God knows where K-Ci, Dalvin, and JoJo are. When musicians begin to think on their own, they’re saying, ‘I don’t need a master,’” said Rhyant over the phone in September from Europe, where he was touring in a revue of the music of Sam Cooke, who encountered backlash after he went from performing songs like “Jesus Gave Me Water” to “She Was Only Sixteen.” Among the stars of American popular music, some of the brightest have been burnished in this crossover—Cooke, Pickett, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Donny Hathaway, the Staple Singers, Ashford & Simpson, Whitney Houston.
. To her right was Tiffany, and another cousin. Subscriptions to Rock’s Backpages are available for institutional or personal use. He gets four lines in like this — technically precise, tender, heavy with the sense of regret just around the corner.Then he passes the baton: “K-Ci, sing it.” The piano offers up a little march-like flourish, then cedes the floor.There aren’t many human parallels to the way K-Ci enters the song here: a bugle blaring the Reveille, the pink sun nudging over the horizon. “Don’t be bringing that r&b in the house, unless it’s Jodeci!” he joked. Back then, Vernon was performing with Little Cedric and the Hailey Singers, the Hailey family gospel band. Drake, the band’s most aggressive contemporary interlocutor, self-consciously situates himself within the same musical tradition; he builds songs on their samples (“How About Now”), weaves in intertextual allusions (“I think I’d die for you / Jodeci ‘Cry for You’”), and, on the song “Jodeci Freestyle” even included a snippet of a phone call with his father, Dennis Graham, whose words are evidence of Drake’s longstanding devotion: “I remember you loved Jodeci. In an interview with group member JoJo, he stated that before the group became known as Jodeci, the original song Jennifer, written by DeVante, was responsible for forming Jodeci as a group, bringing in K-Ci for the song. He tallied up the high price of each renovation: each door, he told the congregation, costs three thousand dollars to replace. Jodeci’s vision of romance was sublime, but suffocating. The song is, of course, not a Jodeci original — it was a minor hit for Wonder in 1981. To one’s church family, the shift from sacred to secular may be interpreted as vain ambition, the prostitution of God’s gift to the devil, blasphemy. He took care of Ginuwine.
Yes. View Jodeci interviews, articles and reviews from Rock's Backpages: The ultimate library of rock music writing and journalism. But none crossed over—from relative obscurity to celebrity and from gospel to secular—so boldly, indeed, so Jodeci comprised two sets of brothers raised in and around Charlotte, North Carolina: Don Jr. “DeVante Swing” (the musical mastermind of the group) and his younger brother Dalvin “Mr. In African-American church families with roots stretching back to plantations, the choice to leave religious music behind may reanimate the historical traumas of slavery, said Rev. But aside from those aspirations, I would probably model or act. ...A multi-platinum music mogul at just twenty four, Sean "Puffy" Combs is the face of future hip hop. The particular perversion of music executives like Cohen is, of course, inextricable from capitalism. We use cookies to help provide you with the best possible online experience. I cut the lights on and his hands were going everywhere, I mean just flying and he all of a sudden stopped. Jodeci was made up of two sets of brothers — K-Ci and JoJo (Cedric and Joel Hailey), and DeVanté Swing and Mr. Dalvin (Donald and Dalvin DeGrate) — though at times it … It was too late. Jodeci Speaks onTheir New Album 'The Past, The Present, The Future', Their Early Beginnings, Group Issues, Death Row Affiliation. But brief. Yeah, so usually just being alone and then showing it to my homie, and then I might play something on the keys and put it on my story. The young girl staring at me during the service, I was later told, is DeVante’s granddaughter. For full terms, please For years, he was hounded by questions about why he didn’t join his brothers’ band. While no one was looking, a new kind of R&B became the dominant force in pop music.