New Music Week

As a youngster, I had relatively unique musical tastes compared to my peers growing up in rural Iowa. Much of this was due to the powerful influence of Prince, Terrence Trent D'Arby and Michael Jackson. Out of the pretty diverse world of 80s pop music (can you imagine Culture Club having No. 1 hits today?), my attraction to these artists naturally led me to their influences -- Little Richard, Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke and James Brown -- which in turn, opened the doors to the entire world of black music.
This was not an easy door to open amid the rolling corn fields. There were no black radio stations in our market, the mall and its corporate music stores were 30 minutes away, and there was no internet or i-Tunes to help in the discovery process.
Instead, I had an older brother who went to college in Mississippi. He came back after his freshman year with a mixtape labeled "Funky Shit" that changed my life. It had all the latest jams, a mix of rap and R&B that I would later come to know as "New Jack Swing."
I gobbled it up, rented House Party from the one Blockbuster in a 90-mile radius, learned Kid 'n' Play's dance moves and bought a shimmery black and gold British Knights hat that I was afraid to wear in public.
I got into Bobby Brown, studied the liner notes inside his cassette, and saw that a man named Teddy Riley was responsible for all the best songs. His name kept popping up in the credits for all the music I liked then, and then I discovered Riley's own group, Guy.
After moving to Indiana, my love for this music continued into the early years of high school with all the New Edition solo acts, especially Bell Biv DeVoe and Ralph Tresvant, and later Boyz II Men and Jodeci.
Cabbage Patch and Running Man 20 years into the future, my brother's "Funky Shit" tape is gone, but Hip-O records has just released a new compilation, "New Jack Swing: Gold," a collection of some my long-forgotten jams.
It was fun to listen to the first couple of times, and I got a little teary-eyed when my little Sofia started bobbing her head to the extended version of Keith Sweat's "I Want Her," but then I was struck by just how much these songs sound the same. Mr. Riley found his hit-making groove and stuck with it for a period of a couple of years. You can't blame him for that, but it gets stretched a little thin over a two disc compilation. He did switch it up in the mid-1990s with his new group, Blackstreet, which thankfully gave the world "No Diggity" before disbanding.
The problem with the "Gold" collection is that it's song selection misses the mark here and there. The great Tony Toni Tone song "Feels Good" is out of place here. I would have replaced it with Redhead Kingpin's "Do the Right Thing." Wouldn't you?