The Breakout Rap and R&B Artists of 1996, Pt. 1
A LaFace newcomer who plays like a one-person unit meets a Bronx singer who can stand next to rappers. On the rap side, Queens detail and Brooklyn chemistry land in the same stretch of months.
Breakout years rarely begin at the moment people remember. They start earlier, in smaller rooms, on singles that sit around long enough to build a rumor, on features that make a voice familiar before a full project ever has a chance to speak. Memory compresses it into one clean date, but the music rarely moves that neatly.
For the artists in Part 1, breaking out in 1996 means they were already on their way in 1995. Tony Rich’s “Nobody Knows” arrives on November 7, 1995, then the album Words lands January 16, 1996, so the public “arrival” is really a two-step that crosses the year line. Veronica’s “Without Love” drops September 12, 1995 and her debut album V... As in Veronica follows on October 24, 1995, with the kind of guest list and producer bench that puts a newcomer in bigger conversations fast. Mic Geronimo’s The Natural comes out November 28, 1995, and Group Home’s Livin’ Proof hits November 21, 1995, the kind of late-year releases that keep circulating into the next one because people keep finding them.
This series is built around that lag between a release and its footprint. Not chart talk, not awards, not a verdict machine. The focus is on how a record introduces a person, how their writing moves, how their voice sits inside a beat, how a hook or a verse makes you recognize them the next time you hear a name in passing.
The Tony Rich Project
One of the unchanging factors that runs through Black music from the blues to hip-hop is storytelling. Black people have wanted stories that lock in with the groove behind them—stories with musical narrative, the kind that, even in fragments, can mirror the truth of their lives. The reason Black people unexpectedly like white folk, or so-called singer-songwriters, is that they are storytellers.
Sam Cooke was pierced by Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and made “A Change Is Gonna Come,” and a phenomenon also arose in which R&B moved closer to folk. In the folk boom of the 1960s, Terry Callier, who shifted from R&B to folk, and Bill Withers, the standard-bearer of folk-soul, are obvious examples, and many people were making folky R&B. After the 1980s, a presence like Tracy Chapman was ignored, but when Babyface was inspired by Tracy and made “When Can I See You” a success, the situation changed completely, and then newcomer Tony Rich arrives from LaFace.
Detroit-born Rich was given a guitar by his music-loving father, taught himself keyboard, and while doing band activities, he was singing in a gospel choir. In the middle of all that, he met pro basketball player John Salley, who runs a studio and production company. Through him he met the producers Tim & Bob. From there his connections broadened to Dallas Austin, Pebbles, and L.A. Reid, and in ’93 he moved to Atlanta. Up to now he has provided songs for Pebbles and Boyz II Men, participated in sessions for L.A.-produced tracks on a Curtis tribute album, produced A Few Good Men, produced 4.0, and has also handled remixes for Toni Braxton and TLC.
This debut is something Rich himself composed, arranged, and produced in full, finding a perfect balance between a sweet voice and bitter guitar chords. Each sound, each word is delicate, but when they connect, they change into something strong—there’s a span full of something like magic. Acoustic guitar, keyboards, bass, a lot of brushes, and drums that strike out a finely shuffling pulse.
The sound, with almost everything played by Rich himself, has clear contours, and by leaving plenty of space it brings the simple tunes and the friendly, sing-along, truly folky and melodic songs into sharp relief. Rich’s vocal brings Babyface to mind, but it isn’t sticky the way his is, and it has an expression full of lingering aftertaste; the feather-soft, multi-track harmony is also extremely effective.
The theme of this album would be “blue.” An unbearable blue feeling can’t be held back, and it spills out of the mouth as words. In “Hey Blue,” he sweetly and sourly confesses how, every time he sees her with a man, Blue crosses the room and comes at him, tightening his chest; in “Nobody Knows” and “Missin’ You,” he lays out the pain of being thrown away by a lover and left behind alone; “Like a Woman” sings a passing love where the two don’t even know each other’s names; “Billy Goat” steps into the mindset of a hustler on the edge of self-destruction; and stories of a man bewitched by the devil are common, but the twisty “Under Her Spell,” with its (in a bad way) protagonist, and the depictions of inner landscapes like length, loneliness, emptiness, and wretchedness, and the stories of life and death, at times call up the blues. Not the blues as a musical form, but the blues as emotion. Leroy Jones once pushed back against white R&B historians’ sense that “Motown isn’t Black music, it’s pop,” by pointing to emotional continuity with the blues, and Rich too seems to have that technique down.
