 1969 and 1970 – when every other record seemed to have a religious calm, as if to provide a reliable old crutch at the end of a turbulent decade. Specifically it can be traced to the Edwin Hawkins Singers’ extraordinary ‘Oh Happy Day’, a record the choir leader sold out of the back of his car until a DJ in Oakland picked up on it, a snowball was created, and it ended up a number-two hit in Britain. Whitney sang in church, almost certainly sang ‘Oh Happy Day’, and would have been familiar with its ebbs and flows, its dam-busting chorus (try working out any of the lyric on that section), its rivulets of headshaking emotion (‘Oh Lord, ohhhhh good God’). It had undeniable – even to a confirmed atheist – raw power.
4 There had been numerous hits from English football clubs before – the 1970 World Cup Squad even had a number one with ‘Back Home’ – but their musicality was a little basic. ‘One Moment in Time’ was the first record to mix patriotic balladry with the pomp and unnecessarily expensive feel of an opening ceremony. Two years later, New Order’s ‘World in Motion’ captured the vim of sport and added a singalong chorus for a far more satisfying result.
5 ‘I’ll Be Missing You’ was just one dirge at the top of the charts in September ’97. The Verve’s ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ called time on Britpop, while Elton John’s ‘Candle in the Wind 1997’ seemed to presage the end of the royal family.
6 Usher was taken from Atlanta to New York at the age of fourteen by his mentor Puff Daddy. ‘I’d be thinking, “Here I am, fifteen years old, out at the club on the dancefloor, wild and crazy at three o’clock in the morning, with everyone popping bottles of Moët and smoking weed, and women throwing themselves at me” … the next day my tutor would say “You’ve got rings round your eyes, you’ve been out with Puffy again”.’ His debut album flopped, though, and Puffy dumped him back in Atlanta, still no
t yet sixteen. His voice broke, he worked out, and he returned with the transatlantic number one ‘You Make Me Wanna’ in ’97.
