Skip to main content

The Music of Troop

Thirteen tracks from a Pasadena vocal group who were briefly enormous and are now remembered mostly by people who were there. Troop deserve the revisit.

Total Respect Of Other People

Troop formed in Pasadena, California in the late 1980s — the name is an acronym for Total Respect Of Other People — and became one of the most successful of the new jack swing-era vocal groups, with a run of R&B hits between 1988 and 1992.

They occupy a specific place in the lineage. Coming after New Edition and before Jodeci, Troop sat between the clean teen-idol model and the harder, sexually explicit groups that followed. Their strength was harmony — five voices, arranged tightly, with real gospel training underneath — and their records hold up better than their profile suggests.

What to listen for

"All I Do Is Think of You" is their biggest and best. It is a Jackson 5 song — a 1975 album track that was never a single — and Troop's version turned it into an R&B number one. The arrangement is a masterclass in five-part vocal writing.

"Spread My Wings" is the other essential and the one that defines them. The Reprise version included here shows how much they thought about sequencing.

"Still in Love" and "Sweet November" are the deeper ballads, and "Sweet November" in particular is a superb piece of writing.

"My Attitude"-era material and "I'm Not Soupped" show the new jack swing side — the swing beat, the hard snare, the rap-adjacent phrasing that Teddy Riley made the default sound of the era.

"I Will Always Love You" is not the Dolly Parton song — it is their own, and worth clarifying.

"Young Girl" and "A Melody" close out the picture.

Go deeper

Attitude (1989) and Deepa (1992) are the albums.

For the era: New Edition is the origin point, Guy and Teddy Riley are the architects of new jack swing, and Jodeci, Boyz II Men, Hi-Five and Shai are the contemporaries. Between them they account for most of what was on Black radio between 1988 and 1994.

And the Jackson 5 original of "All I Do Is Think of You" is worth finding — it is a beautiful record that Motown left buried on an album.

One final thought on why they faded. Troop had the harmony and the material, and they arrived just as the ground shifted: Jodeci landed in 1991 with leather, attitude and DeVante Swing's production, and the clean five-part vocal group suddenly looked like the previous era. That is a matter of timing rather than quality, and it is why a catalogue this good is now remembered mostly by people who were buying records at the time.

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