Switched on Pop - 90s Nostalgia in Bruno Mars and Charlie Puth

Episode Date: January 25, 2018

The 90s are back. It is as if pop music entered a black hole and came out 25 years in the past. Today's artists are reviving the new jack swing and vocal R&B, creating a wave of 90s nostalgia. Uncover how they trick us into somehow loving those days when we got beat up in the middle school parking lot. Spotify 90s Nostalgia playlist: https://open.spotify.com/user/switchedonpop/playlist/3beUwxOxzbTZ8M3aymZlg5 Featuring:Bruno Mars ft. Cardi B - FinesseCharlie Puth ft. Boyz II Men - If You Leave me NowGuy - Groove MeEternal - StayBell Biv Devoe - PoisonCardi B - Bodack YellowChristopher Williams - I'm DreaminBoyz II Men - MotownphillyBoyz II Men - On Bended KneeHamilton - The Room Where It Happened Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. Nate, I have a seemingly easy question for you. Okay, I feel like this is going to be really difficult, but shoot. What decade is it? It is, I can do this. I got this.

Okay. It is definitely the 2010s. No, you're wrong. It's the 90s. You need to fast forward to 25 years in the past because you may not know it, it's the 90s. If you're still watching stranger things or haven't gotten over Carly Ray Jepson's emotion, you might think that we're stuck in the 80s, but you're wrong because there have been hints of 90s culture permeating for a few years. But two tracks that popped up at the beginning of 2018 have planted us firmly.

in the decade that declared the end of history. Are you ready to go back in time with me? Let's do it. Take me there. So these two tracks are Bruno Mars Finesse remix featuring Cardi B. And Charlie Puths, if you leave me now, featuring Boys to Men. Yes. Seems like featuring was a big deal back in the 90s too. So two big featuring tracks.

Today I want to invest in. how does one musically manufacture 90s nostalgia? So I've been listening to Finesse, you've been listening to if you leave me now

before the show we flipped a coin deciding that I would go first so let's drop the needle on Bruno Mars and Cardi B's Fennesse and take a time machine back into the 90s.

Let's do it. Oh yeah. I'm grooving hard in my seat here in Brooklyn. So what do we call that? Let's call it new

new jack swing you're totally right okay so this sound has a name new jack swing do you know about this thing I'm dimly aware of this sound

being called new jack swing beyond that where that term comes from what else it encompasses I would love to be elucidated if you can provide this information I have done my homework good man I had to do some homework because as we were really just coming out of our youth in the late 80s and early 90s,

this sound didn't fully sink in until more recently for me. The genre new Jack Swing was created by producer, songwriter, keyboarders, everything, Teddy Riley, and Bernard Bell. It was made famous by artists like Janet and Michael Jackson, Keith Sweat, Guy, Bobby Brown, Black Street, and Donna Summer. And you're saying, okay, what's in this sound? what we're hearing is this really blurred genre of hints of R&B, hip hop, bubblegum pop, and even swing. And this is where I think I'm going to really hook you in as a jazz scholar.

Oh, yeah. The new, that's interesting, new is good. Jack, don't know what that means. Love it. Don't know what it means. And then swing, that's very tantalizing. Why don't we listen to an original new Jack Swing track, one of my favorites, Motown Philly by Boys to Men? get that sound in our ear.

That is really fun. It's really fun. So I hear New Jack Swing as four elements that encompass this genre. There's probably more, but this is what I'm hearing. And what I want to do is see how Finesse manufactures this 90s nostalgia with references to New Jack Swing, specifically how it incorporates lots of jazzy chords, uses a swing hip-hop drumbeat, really funky and walking bass lines, and belted vocals with rich harmony. Yeah, no wonder I love this music so much.

You've just listed all my favorite things. Okay, great, very cool. Okay, so what I'm going to do is relate some of that old New Jack Swing with that new New Jack Swing, starting with my favorite element, the baseline. New Jack Swing has just got this incredibly funky bass lines, right? Sincopated and even sort of like sometimes these walking bass lines, I think it would be appropriate to invoke the originator of the genre. Teddy Riley, his first group, Guy, and their track, Groove Me.

Check this out, and I think you're going to hear some of that finesse. Wow, that is new to me, and it is true to its title. It is grooving me deeply. Loving this baseline, super active, super syncopated, this fat, chunky, sound, yeah, into all of that. Yeah, let's play it back to back with finesse. Ooh, okay. Okay, point made, Charles.

