Cover of NEW JACK SWING, volume 24 of Origin Story

Origin Story  ·  Volume 24

NEW JACK SWING

How the Drum Machine Learned to Swing, and Who Got Paid When It Did, 1987–1999

Where it sits on the century

19151987–19992030
$14.99Paperback
about 122 pages

$13.49 each from three copies, $11.49 from sixteen, and $299.00 for all thirty-one with every ebook and audiobook included. Postage is free on every order over $79.

This is the complete story of new jack swing and nineties R&B in about three hours: the Harlem church prodigy who put hip-hop’s hardest drums under gospel-trained voices; the two Minneapolis sidemen, fired by Prince after a snowstorm, who built a studio the stars had to travel to; the journalist who named the thing; and the Boston talent-show promoter whose five teenagers seeded half the era — then were handed a tour cheque, by their own telling, for a dollar eighty-seven.

It takes the singing as seriously as the drums: melisma as architecture, the stacked background as a one-person choir, the ad-lib as composition — the church’s vocal technology, explained for readers who cannot read a note.

And it takes the money seriously, because the people in it learned to. The producer as the brand and the act as interchangeable. Fees against points, and why the producer collected from record one while the star stayed unrecouped. The publishing arithmetic that let the writer-producers out-earn the voices on their own hits. The label built around one production team. And the era’s two public bankruptcies — a group that sold ten million albums and a diva who moved tens of millions of records — explained with the participants’ own numbers, because they explained it themselves, on camera, and were not believed.

It ends in 1999, when the trade chart that had carried the genre’s name since the race-records era quietly changed its masthead, and the sound stopped being a genre — because it had won so completely that it became the water everything else swam in.

Contains no song lyrics. Not one line. That is a deliberate rule, explained on the first page, and what replaces it is a description of what these records actually sound like — the off-beat landing thirty milliseconds late, the ratcheting snare fill, the vamp where the lead voice lifts off.

Format
Paperback
Trim
5.5 × 8.5 in
Pages
about 122
Chapters
28 in five movements
Period
1987–1999
Audiobook
2h 55m

The playlist

ORIGIN STORY: New Jack Swing — public, and sequenced to the order the records appear in Movement Three. The book describes them; the playlist plays them.

Volume 19
HIP-HOPthe drum machine’s first conquest, and the other half of this book’s merger→Volume 27
TEEN POPthis book’s production machine, rebuilt in Stockholm and pointed at the mall→Volume 31
GLOBAL POPthe vocal grammar and the idol systems of this era, gone worldwide→

Free to read  ·  the opening

How volume 24 starts.

Origin Story · Volume 24 · NEW JACK SWINGIntroduction

Thirty Milliseconds

This volume of this series turns on the smallest unit of anything in it: a delay of roughly thirty milliseconds, applied to every second sixteenth-note of a programmed drum pattern, by a control most listeners have never heard of.

Thirty milliseconds is less time than it takes to blink. It is close to the threshold at which the ear stops hearing two sounds as separate events at all. Nobody has ever danced to a record and thought the word milliseconds. And yet that delay (settable, repeatable, printed on a screen as a percentage) is the difference between the way American pop rhythm felt before 1987 and the way it has felt more or less ever since. This book will show you the arithmetic, because the arithmetic is genuinely simple, and because once you can see it, a decade of records stops being a mood and becomes a mechanism.

Here is the situation the mechanism arrived into. By 1986, Black American popular music was running as two separate systems that shared an audience and did not share a method. One system was hip-hop, whose story the volume on it has already told: drum machines and samplers, records built by programmers, a music that had spent the decade getting harder, drier and prouder of its machinery. The other was rhythm and blues (the phrase the industry still used for the whole tradition this series has been following since the jump-blues volume) which remained, at its commercial heart, a singer’s music: gospel-schooled voices, songs, ballads, romance, craft learned in church lofts and school choirs. The two systems played in the same houses, often to the same teenagers, frequently within the same family. On record they barely touched. A rap record with real singing on it was a novelty. An R&B record with hard machine drums under it sounded, to most producers of the day, like a mistake, because the machine could not do the one thing the singers’ tradition regarded as non-negotiable. It could not swing.

