Don't Ever Wonder: Why The Nineties Deserves Music's Classic Crown by Sheldon Taylor

                                                           

"Feeling your love/like a love I used to know/long ago"

---Deja Vu (1979)

 

I miss the Nineties. Music was so much better then. It was the best era. There was a time I cringed inside whenever I heard that statement or anything remotely to it. Don't get me wrong. So much fantastic music came out of that decade but in my eyes the fawning and fervent genuflection was a bit premature. Blasphemous. I know. Blame it on the purist in me.

 

 I was born in '68, which technically means the Nineties were my era. I also have a soft spot for music from soul's legendary period landing roughly between 1964-1975.  As elementary school kids in '76, '77 and '78, The Jacksons' Enjoy Yourself.  Heatwave's Groove Line and Boogie Nights. Parliament's Flash Light and Aqua Boogie were on our radar.

 

 Stevie Wonder's Sir Duke from 1976's Songs In The Key of Life wasn't just background music from record collections of older siblings or hip parents,  Stevie's pubescent reflections ('lookin' back on when I/was a little nappy-headed little boy/and my only worry/was for Christmas/what would be my toy") doubled as the soundtrack of my adolescence.   

 

My classmate Vernon didn't draw cartoon characters. He sketched pictures of Eddie Kendrick albums. Across open windows my next-door neighbor PJ and I traded verses from Elton John's Benny and the Jets and the O'Jays' Use Ta Be My Girl. Taking my show on the road (school!), I added Rubberband Man and the Sylvers' Hot Line to my repertoire.

 

While laying in bed, Paul McCartney's Let'Em 'In erupted from my AM radio speakers. I found a crayon and "wrote out" Paul's vocal melody on a brown paper bag. It was my first "arrangement." I was all of seven (Quincy Jones beat that!). 

 

While making their rounds on the early 70s TV circuit, the Jackson Five, ages 11 to 19---ran down their favorite acts---Sly and The Family Stone. The Beatles. the Delfonics. Three Dog Night. Marvin Gaye: Not surprising for a group who conquered talent shows crooning the Temptations' My Girl , secured a deal with a rendition of the Isley Brothers' Its Your Thing and recorded albums were sprinkled with soul, pop and rock covers.

 

 

 

Cue up Marvin Gaye's 1972 live performance of What's Going On from lost concert film Save The Children on You Tube. Pan the audience and you'll see ecstatic children in the crowd. An audio clip of Gaye's live version of Distant Lover recorded at the Oakland-Alameda Coliseum inspired a touching post confirming adult R&B wasn't lost on the young:

 

"My little sister begged me to take her to see this concert, she was 12 & for her 13th birthday this concert was all she wanted. We had to do this in a way where our mother wouldn't find out, but we did it and while Marvin Gaye performed this song I thought my little sister was going to pass out from so much joy & emotion. I had to pick her up & sit her on my shoulders so she could see. It was awesome to do this with her! Sadly that same year she passed away. When I hear this song I can't help but cry because in that cheering crazy crowd is her happy voice! I miss her so much!"

 

 

  

 In 1973's Wattstax, a fifty-six year old Rufus Thomas ("the world's oldest teenager") rocks a crowd of over 100,000. As he launches into  Funky Chicken, tiny tots turn up alongside grown-ups. In an interview, Janet Jackson recalls being an eleven-year old mesmerized by a Teddy Pendergrass album cover. As Earth Wind and Fire's late 70s/early 80s hits  September and Let's Groove attracted young listeners, group leader Maurice White was closing in on forty.

 

 

 

                                                                                                                                                                     

My ears were also cocked in the direction of a post-soul decade masterfully documented in writer Nelson George's twin literary pillars The Death of R&B and Post-Soul Nation: The Explosive, Contradictory, Triumphant and Tragic 1980s Experienced By African Americans (previously known as Blacks and Before That Negroes).

 

It was the era of R&B---Reagan and Bush. Coming down from its lofty high of 70s sophisticated soul, 80s black music splintered into various stylistic factions. Rap music was closing in fast. New Edition was around but it was still pretty much an adult affair. Kashif's synthesized slick, Luther and Freddie's debonair air and Anita's cool ruled. The Great Black Pop Takeover was in full effect. Showtime At The Apollo was the scene of many Whitney and Jennifer Holiday sightings as young singers tried on Greatest Love of All and And I'm Telling You I'm Not Going for size.

 

Around '87, newly acquired disposable income arrived. With no bills or financial responsibilities, I splurged on books, records and tapes. In between soaking up hip hop's emerging golden era, me and my crew dissected the finer points of The OJays' live version of Wildflower unearthed from a used copy of their 1977 Collector's Item compilation album. Dusting off memories from the corner of my mind, I tracked down music with the relentless zeal of a bounty hunter. Discovery of rap samples made me dig deeper. CD reissues with detailed liner notes were like manna from heaven. 

