Obviously, the new jack swing era has become one of R&B's most beloved periods. A sound and style that may have seemed relegated to its era has found universality and timelessness via music by artists like Bruno Mars and events like BET's landmark mini-series The New Edition Story. But it's undeniable that the new jack swing era ended at some point—so what killed it? 30 years ago, R&B was caught in a transitional period; as artists like Mary J. Blige and Jodeci seemed to point the way towards something post-new jack.

In the early 1990s, R&B was still immersed in a new jack swing tidal wave. The sound had broken big in the late 1980s via hit albums like Keith Sweat's Make It Last Forever and Bobby Brown's Don't Be Cruel. It had taken over the R&B charts and then the pop charts; and rappers like Heavy D and Big Daddy Kane were working with new jack auteur Teddy Riley. By the dawn of the 1990s, even pop acts like New Kids On the Block and Glenn Medeiros were doing it; and blockbuster albums by artists like Janet and Michael Jackson were steeped in new jack swing. In summer 1991, Michael Jackson released his multiplatinum selling Dangerous album, a project that had mostly been produced by Riley. It was a sign of the sound's pre-eminence that Jackson would move on from longtime collaborator Quincy Jones to work with Riley; but it was also an indicator that things had reached something of a pinnacle. Even if it's only obvious in hindsight.

Late 1991 and early 1992 saw debut albums from what would soon be recognized as R&B's new wave: namely Boyz II Men, Jodeci and TLC. Alongside Born Into the 90s..., the debut album from R. Kelly & Public Announcement, these releases represented the artists who would soon sit atop the genre, commercially. These platinum-selling projects were all ostensibly new jack swing albums, however; but the tide was about to start turning on the success of a hit remix from Jodeci.

Flipping the groove from EPMD's "You're A Customer" (itself a sample of Steve Miller Band and The Honeydrippers), Jodeci's single drew directly from Hip-Hop's tradition. This wasn't just new jack-style R&B over Hip-Hop beats; this was actually taking a Hip-Hop song and using it as the foundation for an R&B hit. It wasn't entirely without precedent: Bell Biv DeVoe's new jack classic "Poison" was born of Kool G Rap and DJ Polo's song of the same name. But this was R&B that was informed by and reverential to Hip-Hop in a way that seemed to separate it from what came before.

And it was a slow song. And that's important to note.

Where new jack swing was heavily dance-driven, the emergence of hip-hop soul saw things slowing down just a bit. One can't deny that high-energy choreography was still present in early Jodeci and Mary J. Blige videos, but over time; the emphasis shifted from the dancefloor. There was an emphasis on soulfulness and sincerity; music that was drenched in hip-hop but from a moodier, more downbeat place.

This wasn't meant to get you moving. Not exactly. Blige's emergence was just after Jodeci's, and the diva of Uptown Records pushed things even further away from where they'd been in new jack swing era R&B. Mary debuted on the Strictly Business soundtrack in late 1991, but it was her 1992 single "Real Love" that truly announced her as a new star in R&B. That hit single was produced by Cory Rooney and former Fat Boys member Prince Markie Dee, a piano-driven mid-tempo smash that was built on a sample of Audio Two's seminal rap hit "Top Billin'."

"'Real Love' was two years old before it came out," Prince Markie Dee recalled to Soren Baker. "We wrote that song two years prior to it coming out. We were in California at the ASCAP awards or something like that and I remember Puff coming up to me and saying, ''Real Love' is the next single.' It was almost like instantly the phone started ringing."

Mary J. Blige released her debut What's the 411? in fall of 1992, and the Yonkers-born singer was dubbed "The Queen Of Hip-Hop Soul." The title was both effective branding for Blige, and also announced the dawning of a new sound in R&B. "New jack swing" was now a dead term. This is the era of "Hip-Hop Soul."

In Atlanta, Jermaine Dupri was launching his own label. Dupri had seen massive success throughout 1992 with his tween rap duo Kris Kross and their multiplatinum debut album Totally Krossed Out. Columbia Records offered Dupri his own label deal, and Dupri was kickstarting So So Def Records. But he was kicking things off with a quartet of singers from Southwest Atlanta.

Xscape featured sisters Latocha and Tamika Scott, Tameka "Tiny" Cottle and Kandi Burruss. And Dupri's vision for the girls was a post-Mary J. Blige edginess.

"He was like, 'Y'all can sing, y'all like the ghetto En Vogue,'" Latocha Scott said in 2013. "We were kinda like, 'OK, ghetto En Vogue? Cool.' We were also compared to Jodeci cause we had the rugged look. We kinda just brought who we were to the table and Jermaine added that hip-hop flavor to the music. It was just a good mesh."

While artists like Jodeci and TLC had begun their careers predominantly as new jack swing acts; by their respective second albums, these artists were pushing into newer, non-new jack directions. On 1993s Diary Of a Mad Band, Jodeci seemed to embrace West Coast G-funk in a way that completely recalibrated the group's aesthetic and DeVante Swing's production.

The sound of Diary Of A Mad Band would become something of a staple as 1993 gave way to 1994 and G-Funk inspired R&B hits became the norm. R. Kelly's 12 Play and Aaliyah's controversial Age Ain't Nothin' But A Number also further emphasized this new melding of Hip-Hop and R&B; as did releases by groups like SWV and Intro. After disbanding his popular new jack swing group Guy, Riley would re-emerge with a new quartet named BlackStreet, and showed that he could keep up with changing times. By the mid-1990s, new jack swing was no more.

Artists like Brandy and Boyz II Men may have seemed to thrive in a more mall-friendly variation of 90s R&B, but they were no less Hip-Hop connected. One of the landmark releases of Hip-Hop soul is Brandy's stellar "I Wanna Be Down" remix, a chart-topper which featured rappers MC Lyte, Yo-Yo and Queen Latifah.

