Skip to main content

Mint Condition VibeZ

Twenty-two tracks from a Minneapolis band who played their own instruments in an era of programmed R&B and were quietly the best live act in the genre.

OneLove

Mint Condition

Mint Condition are an anomaly and have been since 1989: a six-piece self-contained band in a genre that had comprehensively moved to producers and session players. They write, arrange and play everything, and they have kept essentially the same line-up for three decades.

They came out of Minneapolis and were signed to Perspective Records, the label run by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, which placed them at the centre of the city's scene without making them sound like anyone else on it.

Stokley Williams is the reason they cut through. He sings lead and plays drums simultaneously — a rare combination — and he has one of the most flexible voices in R&B, capable of a rasp and a falsetto within the same phrase.

What to listen for

"Breakin' My Heart (Pretty Brown Eyes)" is the debut single and the record everyone knows — a band performance with real dynamics, at a moment when almost nothing on R&B radio had them.

"What Kind Of Man Would I Be" is the biggest hit and the best-written song here.

"U Send Me Swingin'" is the one musicians talk about — listen to what the rhythm section does under the second verse.

"Someone To Love" and "Forever In Your Eyes" are the ballads, and "You Don't Have To Hurt No More" is the most emotionally direct thing in the catalogue.

"Let Me Be The One" appears twice, and the Ummah remix with Phife Dawg is the hip-hop version — a genuine rarity, produced by the collective around A Tribe Called Quest and J Dilla.

"My Sista" and "10 Million Strong" are the socially conscious records, and "Girl of My Life" with DJ Jazzy Jeff is the later collaboration.

"Whoaa" and "Change Your Mind" are the deep cuts worth chasing.

Go deeper

From the Mint Factory (1993) and Definition of a Band (1996) are the two essential albums, and the second's title is a statement of position.

Stokley's solo records are worth hearing, and for the wider tradition of self-contained R&B bands: The Time, Tony! Toni! Toné! and The Roots — a very short list, which is the point.

Why the band matters: six musicians writing, arranging and playing everything, with essentially the same line-up for three decades, in a genre that had comprehensively moved to producers and session players. The dynamics on these records — things getting quieter, players responding to each other — simply do not exist on programmed contemporaries.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monty Alexander VibeZ

There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...
Post a Comment
Read more

GuiltyBeatZ VibeZ

If you have danced to anything out of Accra in the last ten years, you have probably danced to GuiltyBeatz without knowing his name. Forty-seven tracks of a producer's fingerprints — and the fingerprints turn out to be the melody. The Ghanaian producer who made Afrobeats swing Ronald Banful, who records as GuiltyBeatz, is a Ghanaian producer and DJ whose sound sits at the crossroads where Ghanaian highlife, Nigerian Afrobeats, amapiano and UK dance music all meet. He came up producing for Mr Eazi — the Banku Music partnership is where a lot of listeners first heard him — and his breakout as a name in his own right came with "Akwaaba," the 2018 track with Mr Eazi, Patapaa and Pappy Kojo that spawned a dance craze and became one of the defining African club records of its year. His reputation went global when he worked on Beyoncé's The Lion King: The Gift , but the more interesting story is the consistency. A GuiltyBeatz beat is usually ide...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kashif VibeZ

Kashif is the reason a lot of 1980s R&B sounds the way it does — and the reason you can hear the difference between a synth bassline played by someone who understood bass and one programmed by someone who didn't. This is a producer's playlist, and the producer is everywhere. The architect of the synthesized soul record Kashif was born Michael Jones in Brooklyn in 1956, raised in foster care, and taught himself music young enough that by his teens he was touring with B.T. Express. What he did next reshaped a decade. In the early 1980s, as a producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, he was among the first to build R&B records around programmed synthesizers — the Minimoog bass, the Linn drum machine, the Fairlight — without letting them sound cold. That distinction matters. Plenty of producers adopted the new gear; Kashif made it groove . His basslines are played with the phrasing of a funk bassist, full of slides and ghost notes, which is why rec...
Post a Comment
Read more