Brilliant pop singles band, possibly the best around for their brief peak period in the mid-nineties.
Their best stuff is fantastic but it’s a short list - 5 or 6 great singles, a couple of pretty good albums - so you can’t really put them in the top rank.
Classic 2.5, rounded up to 3 because hearing one of those singles by chance somewhere is still so joyful.
Pretty much this. Hard to.imagine anyone hearing ‘No scrubs’ and groaning but then it does depend on your exposure to MTV and commercial radio, as I remember a time when their stuff was dangerously overplayed.
Waterfalls was the first song I loved that wasn’t made by men with guitars. Best bassline of all time too. CrazySexyCool opened me up to realise that I enjoyed other types of music so I’ll always have a place for it. FanMail is brilliant too. 4/5.
The debut is superb too, but it’s a completely different sound overall. love how much left eye raps on it. look at this lineup of producers tho:
that production group pretty much stuck around for their first 4 albums, with a few other notables coming in and out (puff, organzed noize, saadiq, timbbaland). but each albums sounds so different, pretty crazy they got new jack swing then smoothed out boom bap then timbaland rips then pop beats from the same stable of producers (more or less).
Only got into them a couple of years ago but CrazySexyCool is such a smooth record, love it
probably as influential as Mariah in combining r&b with hip hop?