Selection Genre: R&B
Ten tracks that made new jack swing
A screenwriter handed the genre its name, and the swing came from a hand: Teddy Riley didn't program his drums, he played them straight down with the quantise off. Ten records in release order, and in five years the sound travels from a bathroom used as a reverb chamber to an Epic album.
None of the musicians picked the name. A screenwriter handed it over. He gave it to a kid from Harlem while he was working on a film called New Jack City, and the phrase stuck to a whole decade of records.
Teddy Riley tells it plainly: you’re the new kid who swings it, so you’re the new jack swing.
I never program. I played it straight down. I played everything straight down.
Here’s the part that usually falls out of the story. That lurching hi-hat isn’t a setting on a box. It’s a hand on top of a drum machine with the quantise switched off, because the sequencer he eventually got wouldn’t give him the swing he wanted and he’d sooner do it by hand.
Ten records in release order, 1987 to 1991, five years from end to end.
1987, before the words existed
Keith Sweat, I Want Her. It sits on Make It Last Forever, out on Vintertainment and Elektra. Riley says the beat took him a day.
He also says that while he was making it he had no idea what he was doing, which is not false modesty so much as an accurate description of how a genre starts.
Kool Moe Dee, How Ya Like Me Now. Autumn 1987, on Jive, weeks away from the other one. Two different markets, though, because one is a rap record and the other is bedroom R&B.
1988, the thirteen months that settle it
Al B. Sure!, Nite and Day. Warner Bros., 3 May. The catalogue number reads W2 25662.
Guy, Groove Me. Uptown and MCA, MCAD-42176, 13 June. Riley joined the group because the alternative was Aaron Hall going solo without him. The vocals came off a twelve-track, in a place where the bathroom was doing the work of an echo chamber.
Bobby Brown, My Prerogative. MCA, MCA-42185, 20 June, seven days after the Guy album and with the same man behind it.
Brown walked out of the studio, by Riley’s account, because he didn’t want to sing it the way they were asking him to, and it was the label that sent him back in with the line that there would be no album otherwise.
1989, the name goes on the sleeve
Wreckx-n-Effect, New Jack Swing. Motown, MOTD-6281, a track named after a genre that was under two years old at the time.
Listen while you read
Heavy D & The Boyz, We Got Our Own Thang. From Big Tyme, Uptown and MCA, MCA-42302. Second time Uptown turns up here. It won’t be the last.
1990 and 1991, when they stop needing him
Bell Biv DeVoe, Poison. MCA, 27 March 1990, and we had it filed in our heads as faster than it actually is.
Jodeci, Forever My Lady. Uptown and MCA, MCAD-10198, 28 May 1991. That’s the third record here carrying the imprint, and by this point Uptown is simply the address where this music gets made, which is a different thing from a producer having a sound.
Michael Jackson, Remember the Time. From Dangerous, Epic, EK 45400, 26 November 1991. Riley has half of that album. He also says he sat in every marketing meeting and chose the sleeve.
What’s left to hear
Those sixteenth-note triplet hi-hats are the signature, and they sound crooked because a person put them there.
After this the rhythm could be quantised. Everybody quantised it. What you get across these ten records is the version with the hand still in it.