could it be the time-piece flooded with chips”).

Jersey native Jaheim, fully embraced the “Thug Soul” aesthetic on his debut Ghetto Love which featured tracks like “Just in Case” and “Could It Be” where he sang about his thuggish-ruggish lifestyle and his vulnerability (“could it be the drop-top Benz, that got your friends going out on the limb. As if “chickenhead” episodes somehow counter hundreds (hell, thousands) of years of patriarchal privilege, Hollister can get open with “Baby Mama Drama” (“somebody out there know what I’m talking about”) and Joe gets his sympathy on with “Stuttering”. This followed a line of reasoning that Bell Biv Devoe (BBD) first publicly broached with “Poison” (“never trust a big-butt and a smile”). What distinguished these artists from real-time thugs and connected them to the Soul Man (really the Race Man with a fly-ass vocal flow) was their willingness to posit themselves (however ludicrously) as vulnerable targets, who were beguiled and profiled, by a generation of “skeezers” and “chickenheads”.

Kelly, seemed more interested in confirming their thug status, not simply via their styles of dress and the hard-core rap artists that cameoed on their songs, but in the music itself.

Still Jodeci’s thug image was always presumed.īy the late ’90s a generation of R&B singers, most notably Dave Hollister, Joe, Chico Debarge, and veteran R. The only thing that really distinguished Jodeci from say, OJ and Pac (they were all accused of sexual abuse), was the fact they were a direct lineage to the Soul man tradition. Yeah they were thugs, or at least they tried to dress like ’em (one of Diddy’s great moments as an A&R man), but the members of Jodeci were church boys, who in the best spirit of Sam Cooke, Wilson Pickett, and Al Green simultaneously conjured the feel of the black church, fed both the fears of and heightened desires for black male sexuality in the mainstream and provided another visual component for the continued demonization of black men in popular culture.

Dalvin and Devante) dropped their debut Forever My Love (1991) and started riffing on joints like “Stay”, “Come and Talk to Me”, and “Feenin'”. Or so folks thought back in the early ’90s when the brothers Hailey and Degrate (K-Ci, JoJo, Mr. Real thugs don’t go to church, real thugs don’t love their mommas, and real thugs can’t appreciate fly-ass chords in a classic soul recording. The common thinking has always been that “thugs” are somehow outside of the mainstream of the places and spaces where they prey.

Where is jaheim now