Except that it could. The capacity had been sitting on the front panel, under various names (shuffle, swing, swing quantise) since 1980, designed into the first serious drum machine by an engineer in California, and this series flagged it two volumes ago as the ancestor of everything in this one. What happened in the late eighties is that a small number of very young Black producers (a teenager out of the churches of Harlem first among them, two fired sidemen in Minneapolis in parallel) stopped treating that control as a correction and started treating it as the instrument. Turned up, the grid limps. Turned up further, it struts. Set precisely, and layered with the hardest drum sounds hip-hop had taught a machine to make, it produces a rhythm no human drummer ever quite played: perfectly repeating, mechanically confident, and swinging, a beat with a machine’s authority and a congregation’s gait. Put a trained voice on top of that and the two systems stopped being two systems.

The introduction runs on for another 8 paragraphs, and then the book starts. 28 chapters · about 122 pages · $14.99

Contents

28 chapters, five movements.

Every volume in the series runs the same five, in this order. What each movement is for.

01The Room4 chapters
  1. 1The Choir and the Block Party
  2. 2Fired in a Snowstorm
  3. 3The Man Who Named It
  4. 4The Assembly Lines
02The Machine6 chapters
  1. 5The Grid
  2. 6The Knob That Loosens the Grid
  3. 7The Fingerprint
  4. 8The Voice Against the Grid
  5. 9A Field Guide to the Voices
  6. 10Why the Records Sound Like That
03The Records7 chapters
  1. 111986–1988. The Beat Learns to Swing
  2. 121989–1991. Everybody Swings
  3. 131992–1995. The Voice Takes the Wheel
  4. 14The Merger Records
  5. 151996–1999. The Pocket Moves
  6. 16The Records the Canon Dropped
  7. 17Three Records That Failed
04The Money6 chapters
  1. 18The Fee and the Points
  2. 19Who Owned the Song
  3. 20The Screen and the Dial
  4. 21The Group’s Arithmetic
  5. 22The Label Around a Production Team
  6. 23What These Records Earn Now
05The Ending5 chapters
  1. 241999. The Chart Stops Pretending
  2. 25The Rebellion Against the Grid
  3. 26What It Became
  4. 27What the Story Leaves Out
  5. 28The Knob Is Still There

Free to read  ·  reference

NEW JACK SWING: the dates.

The book’s own timeline, in full and free to quote. 20 entries, 1987–1999. Where a date is contested the book says so at the point it appears; these are the ones that are not in serious dispute. All thirty-one timelines on one page.