Familiar? Yep, it's really hot. It's great, though. It's a good reference. Yeah, I mean, it seems like it's the right time to reach back to this New Jack Swing moment. As much as music now is this sort of pastishi grab bag of the last century of music history, no, I don't know anyone recently who's quite tapped into this particular moment of New Jack's

swing. All right, element of the first, bass line, funky, syncopated, groovy, groove me. We got that covered. Element of the second. Drums. Yes. And for me, this would have been first, just for the record. I mean, there's nothing wrong with putting bass first, but for me, drums are like the key sonic signifier here, just for posterity. So that's out there. But please continue. I've been playing a lot of like Mogee synth bass lines recently just for fun and on the side. And so that's what grabbed me. But you're right. I actually think that it is the swung hip-hop drum sound that probably gets a lot of people when they hear the genre. And there are so many tracks from the past that use this same sort of sound. In particular, they love drum fills. What you're going to hear are these swung syncopated drum fills

opening so many tracks. So I just compiled a couple of openings and you're going to hear them reflected back in finesse. Let's start off with the Motown Philly opening. Listen to that Phil. Great. Yeah. Right. Okay. Now I've got another one a group called Eternal. Their song Stay. You can't do this genre without a great opening drum fill. Cool. That one not quite as syncopated. More just like one, two, three, four, but still really getting you hyped up for the song to come. Okay, this is fun. Next one. All right. This is the one. This is Bell, Biv, DeVose, Poison. Yeah. Yeah. That's the one. All right. And you can't move any further forward without playing that back to back with finesse.

You're right. There we go. They all have this, what I now see as a sort of characteristic drum intro, this like hyper aggressive, hyper swung with the snare drum in particular, really prominent. And I think it serves a function of informing the listener about the world they're about to enter into. You don't ease into this new jack swing sound. It grabs you right out of the gate. Yeah, you're jacked right in. Yeah, and as much as you can imagine these songs and this Bruno Mars slash Cardi B remix included being made for the dance floor, this is really effective because there's no prelude. You just hear that snare and then that's your cue to get down.

Yeah, exactly. In songs that we've already heard, things like Motown Philly and Grooveme, these, drum line served to jack you right into the music and then throughout the rest of it are these incredibly infectious drum beats. Holding it together though are beautiful jazzy chords. And that is the element of the third that finesse draws on to bring you into the past. And I think in order to understand why it sounds so significantly different than what we hear on the charts, it might be useful to look at a modern song in which it's just not incorporating these kinds of sounds

in any sort of way. Ah, okay. So sort of a negative example. A negative example. We'll listen to a song that unlike these New Jack's swing tracks does not feature these complex harmonies. Exactly.

So why don't we listen to Cardi Bordy's other song, the one that we covered a few weeks ago. Just take a quick listen to Bodak Yellow, one of the biggest songs of 2017, and see if we're hearing any of those beautiful jazzy chords. In a word, And no. No.

Which seems appropriate for a song that is aggressive, confrontational, is so focused on the kind of Spartan quality of Cardi B's vocal that these lush, chromatic harmonies would just seem to distract from her message, I think. I absolutely agree. It is the right choice for what she's doing. But that sound, that trap sound, is so popular right now. There are so many artists drawing on that sort of aesthetic. And it is heavy in rhythm. It has really great riffs. The bass is thick.

But it doesn't incorporate different harmonies as much. That's just not the language of what's happening right now. And so in that way, I think when we hear Finesse come on the radio, we're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, I am taken back to another time. Let's take a listen to Finesse and check out some of those beautiful jazzy harmonies. So you can hear in the background those synthesizers playing some really neat chords there. You've got this beautiful D-flat major seventh chord down to a C dominant seventh chord and moving to this F minor chord. There's this beautiful voice leading that is reminiscent of jazz style chord progressions. What do you think of those sounds?