Alongside D’Angelo, a talent that can be called the big discovery of 1995. A work with flavor you don’t get tired of.
Veronica
To be blunt, there’s no way to hide the fact that I was drawn in first by the debut jacket (I fall into this pattern a lot, don’t I). Veronica, who got into the music world at age five and fought her way through countless talent shows, is a Puerto Rican raised in the Bronx. In high school, she learned opera (apparently, she can sing in Spanish, Italian, French, and even Russian), and she mastered four kinds of dance—modern, ballet, Latin, and African—so she’s a pretty serious girl. The episode about winning three straight times at the Apollo Theater Amateur Night also shows what her ability is like. It’s interesting that, as artists who influenced her, she names Barbra Streisand along with Stevie Wonder and Whitney Houston; if you put that taste together with her flashy career, she might actually be from a fairly sheltered background.
Even so, what really grabs you is how wide the network is that gathered for this album. The lavishness (lack of restraint?)—Sadat X, Diamond D, Full Force, Gordon Chambers, Dallas Austin, and so on—feels almost mysterious, but needless to say this will be “power” in itself.
It’s a hip-hop R&B that’s extremely easy to understand, and it’s not like there’s any innovation to speak of at this point, but the richness of expression you glimpse in down-low tracks like “Sista” is pretty impressive. A good example is “What I Wanna Do (W/Interlude),” where she collaborates with Sadat X and Diamond D. After the opening rap part ends, the moment her vocal slips in, sliding through the space between the guests, comes without strain, and it shows she’s a typical modern R&B singer. The way she moves without getting overwhelmed by Sadat X’s too-dangerous presence is also splendid.
Also, the two Full Force tracks, “Unnecessary Trip” and “Lock Down,” are high-quality numbers that you really should make sure to catch, making the most of what she does well. Especially “Unnecessary Trip” has a pop feel that brings Brandy to mind, and it has hit potential all the way. The latter, which (even now) borrows Kool & The Gang’s “Summer Madness,” is also an excellent piece of production work that draws out her singing ability well.
But the one you should pay the most attention to here is a man named Rodney Jerkins, who handles the songwriting and production for “Without Love,” “What I Wanna Do (W/Interlude),” “Can’t Stop Lovin’ You,” and “A Love to Come Home To...” He’s apparently 17, but he’s doing truly great work. That said, the quality of the rest of the material is broadly high too; the appeal of “Really Don’t Miss You,” which pulls you along over a fat track that feels exactly like Dallas Austin, can only be called impressive.
To put it simply, she’s a perfect match with hip-hop-type low beats, but you also want to keep in mind the richness of feeling on the slow side. “Without Love” is like it seeps into the inside of the listener without making a sound, and “A Love to Come Home To...,” the wettest and deepest track on the album, is the standout, but in the latter you also get to taste the “too-deep” duet nuance with Gordon Chambers, with a phrase from Stevie Wonder’s “Rocket Love” showing up as well.
Unless you have not only skill but also a serious character, it’s fair to say this is a slightly difficult era for new artists right now. In that sense, it feels like Veronica might be missing one more thing, but whether that guess hits or misses, I wanted to see the outcome clearly.
Mic Geronimo
Nas, Mobb Deep, AZ. Just lining up those names makes a single context rise up on its own. The lineage of “Queens bad guys” that runs on from Kool G Rap—what you could call the tradition of “Queens hardboiled.” The scenery is different, but you can easily find an image that overlaps with Raekwon and the like. And Mic Geronimo is the newest inheritor of it.
Hip-hop listeners should already be long used to hearing his name. The debut single “Shit’s Real” was released, if I remember right, in the first half of ’94. This track got ahead of the curve in using Deniece Williams’ “Free” as a sample (even though, in truth, the sound is remade a bit cheaply), and you can say it’s already made it into the classic category. By the way, it seems this single was a re-release from Blunt Recordings of an independently made record he did with DJ Irv (Geronimo’s partner, and the producer of “Shit’s Real”).
The planned release was January 1995. The album title was “Take It Like It Is,” and the producers listed were Large Professor, Diamond D, Easy Mo Bee, Chyskillz, and DJ Irv. Sure enough, for a newcomer debuting from an unknown label, that’s an unusually luxurious lineup, isn’t it?
And with people like Mark Sparks being brought in as producers—no, rather than what was announced, couldn’t you even say this is a more in-season shift? Living up to expectations, each person is showing work made while the grease is on.
