The New New Jack Swing
A handful of new albums gives one woman hope for the resurgence of new jack swing ballads.
One of my most formative musical memories is hearing the quivering, glossy mewls of Al B. Sure for the first time. It was 1988, not long after the New York R&B icon released his debut album, In Effect Mode, and a friend had nicked the cassette from her older sister and passed it along to 11-year-old me. Even as someone who was raised on Janet Jackson’s immersive keyboards and vocal intimacy, I was not ready for the full experience of Al B. Sure’s “Oooh This Love Is So,” where his molasses harmonies were both distant and immediate, as if he were an apparition cooing a subconscious narrative into the ether. I’d never heard a song produced in that way, and the elusive atmosphere permeated the entire album, signaling a shift towards new jack swing—the kicky, hip-hop-inspired R&B offshoot that producers like Teddy Riley and Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis ushered into the 1990s.
These were my foundations for R&B, and while I’m not exactly catholic about new jack swing cowbell and loverboy vocals, the last few years have felt especially void of the work-hard sentiment and gooey synths that were my first love. So much of this relative absence goes back to the Drakeification of male R&B, in which loose crooning dovetailed with relational toxicity all the way up to the rise of creepy, insular online misogyny (even if the man himself claimed reverence for new jack swing). But with the lovelorn king’s precipitous fall thanks to Kendrick Lamar’s 2024 national anthem “Not Like Us,” I’ve been hearing the return of true loverboy aesthetics, whether open-hearted and devotional or game-spitting with real earnesty, in some of my favorite recent albums. These records inspired me to revisit the era of Guy’s “Piece of My Love” (1988), Bobby Brown’s “Roni” (1988), Ralph Tresvant’s “Sensitivity” (1990), and Tevin Campbell’s “Can We Talk” (1993): all-time great love songs, in which the subjects are those being romanced, rather than the vocalists’ own narcissistic projections. And this new era of new jack swing made me wonder: Is the 3 a.m. booty call giving way to another era of MAKING LOVE—even, perhaps, one with the devotion and ferocity of Johnny Gill or Babyface?