Yeah, in the world of Bodak Yellow and a lot of other contemporary songs will see very simple triadic chords. The ones we are hearing here in finesse by contrast are much richer. They have literally more notes inside them, first of all. And they're going to places that aren't as expected, harmonically speaking, that maybe surprise our ears a little bit. So, yeah, I think this is more in touch with a different lineage of black musical practice where you use these extended chords to really tug on a listener's emotional heartstrings. And it's great those sounds that we hear New Jack Swing are referencing decades of musical history far before it. So now we're being transferred way back into the 50s, 40s, 30s with some of these sounds. Right, exactly.

the era in which the term swing first emerged. Exactly. In the 1930s, to be exact, this was, swing was not only associated with jazz. It was literally described an entire genre of jazz. The most hyperrhythmic, most danceable music was simply known as swing. So if the crazy drum lines filling in jack you into the song, the chords and a bunch of the rhythms have got that swing sound and swing feel. Indeed. So I said that there are four elements that help manufacture that 90s nostalgia here, that new jackswing sound, and we would be remiss if we did not talk about the vocal. So I have for us here

another reference. Let's go back to the 90s and listen to I'm Dreaming by Christopher Williams. Whoa, yeah, into this. Another new track for me. Thanks for exposing me to all this new old new jack swing wait. Do I get there right? Don't worry. I've made you a whole playlist.

I'm going to share it with everyone. If they make it to the credits they'll find out where to find it. I'm dreaming. One of my favorites. It's got the rhythm. It's got the funk bass.

It's got all of it. But specifically the vocals here, you're getting this belting voice, right? Kind of just soaring over the backing vocals, which are filling in some of those lush,

jazzy chords, rich harmonies. And then throughout it, you even get these sort of ad lib, vocal fills, you know, your yes and uh-huhs and those kind of things. So let's listen to that in comparison to finesse and see how Bruno and Cardi B interpret it. Ah, I see. We have Bruno belting and in the background, Cardi B kind of offering that call and response

chorus. Yeah, absolutely. I see the template. And there's like Bruno's on top of Bruno's. You got the filling in with the backing harmonies and then he'll throw in some screaming higher things over them. It's just beautiful vocal production. Absolutely. All right. So, Bruno and Cardi B have taken us into the past, referencing some music that I heard when I was like five on the radio. And I'm really enjoying rediscovering. But this is not the only track, which is pulling on this 90s nostalgia. I know you've been listening to one as well. And I figure what we'll do is take a quick ad break, come back, and dive into Oh my gosh, this is so great.

Charlie Puth with Boys to Men. See you there. Convier to your passion in a business with Shopify and bathe records of ventas with the form of pay with a better conversion of the world. Has heard of bien?

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and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came. But what we want to do in this space is talk about America and politics beyond the current president. So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period? I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE. When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want border at the border.

They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. Hello, Charles. Let's continue our retro voyage to the heart of the 90s. Yep. You took us through Bruno Mars and Cardi B's resuscitation of new jack swing.

Yeah. And there's another young artist who, seems to be sampling another 90s moment here. Yeah. That's Charlie Puth, who has enlisted one of the great 90s groups of all time boys to men to back him up on his latest song, If You Leave Me Now. Let's have a listen. There's one thing you're going to notice immediately about this track.

Oh, okay. I'll pay attention. Because, girl, if you leave, if you give it up and just walk, you won't take the biggest. Pardon me And all the things All right, Charlie, Let's do this in the style

of a Jeopardy question, okay? Okay. Category 2010s or 1990s Answer, this song uses a technique popular in the 1990s

but rarely heard in the 2010s. What is not having anything but just vocals? Acapella? That's 500 on the board for Charlie.

Well done. Ooh, okay. A cappella tracks. Yes, what grabs us here, unlike the sort of maximalist musical universe that you just described for us on finesse is actually the absence of sound. Yeah. We just analyzed these super beefy, intense snare drums in the New Jack Swing of the 1990s. But here on this Charlie Puth and Boys to Men song, the most intense percussive.

effect we'll encounter is a snap. It's a good snap. I feel like we at this point have an option to just simply snap through the rest of our recording session, a simple gesture that immediately makes whatever you're saying, especially if you drop your voice down real low like this, deeply intimate. and important and sexy. Those are all the things I ever think about you, Nate. And this song is just delightful.

It is delightful. It's not a hit. As I understand, it's not on the billboard charts at the time of this recording. It's number 10 in Sweden, but, you know, they're... Well, it is a slow burn track anyway. Well, the instrumentation that we explored in finesse is no longer present. I think we still do retain some of these 90s musical characteristics that you identified. Primarily those complex harmonies and this super belting, sort of impassioned vocal style.