 

Soon generational cracks were forming.  Older artists that dominated the decade were fading. As younger acts trickled in,  savvy ones like Jody Watley reinvented themselves. Traces of the Saturday Morning Soundtracks I was swaddled in remained. Throaty singers like Aaron Hall became our Stevie Wonder, Charlie Wilson and Donny Hathaway. Steve Arrington's nasal tone and fluid grooves (Just A Touch of Love, Watching You) lived on in Keith Sweat's I Want Her.

 

I detected Off The Wall's slick liberated swagger in Bobby Brown's Don't Be Cruel. Al B. Sure's In Effect Mode retooled shoulder-pad clad champagne-and-roses balladry. Guy resurrected funk's freewheeling vibe that that had been MIA. From barnstorming rap tours sprang new fans and future stars spawning a nascent cottage industry critical to hip hop's staying power.

 

If the late eighties offered a peek of what was to come. The nineties offered a panoramic view of a world where music, visual and print media worlds intersected. Post-Soul Train and Don Cornelius, BET's Donnie Simpson, Sherry Carter, Madelyn Woods, Rachel, Chris Thomas, Joe Clair and others emerged as new stewards of Black music. 24-7, Midnight Love, Planet Groove, Rap City, Video Soul and Carribbean Rhythms kept the hottest music videos in rotation.   

 

 Great literary minds from Vibe, The Source, XXL and Rap Pages penned seminal pieces documenting the exploits and power moves of  Gen-Xer music executives, producers and songwriters who injected the industry with new youthful vigor. 

 

After Soundscan gentrified the Hot 100, R&B/hip hop masterworks ran up charts cementing the power of Black music's financial bottom line. The era also broke from 80's fixation with the Black solo act. There were groups in every configuration: Jodeci, Gang Starr, Black Moon, Pete Rock and CL Smooth, Zhane, Groove Theory and Vertical Hold. 

 

For a music junkie like me, watching the parade go buy was a heady time. New Jack Swing's hyperactivity gave way to hip hop soul's head-nod litmus and neo-soul's simmer. Early/mid nineties rap's screw-faced scowl gave way to a celebratory spirit and unprecedented affluence  in hip-hop. Records sales climbed into the stratosphere. As these industry triumphs carried over into the new millennium, BET would coin a name for these watershed moments: black star power.

 

Fast forward to 2021: Previous Black music eras have passed through our portal of reflective coronation. Elevated and celebrated. Explored and reexamined. Now its the 90s that have moved front and center. During the pandemic, the reemergence, reunion and occasional sightings of the decade's icons have soothed our ravaged peace. 

 

 Recent milestones confirmed classic soul's undisputed endurance: the eternal genius Steve Wonder turned 71. Marvin Gaye's iconic What's Goin' On album turned 50. Earth Wind and Fire and The Isley Brothers shut down Verzus. So what places 90s Black music in the pantheon of greatness? Do we hold it to a revisionist standard or do we let it breathe?

 

 Donny Hathaway and Harlem scribe Barry Michael Cooper offered up similar reflections of music's scope. Hathaway saw it in "totality". Cooper visualized it as "a seamless transition; the seamless continuum, eternity; living with the beat forever." Nineties music rests comfortably between the pillars of Hathaway's totality and Cooper's seamless continuum. 

 

Listen close. Keith Sweat and Athena Cage's Nobody conjures up images of Rick and Teena's torrid chemistry on Fire and Desire. Will Downing's keen curation of the classics carries on Luther's tradition. D'Angelo's sinister Shit, Damn, Mother%*cker matches Prince's neurotic narrative on Sign O' The Times  line for ominous line. EnVogue's unified harmony would have been right at home on the hook from Chic's Good Times. Organized Noise, Cash Money and No Limit's earthy southern grit reincarnates the power moves of proto-Dirty South imprints like Stax and Hi Records. 

 

Bad Boy exuberant party-hearty vibe channels the energy of great Black dance music from days gone by. Mint Condition bottled up funk bands' flair. Lauryn Hill's nimble historic recall and Faith Evans' sweet-and-swagger evoke Teena Marie. Mary J. Blige's ecstacy, passion and pain recalls Queen Aretha's own. Rakim and Gil-Scot Heron are baritone clones.

 

Nineties Black music's crowning achievement is its ability to pull elements from the past and plant seeds for the future. Its autonomy, entrepreneurial spirit, youthful eclectic artistry and energy lives on in today's version of Black Star Power.