What About Us? The Enduring Legacy of Jodeci by Lawrence Ware

What About Us? The Enduring Legacy of Jodeciby Lawrence Ware | @Law_Ware | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
For some, spring brings Easter to mind. The blooming flowers and budding trees remind them of the resurrection and (in the words of an old preacher) that he got up early on Sunday morning. For others, it may be the beginning of baseball season or the college basketball madness that March brings. That’s not what spring brings to mind for me. I think of K-Ci, JoJo, Mr. Dalvin and DeVante Swing.
I discovered Jodeci late. Their debut studio album Forever My Lady was released in August of 1991, and I didn’t discover them until March of 1992. My mom was not a big fan of ‘secular’ music, so I had to sneak a tape of the album into the house by hiding it in a pocket of the Trapper Keeper I carried in my book bag.
For good measure, I had my friend Tay put small pieces of balled up paper in the top of an old Commissioned cassette, thereby allowing me to get a copy of the album without raising the suspicions of my mother. We did this many times. I would later get copies of Biggie’s Ready to Die and Snoop’s Doggystyle using similar Trapper Keeper cassette trickery. I snuck into my room and listened to the album on a yellow Walkman Sport. The tape was a little wet because Tay gave it to me as we walked in the rain to catch our respective bus home. Everyone was talking about the group at school, and I was eager to listen when I got home. To put it mildly, the tape didn’t disappoint.
Jocdeci was like nothing I’d ever heard before; yet, the group sounded exactly like everything I loved. They married the vocal stylings of gospel with subject matter that would make a first lady blush.  They harmonized over new jack beats, and expressed emotion in a way that fit my still developing understandings of black masculinity. They were everything I didn’t know I wanted in a group.
I was familiar with BoyzIIMen and that group was an easy point of comparison for Jodeci. Their Cooleyhighharmony debuted in February of 1991, and, somehow, my mother allowed me to listen to the album. It may have been BoyzIIMen’s old school feel. They were a throwback to an older time in R&B in that you could put the four of them in front of a mic and they would make beautiful music. The group played with a new jack sound in songs like “Motownphilly” and the later “Thank You”, but that sonic profile was not their musical identity. Songs like “It’s So hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday” from 1991 and “End of the Road” from 1992 solidified their sound. They were good; they were talented, but they embodied the preferences of previous generations.
I now know that Jodeci was not the first to make soulful music grounded in an urban and gospel sound, but for a black kid sheltered from ‘worldy music,’ Jodeci was revolutionary. They have also proven to be influential.
Hip Hop artists like Jay-Z and Big K.R.I.T. have mentioned the group in their lyrics and sampled their work in their songs. Drake’s soulfully vocalized flow is deeply indebted to Jodeci and J.Cole’s melodically atmospheric approach to hip hop channels the DeVante Swing approach to musical composition. To the chagrin of many, contemporary R&B is more inspired by the likes of Jodeci than BoyzIIMen. The days of simple balladry in R&B have given way to an, at times, complex relationship with hip hop. Jodeci foreshadowed the genre bending we now see from artists like Future, Young Thug, and Kanye West. For better or worse, they were part of the move away from the lush R&B of the 80s to the edgy sound ubiquitous today.
Jodeci remains my favorite R&B group—even if their most recent effort, 2015’s The Past, the Present, the Future, was decidedly underwhelming. Their musical brilliance and unapologetic embodiment of urban black cool made way for many who came thereafter. Jodeci was more than just two sets of brothers from the south, they helped redefine the sound of black music—and black culture has never been the same.
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Lawrence Ware is an Oklahoma State University Division of Institutional Diversity Fellow. He teaches in OSU’s philosophy department and is the Diversity Coordinator for its Ethics Center. An advisor to Democratic Left and contributing editor at RS: The Religious Left, he has also been a commentator on race and politics for the Huffington Post Live, NPR’s Talk of the Nation, and PRI’s Flashpoint. He is an ordained minister in the Progressive Baptist Convention. Find him on Twitter @law_ware.