In my personal opinion, Mark Sparks in particular feels right. Or rather, his compatibility with Geronimo is good. Maybe because the impression of “The Natural” is strong, but compared with the kind of track that’s just brutally hard, a track that leaves a slightly catchy feel makes the individuality of Geronimo as a rapper stand out more effectively. On that point, Mark Sparks’ well-balanced workmanship (proven on Grand Puba’s “2000”) hits the mark.
The funky “Wherever You Are,” the album’s first cut that uses Bob James’ “Night Crawler,” the unusual story piece “Sharane,” and the one with R&B-flavored vocal touches—all of them are good. As for guest tracks, there’s Royal Flush (a newcomer who, like him, is debuting from Blunt Recordings, and also handles part of the background vocals) and O.C.; speaking of which, that guy too is one of the “Queens hardboiled” flyers.
However, for whatever shifts in circumstances happened that we have no way of knowing, on this album, released about ten months late from the initial announcement, the only ones actually participating out of the above names are Chyskillz and DJ Irv (the songs with those two credited seem to be relatively old material). In exchange, there’s Buckwild, who handled the second single “Masta I.C.,” Mr. Walt of the Beatminerz, and tracks with the Lost Boyz, who are a special presence even within Queens. Including Mr. Walt’s track, you should make a note of the day-to-day astringency.
Group Home
Group Home, coming out of the Gang Starr Foundation. Their first single “Supa Star,” released at the end of 1994, monopolized attention as a masterpiece, and made their name known to the world at once. If you’re an East Coast hip-hop fan, there shouldn’t be anyone who doesn’t know them.
This duo, made up of 21-year-old Lil’ Dap and 18-year-old Malachi the Nutcracker, had been in contact with Gang Starr since around the late ‘80s as local acquaintances in Brooklyn. The first time the name Group Home appeared in the scene was on Gang Starr’s 1992 Daily Operation, in “I’m the Man,” where Lil’ Dap gave a wild performance (before that, Lil’ Dap appeared in the “Just to Get a Rep” video). Then in 1993, they released “So Called Friends,” the first track under the Group Home name, on a promo compilation for Illkid Records, Guru’s imprint, titled Gangstarr Foundation Sampler. By the way, that disc also included Jeru’s “Come Clean.” Then in early 1994, on Gang Starr’s Hard to Earn, Lil’ Dap guested on “Speak Ya Clout,” and Nutcracker guested on “Words from Nutcracker.” After a light warm-up, what came out at the end of that year was the one mentioned at the start.
The producer of this track is DJ Premier. This song is praised as his best work even among his many productions. First you’re guided by an impressive, ultra-slow loop that repeats “Everyday—,” and then the main part begins abruptly. In that main part, an eccentric loop rides on top of a programmed beat from James Brown’s “Funky President,” a loop that makes you feel even a kind of cosmic spread (as an aside, I learned later that this loop comes from breaking down and rearranging the intro section of Cameo’s “Hanging Downtown.” And after that I listened through Cameo’s catalog again, and I was made to take my hat off once more to Premier’s creativity).
But it isn’t only Premier’s production that’s great. A track exists because there are good lyrics, and the reverse is also true. First, matching the sudden start of the main part, Nutcracker also appears suddenly. The beauty of his lyrics lies in the straightness of his rhymes, to the point of being almost too much. By stepping on rhymes on the 2nd beat or the 4th beat, he gives the listener bounce. Being easy to ride (easy to sing along) should be one of the important essentials of lyrics.
Next comes Lil’ Dap. His lyrics have been criticized more than once up to now, but his beauty is in a voice/flow that seems positioned as the opposite pole to Nutcracker’s royal-road straightness—irregular, strange. Nutcracker with a straight delivery, and irregular Lil’ Dap. The exquisite contrast between these two becomes, like the track, something deeply flavorful.
Of course, what I’ve said up to this point also runs through their debut album as a whole. Whether it’s “Suspended in Time” and “Sacrifice,” which lay out their feelings toward hip-hop, or “Baby Pa,” where the fearless programming is manly and ferocious, whichever track you bring up, you can call it a work born from the tight lock between the two rappers’ contrasting combination and Premier’s soul-on-the-line production. In that sense, “Serious Rap Shit” and “4 Give My Sins,” which bring in Guru and Big Jaz as producers respectively, aren’t bad by any means, but they can’t reach the same force as Premier. There’s even an episode where, after finishing this album, Premier praised the finished quality of his own work. It’s only natural that Guru and the others would be at a disadvantage. At the same time, you should also be able to grasp the depth of this album. An important work that already appeared in 1996. From here on, you can’t talk without listening to this.