1980
  • The Linn LM-1 ships with its shuffle control, swing quantise’s ancestor, per the synth-pop volume. Black Entertainment Television founded.
1982
  • Maurice Starr auditions five Roxbury teenagers at his Hollywood Talent Night showcase in Boston. New Edition is formed.
1983
  • Candy Girl tops the R&B chart and reaches number one in Britain. A snowstorm strands Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis at an S.O.S. Band session; they miss a Time show and are dismissed. Their production of Just Be Good to Me charts the same year.
1985
  • Loose Ends become the first British act to top the American R&B chart. December. New Edition vote Bobby Brown out of the group.
1986
  • February, Control is released; five of its singles will reach the American top ten. Andre Harrell founds Uptown Records. Teddy Riley’s early production credits appear on Harlem rap records.
1987
  • The E-mu SP-1200 ships. Autumn. Barry Michael Cooper’s Village Voice writing on Riley coins the phrase new jack swing. November. Keith Sweat’s Make It Last Forever, with I Want Her, built by Riley.
1988
  • The Akai MPC60, designed with Roger Linn, ships with swing quantise behind a numeric display. June, Guy and Bobby Brown’s Don’t Be Cruel released within weeks of each other. Take 6’s unaccompanied debut becomes the era’s harmony textbook.
1989
  • LaFace Records founded in Atlanta by L.A. Reid and Babyface in a joint venture with Arista. 2300 Jackson Street fails; the Jacksons’ Epic era ends. New Kids on the Block, Starr’s white replica of New Edition, become the highest-grossing act in America. September, Rhythm Nation 1814. Soul II Soul’s London swing reaches the American top five.
1990
  • March. Bell Biv DeVoe’s Poison, carrying the group’s printed hip-hop-smoothed-out manifesto. June. Mariah Carey’s debut single Vision of Love resets the melisma benchmark.
1991
  • Jodeci’s Forever My Lady. Boyz II Men’s Motownphilly and Cooleyhighharmony. Perspective Records launches with Sounds of Blackness. November. Dangerous, with Riley, twenty-four, producing the biggest star alive. 30 November. The Hot 100 converts to scanned sales and monitored airplay; the sibling volume’s machine.
1992
  • En Vogue’s Funky Divas. July, Mary J. Blige’s What’s the 411? names hip-hop soul. Summer, End of the Road begins thirteen weeks at number one, breaking a record standing since 1956. November, The Bodyguard soundtrack; I Will Always Love You begins fourteen weeks, its publishing flowing to Dolly Parton. Bobby Brown’s Bobby sells a fraction of its predecessor.
1993
  • Sean Combs is fired from Uptown and founds Bad Boy in a joint venture with Arista. May, janet., against a Virgin contract briefly the largest ever signed. SWV’s Weak at number one. Toni Braxton’s debut. Zhané’s Pronounced Jah-Nay.
1994
  • June. Lisa Lopes pleads guilty to arson after the fire at Andre Rison’s house; probation and a fine. August. R. Kelly, twenty-seven, marries the fifteen-year-old Aaliyah with falsified documents; Vibe later publishes the certificate; the marriage is annulled. Autumn. Boyz II Men’s II: I’ll Make Love to You holds number one for fourteen weeks and is succeeded there by the group’s own On Bended Knee, Babyface handing the top spot to Jam and Lewis, the act unchanged. November, CrazySexyCool.
1995
  • July. TLC file for bankruptcy, listing debts of about three and a half million dollars, while CrazySexyCool sells towards its eventual ten million American copies; Waterfalls holds number one for seven weeks. D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar opens the rebellion. Montell Jordan’s This Is How We Do It gives Def Jam its first R&B number one. Method Man and Mary J. Blige’s duet weds the two systems over a Motown copyright. Andre Harrell is named chief executive of Motown. December, One Sweet Day begins sixteen weeks at number one.
1996
  • No Diggity reaches number one; Riley’s second act. August. Aaliyah’s One in a Million, built by Timbaland and Missy Elliott, moves the pocket beyond the swing knob. New Edition’s Home Again reunion tops the chart; the tour collapses. Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite.
1997
  • February (Erykah Badu’s Baduizm. July. Missy Elliott’s Supa Dupa Fly: the era’s apparatus owned end to end by a woman. September. Usher’s My Way, produced by Jermaine Dupri. The Backstreet Boys’ American debut carries the Cheiron studio’s Stockholm-built R&B grammar; Jive, a Zomba company, releases it.
1998
  • January. Toni Braxton files for bankruptcy and itemises the arithmetic on national television. The Boy Is Mine holds number one for thirteen weeks; Rodney Jerkins’s signature. August. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.
1999
  • February. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill wins Album of the Year, the first hip-hop album to do so, among five Grammys in one night. No Scrubs and Bills, Bills, Bills, written with Kandi Burruss and Tameka Cottle, produced by She’kspere, hold number one in succession, the era’s grammar; the Jive teen-pop records built on the same grammar surround them. December. Billboard retitles its R&B singles chart to carry both nouns: R&B/Hip-Hop. The wall’s masthead comes down.
2000
  • January, Voodoo, past this book’s boundary on purpose: the machine’s feel, returned to human hands, played later than any knob can reach.
2002
  • Clive Calder’s option obliges his major-label partner to buy Zomba outright, at roughly two point seven billion dollars, the biggest cheque in this book, written to the man who owned the paper.