Oh my gosh. Well, yeah. You just described boys to men in a nutshell. Yeah. It is refreshing to hear this a cappella texture and to hear these lush harmonies. I think it's a very effective throwback moment that Charlie Puth is accomplishing here. And gosh, darn it, if I can't begrudgingly admit that this young man is quickly becoming one of my favorite pop artists. Oh, no doubt. As I've expressed elsewhere on this show, I still have not forgiven him for the musical abomination that is the song Marvin Gay. Oh, no, no, we need to move beyond that. but he's slowly eroding my misgivings by putting out first the track attention and now this one.

All right, let's go through what makes this song so effective. Great. As you pulled up all these great 90s recordings to compare Bruno Mars to, so let's go back to 1994 and listen to a boys to men track called On Bended Knee. This one isn't a cappella, but we're still going to hear those rich harmonies and those impassioned vocals. Let's have a listen. We're hearing those belted vocals, those call and response choruses, but keep listening, Charlie.

There's something else I want you to notice here. I hear it. What else is going on in this excerpt from On Bended Knee? An epic modulation where everything soars up and above. Oh yeah, we have just bumped up this entire track from, the key of E flat major to E. But keep listening, Charlie, don't turn it off, okay? Oh, okay.

So we've moved up from E flat to E, a pretty heavy duty modulation, and it seems like we're just going to coast on out in this new key, but wait. No. It keeps ascending. Yes, from E major all the way up to F. Whoa, this is serious stuff. So not only do we have those rich harmonies, those impassioned vocals, we're hearing here in this boys to men song,

a technique we've identified before that of modulation, and not just one modulation, not just moving it up once, but twice. And it's really brilliant because it reinforces the lyrical message of this song. Okay, so I wasn't paying enough attention to the lyrics. What's going on? Why are they doing this? I can't blame you at all.

He's down on his knees. He's begging you please. And then the modulation, can we go back? to the days our love was strong. Oh my gosh. It's almost like he's standing up. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, it's like, it's both kind of beautiful and slightly tragic at the same time because

it's like this plea and it gets more and more intense and sort of desperate perhaps as the melody actually assent. That makes a lot of sense because moving into a new key creates tension, right? Like, it's not heard necessarily as immensely pleasing on its. own, it has to be serving some kind of function. And here, it's raising the stakes. It's raising the stakes of this pleading. It's a nice example of how modulations aren't always triumphant. They can sometimes be a little more ambivalent. Now, Charlie Puth, I think we've seen as a great student of pop music. So if he's going to do a track with Boys to Men, he's listening to these

songs, he's imbibing this musical playbook. And sure enough, when we go back to, if you leave me now, And fast forward to the end, what do we experience? I'm going to guess it will be a modulation, but I'm going to listen anyway. Yeah, I guess I kind of spoiled that one. Yeah, wow, this is really doing so many of you. Oh, my gosh. Okay, so there's so many things. First of all, like, just what a great way to show off that you are an extraordinary artist

by stripping down all of the instrumentation and putting your voice naked out there for all to hear. I guess it helps though if you have the entire boys to men backing you up. And this modulation is such a perfect moment where Charlie Puth is doing that belting. And underneath boys to men have this awesome rising baseline. Like it's going to resolve this place and you think you're landing there. But no, they like keep on moving up even further and take you to a new key. It's so good. It's so good. Totally. I have the same reaction. And I think you can see how Puth is using the Boys to Men catalog as his inspiration. Not only do we have the musical modulation, we have these lyrics that are asking for it in the same way as the Boys to Men's song.

Both of these songs are kind of like a plea or like a kind of a last stand maybe. Right. Please don't go. And both of these songs really communicate that message by these desperate modulations towards the end, right? Absolutely. Like really putting your money where your mouth is, so to speak. They're saying they're going to go above and beyond as the music is going above and beyond. Totally.

So maybe if you're the imagined partner in the scenario, you're kind of walking away and then you hear the modulation and you're like, oh, you do care. Okay, I'm coming back. And boys and then it's like, that doesn't do the trick, so you've got to do two modulations. And then that brings them back. Yeah. That's fun. Wow. So props to young Puth here. Oh, for sure.

Very good, though. again, I do think he missed an opportunity to have this spoken interlude that I see as another one of the most characteristic and wonderful parts of a voice to men track, like on-bended knee. Spoken interlude. Oh. Baby, I'm sorry. Do you think perhaps the reason why Puth dropped that opportunity is that he may be lacking in that rich baritone that it requires? Because he doesn't have my number?

