Hip Hop Appreciate 104: Missteps of the Early 1990's
New Jack Swing
It always strikes me as odd that so few analyses of a given period or style of art include the failures and mistakes along with the canonical greats. A lot can be learned by observing what didn't work, if only to identify the deleterious thought processes that led to the failures so future artists don't stumble in the exact same way. This makes me think of a particular day in elementary school when we were learning about Thomas Edison and the invention of the lightbulb. I found the rejected filaments much more fascinating than the one that ultimately worked. So, today we'll be looking at some Hip Hop acts and styles that didn't work out very well and have essentially disappeared. Think of them as the bulb filaments made from hair and weak metals.
Specifically, I want to focus on the many well-meaning but still ill-fitting Hip Hop projects of the early 1990's. This was a fertile period for the genre when it was positively florid with variety. While Gangsta proved to be the most influential to future endeavors, there were many other styles that were arguably more popular at the time.
Take, for instance, New Jack Swing. That stuff was fairly ubiquitous between 1990-1995. As a style, it's all bright colors, middling electronic sounds and harmonies. Every time I hear it, no matter which artist it is, I can't help but associate it with the gratingly family-friendly pop culture of the era. It's the musical equivalent of Family Matters, the kind of thing major studio producers stapled to kid's movies like The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
What's really amazing about New Jack Swing is that something with so many subversive ingredients somehow resulted in music that seemed designed for selling out. The style aspires to fuse R&B, Rap and electronic music into a single force. In theory, New Jack Swing should have been the most innovative music on the planet. What actually happened was the equivalent of taking parts from a solar powered car, a fighter jet and a Harley-Davidson, then combining them to make a Segway.
On a slightly more respectable but significantly less successful note, there was also a push in the early 90's to bring Hip Hop and Jazz together. The most famous attempt came from Digable Planets. I've linked to their one-hit-wonder of a song not out of ignorance for the remainder of their work, but because most of their stuff sounds exactly the same and this is just the best example of their limited range. "Rebirth of Slick" is an excellent track and it's basically a proof-of-concept for Rap/Jazz, but Digable Planets never really did anything else with the seemingly fertile idea. Neneh Cherry also occasionally dabbled in this style, with similarly limited results.
I suppose what we can gather from these missteps of early 90's Hip Hop is that it takes more than a good idea to make good art. New Jack Swing certainly proves that Hip Hop is not impervious to losing its soul to mass appeal just like any kind of music. Anything that produces both MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice ought be considered for a complete recall. The truly sad part of all this is that the artistic bankruptcy of these styles resulted in a narrowing of Hip Hop in the coming decade. Only recently have there been some truly good experiments in the art. These days, early 90's Pop-Hop is little more than an anachronistic punchline.