Free to read  ·  where it comes from

The sources.

This series is written from published material and its byline claims method rather than credentials, so the sources are listed. They are given as books and categories of material rather than as page citations; where a claim in the text is contested, the text says so at the point of the claim.

The business, and the era’s institutional history. Dan Charnas, The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop, the fullest account of the executive class this book shares with the hip-hop volumes: Uptown, the joint-venture economics, the rise of Sean Combs, the Zomba operation. Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm & Blues, published in 1988, at this book’s opening, and therefore both source and artefact: a participant-critic’s argument about crossover, ownership and the fate of the R&B infrastructure, written before the era had happened, whose worries the era then tested. John Seabrook, The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory, the standard account of the Cheiron studio, Clive Calder’s Zomba and the teen-pop hand-off in this book’s ending. Fredric Dannen, Hit Men, the independent radio promotion system, its scandals and its persistence. Donald Passman, All You Need to Know About the Music Business, the clearest general explanation of the contract machinery in Movement Four: producer fees and points, record-one royalties, controlled composition clauses, video recoupment. The specific percentages and fee ranges in this book are illustrative of standard period practice as those sources and the trade press describe it; almost no individual contract from the era is public, and the text flags every figure that rests on participant testimony rather than documents.

The machine. Dan Charnas, Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm, indispensable for this book’s rhythmic framework: straight time, swing time, and the third feel this book’s rebellion chapter describes, explained with a scholar’s precision. Roger Linn’s extended technical interviews, in Attack Magazine and elsewhere, are the designer’s own account of swing quantise (the delay applied to even sixteenth-notes) and of the mythology around it. The Red Bull Music Academy lecture archive holds long-form public interviews with several of this book’s principals, including Teddy Riley and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, in which the working methods of Movements One and Two are described first-hand.

Memoirs and participant accounts, all to be read as interested tellings: L.A. Reid, Sing to Me; Mariah Carey, The Meaning of Mariah Carey; Bobby Brown, Every Little Step; Questlove, Mo’ Meta Blues and his subsequent published writing on the Voodoo sessions and J Dilla, from which this book’s account of relearned drumming is drawn. The accounts of the New Edition royalty cheque, the Jodeci audition, the Mary J. Blige mall tape and the Flyte Tyme firing are the participants’ own oft-repeated tellings, and the text labels them as such at every appearance.

The period press. Billboard, for chart positions, the November 1991 conversion of the Hot 100 to scanned sales and monitored airplay, and the December 1999 retitling of the R&B chart; Vibe, founded 1992–93 and the culture’s magazine of record for the era’s second half, including its 1994 publication of the marriage certificate discussed in the chapter on what the story leaves out; the Village Voice, where Barry Michael Cooper’s writing named the genre; and the general run of Rolling Stone, Spin, The Source and the trade press for contemporaneous reporting of deals, budgets and disputes.

On R. Kelly. Jim DeRogatis, Soulless: The Case Against R. Kelly (the journalist who received the first tip in 2000 and kept the record for two decades) together with the public records of the 2008 state trial and acquittal, the 2021 federal convictions in New York for racketeering and sex trafficking, the 2022 federal convictions in Chicago, and the sentences imposed in 2022 and 2023. The passage in this book states what courts found and what the published record documents, and nothing else.

Documentary and screen sources, used with the caution owed to authorised and dramatised accounts: the VH1 Behind the Music episodes on several of this book’s acts, the TLC and New Edition biographical films (dramatisations, cross-checked against interviews), and the filmed Grammy and news footage in which the era’s bankrupt stars explained their arithmetic.

