New Jack Swing

New jack swing is a fusion of contemporary R&B, hip hop and funk that dominated Black American popular music from the late 1980s into the early 1990s. Its signature is a swung, heavily syncopated drum-machine beat — the swing of jazz applied to programmed rhythm — supporting melodic, gospel-inflected singing and rap verses within the same song. Created by producer Teddy Riley and his contemporaries, the style replaced the live-band feel of earlier R&B with dense, sample-and-synthesizer production while keeping the singer, rather than the rapper, at the center of the record.