and pumped more than 50 singles into the Top 25 on the Billboard R&B chart.ĭespite these weighty achievements, the group has largely been passed over by the canonizers, who still favor pre-hop-hop R&B. “Fortunately it worked.” This is a ferocious understatement: as a group and across the members’ various solo and spin-off projects – Brown, Gill, Tresvant, and Bell, Bivins and DeVoe’s famed Bell Biv DeVoe outfit have all released platinum-certified albums – the extended New Edition family has sold more than 25 million units in the U.S. “When New Edition came out, we were the first generation of hip-hop we mixed it with R&B singing,” Brown tells Rolling Stone in advance of The New Edition Story, a three-part biopic that airs on BET starting Tuesday. The Best Audiophile Turntables for Your Home Audio System And nearly every notable R&B singer to emerge after New Edition has followed their cross-pollinating example. Because of their aesthetic fluidity, this quintet from Roxbury, Massachusetts – initially made up of Ricky Bell, Michael Bivins, Bobby Brown, Ronnie DeVoe and Ralph Tresvant Johnny Gill joined up later in place of Brown – has persisted for more than three decades, quietly carrying on a remarkable dynasty. It’s no coincidence that Luther Vandross and Anita Baker, singers of near peerless grace, and Prince and Michael Jackson, masters of pre-rap pop, released their best albums before hip-hop’s first golden age in the late 1980s.īut shrewd young singers like the five who ended up in the group New Edition took the impact of rap in stride, embracing hip-hop on their very first single in 1983. After the hip-hop comet struck more than three decades ago, many crooners suddenly looked liked dinosaurs, and even some of the greatest vocalists on the planet never really recovered, at least on recording. Hard as it is to imagine today, when hip-hop and R&B are so closely intertwined, the arrival of the rapper as a commercial force initially posed a threat to R&B singers.
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