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Teddy Riley hopes he finally has a group that can stay together. The leader of BLACKstreet, says the quartet's new members give the group a broader vocal range, plus a harmony it previously lacked. Tenor Mark Middleton and baritone Eric Williams replaced Levi Little and David Hollister, who left to pursue solo careers, leaving Riley and Chauncey Hannibal as the only original members.
All families have disagreements, but with these guys we can still come together with a unity that the last group never had, Riley says. When we disagreed, it would last for the whole tour. There was just too much animosity where everybody just thought about themselves instead of what was good for the group.
Riley says he had been down that road before with the groundbreaking hip-hop trio Guy, which included Aaron and Damion Hall. It disbanded in 1991.
But he has a better feeling about the current BLACKstreet, which in November ended the 14-week run of Los Del Rio's Macarena (Bayside Boys Mix) atop the pop singles chart with the mesmerizing No Diggity. The song, combining the production talents of Riley and rapper Dr. Dre, stayed at No. 1 for a month. It also helped keep their album, Another Level, atop the R&B charts for five weeks.
Riley, who is largely credited with creating "new jack swing" - that hybrid of and hip-hop - 10 years ago, now wants to bring back classic . He says that aside from No Diggity, he purposely kept Another Level rap-free.
I want to go back to heavy, where you don't need a rap song to have an song do really well," Riley says. We wanted to do in its pure form, with good singing and some real playing.
While the album includes a couple of funk-drenched dance numbers, it's mostly old-style ballads and mid-tempo tunes that avoid the negativity found in a lot of urban music.
It is what people need to bring families together and bring more self-esteem to young, actually all, women going through problems," Riley says. We've got a song on there called The Lord Is Real (Time Will Reveal), and he is real if you believe in God. All you got to do is pray, and things will come through for you.
The Harlem-bred Riley moved to Virginia Beach, Va., six years ago to get away from the more cutthroat recording practices in New York. He says that he could not really take control of what he was doing as long as he stayed there.
In New York, you can't make it what you want it to be because everybody wants to be a star, Riley says. Everybody is stealing from each other, and I've been places where I've been ripped off. Everybody would be at one studio and pop into each other's rooms or listen at the door to see what you were coming up with.
Riley, who has produced hits for everybody from Michael Jackson to the Winans, will be working on new material for BLACKstreet and other artists he's developing while on the road. He has a mobile studio on a bus from which he can download music to his main studio in Virginia Beach.
He has a distribution deal with Interscope Records, which is run by Jimmy Iovine, and his own label, Little Man Records. He called it that because we're both short, and we're not big shots. We're little guys trying to make it big.
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