Where figures are disputed (the size of the era’s producer fees; the New Edition tour cheque; the exact terms of the Janet Jackson Virgin contract and the TLC and Toni Braxton settlements; worldwide sales of Dangerous; Riley’s account of his uncredited 1985 work) the text says so rather than choosing. Those disagreements are not gaps in the record. They are the record.

What this book does not do

One paragraph of terms, because this book’s method is a bit unusual and the method is the point.

This book quotes no song lyrics. Not one line, not one phrase, not the famous bit. That is a deliberate rule and it is absolute, and song lyrics are owned, licensing them is negotiated song by song and publisher by publisher, and there is no safe word count: the copyright office says so in as many words. A book that quotes a little is a book making a legal judgement it cannot check. So this one quotes none, and instead does the harder and more interesting thing, which is to tell you what a record actually sounds like and what its words are about. In this volume the rule costs less than you might fear, because the era’s most consequential sentence was never sung. It was printed in small type under a song title, and it began with the words produced by.

It reproduces no album art and no photographs. There is nothing to look at here but words and one flat poster on the cover.

And it cannot play you a record, which is the real limitation, and there is no point pretending otherwise. What it can do is point. There is a playlist for this book, on the same app you may well be reading or listening on, sequenced to the order the records appear in these pages. It is called ORIGIN STORY: New Jack Swing. Search for it by name. Everything described in Movement Three is on it, in order, and the book is substantially better with it running.

Almost nothing is lost by not quoting these records, and a great deal is gained by explaining them, because the thing that made this music was a setting on a drum machine that no history of the period has ever described in plain language. This one does, as part of the whole story, start to finish, in about three hours. Where the sound came from, what one setting on a drum machine actually does and why it mattered this much, which records carried it, who got paid (and in this volume more than most, who conspicuously did not) and how it ended, which was not with a death but with a victory so complete the name stopped meaning anything.

Where the record is contested, this book says so. Where it does not know, it says that too. Sources are listed at the back.

Shelved under

MUSIC / History & Criticism  ·  MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Soul & R 'n B  ·  MUSIC / Business Aspects

Identifiers

Ebook ISBN
979-8-90623-915-0
Audiobook ISBN
979-8-90623-916-7
Paperback ISBN
not yet issued

Buy it

Paperback, $14.99, posted direct. Every ebook and audiobook comes free with the complete set.

Questions

About this volume.

What is Origin Story volume 24 about?

How the Drum Machine Learned to Swing, and Who Got Paid When It Did, 1987–1999. A drum machine plays perfectly straight time: every note on a grid, every bar identical to the last, forever. One setting changes that. It is called swing quantise, and it delays every second sixteenth-note by a percentage you choose — about thirty milliseconds, at the tempos in this book. Set it right and the grid stops marching and starts to strut. That knob is why the biggest American records of 1987 to 1999 feel the way they do, and this is the story of the young Black producers who turned it into a sound, the sound into a brand, and the brand into an empire.

What years does NEW JACK SWING cover?

1987–1999. The volume is numbered 24 because that is where the genre sits in the chronology of the music, not the order the books were written in — the first three written were volumes 17, 19 and 21.

What made NEW JACK SWING possible?

The swing quantise. Movement Two of every volume is about the technology that made the genre possible and would not have ten years earlier.

Are there song lyrics in it?

None. Not one line, in this volume or in any of the thirty-one. Lyrics are copyrighted expression, licensing is negotiated song by song and publisher by publisher, and there is no safe quantity — so the rule is zero, and a program checks the manuscript, the EPUB and the narration script against it before the volume ships. What replaces them is a description of what the record actually sounds like, what it cost, and who was paid.

How long is it?

About 29,000 words: 28 chapters across five movements, roughly 120 minutes’ reading, 122 pages in the paperback. The audiobook runs 2h 55m.

What is in the back of the book?

A dated timeline of 20 entries, a source list, and a note on what the volume does not do. All three are reproduced free on this page.

Can I buy NEW JACK SWING in print?

Yes, here. It is a 5.5 × 8.5 in paperback, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, about 122 pages, and it never goes out of print.