Is that what you're saying? He should have had you on the track, exactly. So beautiful work. I think we can safely say that we are both very fond of these two 90s throwbacks, the Bruno Mars, Cardi B, finesse referencing New Jack Swing, the Charlie Puth Boys to Men, referencing these 90s R&B vocal groups with their lush harmonies and impassioned vocals. Why this 90s moment right now?

Why do these sounds appeal to us? Because we were stuck in the 80s nostalgia and then we have to march forward and millennials are afraid of getting older and thus are looking backwards. Interesting. Okay. So perhaps we have this sort of constant retro window of 25 years and it's as we move forward in time that window is also moving forward. Possibly. I see that. We can maybe see a concurrent interest in other media, whether it's the O.J. Simpson trial becoming.

a documentary and a TV series. I Tanya. I Tanya. Yeah, absolutely. I think we're going back to the 90s and trying to better understand what was happening during that period. In some ways, I think the sound of the 90s supplies a certain, dare I say, comfort to us

because in many ways, I think retrospectively that decade was, pretty chill, I guess. Well, I referenced it at the beginning, right? The political theorist called it the end of history because at the close of the Cold War, everyone expected that everything's going to be a democracy. Everything's going to be just swell. Everyone's going to get better. Things are going to grow. And justice will collapse. Of course, these things were not at all true, but that was the narrative that was played out in the media. We had relative economic prosperity and perhaps the music of the time reflected that. It was very earnest.

And that's true when we're listening to New Jack Swing and Boys to Men. It's also true when we're listening to Nirvana or Joan Osborne or whoever. Like this was very sincere earnest music that seemed to reflect a sincere earnest time. So unlike the one we live in now. And maybe we find that a little bit comforting to be transported to that place. That's a nice theory. I'd just love to end with an open question. Are there other examples of these 90s sounds resurging into our present pop landscape?

That's a good question. And that takes me back to the fact that I have made a playlist of 90s nostalgia. And we would love to throw in other examples of people who are borrowing this sound and some of your favorite tracks from the past. So I would request that all of our listeners send us a message on Facebook or Twitter or email us. We're basically at Switched on Pop everything. contact at switchdownpop.com and send us your great tracks and we will put them all together.

That will answer your question, Nate. Whoa, that's great. So you're saying these are contemporary tracks that are referencing this 90s sound. It's the new and the all together, one big playlist. Oh, I've wanted to add to it. What do you got?

Well, when you were playing all those new Jack Swing songs and I know you're a fan of this score. Any selections from Hamilton ringing a bell? Oh, is it the rap battles? Maybe. I'm thinking of the room where it happens Oh, the room where it happens, definitely No one else was in the room

Where trade out the sausage gets made We just assume that it happens That's straight out of new jackswing. Definitely. All right, I'm throwing it on the playlist. Thank you. My work here is done. This episode of Switched on Pop was produced by Charlie Harding And Nate Sloan.

It is edited and. Mixed by the wonderful Bill Lance. Design is by Luke Harris. We are a proud member of the Panoply Network. And you can check out more episodes and reach out to us at switchedonpop.com on Twitter at Switchedonpop. Shoot us an email. Contact at Switchedonpop.com. I want to give a shout out to a couple of our listeners who dropped us some good hints about what's going on in these 90 sounds.

So thank you to Quincy, Paula, Diet Coke for breakfast. handle. The Dysk Podcast, Blinky Bill, Robert Drew, Jed, Nothold, Kay Zuzis, and Erasumo. Thanks for all the great tips. That's what we call crowdsourcing. Speaking of crowdsourcing, we need to make another playlist that's all the non-Christmas songs that feature sleigh bells that our listeners sent into us after our Mara-Ric-Ari episode. Oh, yeah. I don't know what a catchy title for that is, but. Yeah, the Beach Boys were on it. Michael Jackson was on it. There's so many good ones. There's so many surprising. Mollers, Fourth Symphony, just great, great stuff. When you're craving sleigh bells, but don't want to listen to Christmas music, that's the playlist.

All right, we'll work on that one too. So our playlist, they'll be up on Spotify. We'll post that on our website and on Twitter. You can find more episodes of Switched on Pop on Spotify, happen in there now, which is really exciting. Also on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else where you get your podcasts. We're going to be back in two weeks with another episode. And until then, thanks for listening. Thanks for listening.