“Lyte made me rewrite my part,” Latifah recalled in 2014. “I had some lovey-dovey, emotional, cute [lyrics]. I was like, ‘Oh, no no. I better step my game up or MC Lyte is going to butcher me on this record.'”

“I couldn’t wait,” Yo-Yo said. “It was the first time we had all been together on one song. The song was hot. Keith Crouch had just done an incredible job. The beat was just slamming. I was like, ‘This is a hit.’ … The styling, the makeup, the video just made it that much better.”

The success of the "I Wanna Be Down" remix typified what would become something of a standard in mid-1990s: the rap-centric remix of a popular R&B hit. Boyz II Men would team with Treach of Naughty By Nature, Craig Mack, Busta Rhymes and Method Man for the remix version of their single "Vibin.'"

R&B and Hip-Hop were now joined at the hip in a way that felt organic and effortless. There were no more anonymous psuedo-rappers appearing on R&B songs to give those hits a Hip-Hop edge; these were official collaborations and Hip-Hop had just as much reverence as R&B, and vice versa, from this wave of artists. Singers like Case would see tremendous success in the mid-1990s, delivering R&B love songs with a rapper's swagger. Case would work with Mary J. Blige and rapper Foxy Brown on "Touch Me, Tease Me," one of the biggest R&B hits of 1996.

“Yeah, I met Mary through Misa [Hylton] when we were working on the album. She had come to the studio to hang out or whatever. We just started hanging out,” Case said. “She was there when I was working on my album. There were three or four songs that she wrote, or that we wrote together.”

There is no singular force in the rise of Hip-Hop Soul; but, when examining the history of R&B in the 1990s, it's impossible to overstate the impact of Sean "Puffy" Combs and Bad Boy Records. Building on the template forged by Uptown Records, Puff's label took Hip-Hop Soul to the masses in a way that branded it across mainstream R&B.

Once Bad Boy Records saw major commercial success via the Notorious B.I.G. and his hit 1994 debut album Ready To Die, the label immediately began churning out major projects from its R&B acts. Artists like Total, Faith Evans and 112 were soon dominating urban radio, and they were doing it with a style that was just as Hip-Hop as Biggie--despite not being rappers. Total began as Total Opposite, and auditioned passionately for Puff.

“If you look at us, we were all completely opposite of one another, so the name stuck,” recalled Total's Pamela Long in a 2021 interview with Hip Hop News Uncensored. “I was a knucklehead—15 years old—the first time I ever went to the studio in my life; a family friend took me.” Puff changed their name after he they gave an impromptu performance in an elevator at the Hit Factory recording studio.

“We were giving him everything we had […] we’re performing all in his face,” expressed Long. However, the mogul seemed “uninterested.” Long later learned that it was simply a facade. “[At] 5 a.m. the next morning, he called our manager Kathy Dukes and said, ‘Don’t take those girls anywhere, I want to sign them.’”

Alongside Bad Boy's popular remixes of major hits (one can't pretend Mariah Carey's "Honey" single didn't break tremendous ground for pop stars embracing of Hip-Hop Soul tropes), the success of Puff Daddy and his R&B acts recalibrated the genre. Bad Boy married singers and rappers on virtually all of the label's major hits, with those classic remixes launching the careers of stars like Ma$e.

Uptown Records had seen major successes with Mary J. Blige and Jodeci, but by the mid-1990s, former upstarts like Death Row and Bad Boy were now standard-bearers for the urban music industry. Uptown had been the label that kickstarted the Hip-Hop soul revolution, and now it suddenly seemed as other camps were passing the label in terms of visibility.

But as Bad Boy was scaling commercial heights, Uptown Records hadn't been languishing on the sidelines. Labelhead Andre Harrell departed Uptown in 1995, and rapper Heavy D, one of the label's biggest stars, assumed the position of CEO. The label released popular albums by the sibling quartet Soul IV Real and singer Monifah, as well as Heavy D's subsequent solo albums following the dissolution of his backing group The Boyz. Heavy was producing hits and A&Ring albums for the label, leading to commercial hits like "Every Little Thing I Do" and "I Miss You" and, of course, one of Uptown's most beloved singles.

"There was a record called 'Candy Rain,'" Heavy recalled to Consciousness Mag in 2009. "And a great friend of mine who used to work at Uptown Records, Lewis Tucker, was like the radio promotions guy and he didn’t understand the record. We were friends first and he was a guy that I kind of looked up to and admired. He was like, 'I don’t know man, I don’t think we should put this record out.' Something in me was like, 'Dude, just trust me,' and he left it alone. I don’t know if it was the passion I said it with or whatever. He left it alone and he trusted me; that record blew up, sky rocketed. He didn’t understand. Later on, Doug Morris who I idolize as well, I idolize my dad, but who I have a tremendous amount of respect, love and honor for, told me, "No matter what you do, you pick the record and then you give it to the people promoting radio. Just because they promote radio doesn’t mean they know how to pick records. Don’t let them tell you what to pick! Give them the record and you make them work the record."

Both Heavy D and Andre Harrell have passed on, but the legacy of Uptown Records is imprinted onto the history of R&B and Hip-Hop. Diddy's ongoing success is a testament to the vision that these industry influencers had for urban music three decades ago. Hip-Hop soul may be a somewhat antiquated term today; but it's only because the idea of R&B and Hip-Hop blended has been intrinsic to contemporary music. From Usher to Drake to Aaliyah to Beyonce; it's impossible to imagine the past 30 years of Black music without Hip-Hop soul's shadow looming over it.