Bell Biv DeVoe Is Secretly the Most Influential Pop Group of All-Time

Yes, the "never trust a big butt and a smile" guys

Remember Bell Biv DeVoe? Sure you do! They had that “Poison” song back in the day!

You know who loves that song? Everyone.

During their Vanilla Ice-length reign, Bell Biv DeVoe released a handful of hits that subsequently generated a couple of timeless pieces of ass-related wisdom. The aforementioned “Poison” taught us to never trust a big butt and a smile. The follow-up single “Do Me!” told us that if we did find a big butt we trusted, the next move was to smack it up, flip it, rub it down.

While they were a bit too successful to be written off as one hit wonders, the fact that all of their hits were on their first album (along with all the butt stuff) does saddle Bell Biv DeVoe with a bit of a novelty act vibe.

That is understandable, but that doesn’t mean it’s deserved. In fact, I would argue that rather than being a blip on the radar of pop music history, Bell Biv DeVoe is quietly one of the most influential music groups of all-time.

Come along on a journey with me. It starts with Prince!

Shutterstock said I can use this picture, please don’t sue me, Prince’s estate!

Seeing as how they’ve been joined at the hip for decades now, it’s hard to fathom that there was a point in history when rap music and pop/R&B music did not get along so well. That was the case for almost the entirety of the 1980s.

Sure, there were some crossover attempts, and some of them weren’t the worst. Jody Watley and Eric B. & Rakim teamed up with arguably decent results, for example.

Still, in that and most other cases, the results just sounded like a rap verse awkwardly shoehorned into a pop song. Like literally every time Bobby Brown rapped.

No artist was more representative of the weird relationship between rap music and pop music during this time than Prince. His legendary Black Album, which was initially set to be released in 1987 (and was heavily bootlegged that same year after being shelved), included a song called “Dead On It.”

In one of the most meta moves in music history, it is both a diss track aimed at “silly” and “tone deaf” rappers, and one of Prince’s earliest and most awkward attempts to incorporate rap into his own music.

Now, Prince obviously changed his mind when it came to rap music, with varying results.

What finally won him over? Apparently, it was legendary rap group Public Enemy and, more specifically, their 1989 hit “Fight The Power.”

That’s according to Wendy Melvoin from the Revolution and that Tony M guy who rapped on a bunch of New Power Generation-era songs both.

That brings us back to Bell Biv DeVoe and just one of the ways they changed music forever with the release of the Poison album. Again, up to that point, most crossovers between rap and pop/R&B artists just amounted to dropping a rap verse into what was otherwise clearly not a rap song.

Bell Biv DeVoe went the other way. They incorporated pop and R&B elements into what was otherwise mostly rap music production aesthetics, so much so that a third of the songs on Poison are produced by Hank Shocklee, Keith Shocklee, and Eric Sadler.

They are the trio who produced all of Public Enemy’s most famous songs and albums, including “Fight The Power,” under the name The Bomb Squad.

A short couple of years after that, Sean “Puff Daddy (sp?)” Combs took that same formula of mixing R&B vocals with rap music production and ran with it on Mary J. Blige’s groundbreaking What’s The 411? album.

From that point on, pop and R&B music mostly stopped trying to incorporate rap into what they do and started trying to do what rap music was doing, and it’s kind of been that way ever since.

For that reason alone, Bell Biv DeVoe (Bell Biv) deserves a lot more credit than history will ever give them, but there’s more!

Around the same time the formation of Bell Biv DeVoe was announced, group member Michael Bivins was starting to dip his toes into management and talent development. As luck would have it, at a concert in Philadelphia around that same time, a hopeful young R&B group snuck backstage with the goal of finding and performing for Will Smith. Instead, they found Michael Bivins and performed “Can You Stand the Rain,” a hit by New Edition, the other, far more well known group he’s a part of.

That group was Boyz II Men. Ever heard of them? They only went on to be one of the biggest selling pop groups of the ‘90s. It’s easy to forget that they started their life as Bell Biv DeVoe proteges who, along with kid group Another Bad Creation…

…made up a unit called The East Coast Family. The songs on the first Boyz II Men album, Cooleyhighharmony, are a direct continuation of the sound and style of Bell Biv DeVoe’s Poison…

…as opposed to the version of Boyz II Men that climbed to the absolute peak of pop music success and lived the dream we all dream of by collaborating with Mariah Carey.

There’s a very specific reason why the Boyz II Men sound changed so dramatically after that first album. While they were touring to support it, they briefly returned to the studio to record a song that famed producer and musician Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds wrote for the soundtrack to the Eddie Murphy film Boomerang. That song was “End Of the Road” and it quickly become the group’s biggest hit up to that point.

Their sophomore album, the aptly titled II, leaned really hard into the sound they crafted on that song with Babyface and the people loved it. The album eventually sold a staggering 12 million copies, and Boyz II Men never returned to the sound that first made them famous on the Cooleyhighharmony album.

From that point on, every pop and R&B group that wasn’t trying to sound like Bell Biv DeVoe or Mary J. Blige was trying to sound like sophomore-album-Boyz II Men for years to come.

For not only bridging the gap between rap and pop/R&B music, but also providing the launching point for one of the biggest pop acts of the ‘90s, Bell Biv DeVoe should get way more music history credit than they do…and we still aren’t done.

When it was time for Boyz II Men to record their first album, Michael Bivins paired them with a young upcoming producer named Dallas Austin. He produced the majority of Cooleyhighharmony, but after the group’s sound shifted, he was only credited with producing one song on that massive follow-up album.

On the bright side, that left Dallas Austin with lots of time to pursue other projects, so Babyface and his production partner LA Reid tapped him to work on the debut album from a group they’d just signed to their record label. That group was TLC.

If the name sounds familiar it’s because they are the best selling American girl group of all time. They’ve sold around 65 million records to date. Dallas Austin not only produced a majority of their first album, he also produced some of the key singles from the album that eventually made TLC legitimate superstars, CrazySexyCool.

So, you can draw a direct line that connects the first Bell Biv DeVoe album to at least three acts who would go on to define pop music for the rest of the ‘90s and well beyond. But we still are not done.

Dallas Austin did some of his earliest production work while hanging out at an Atlanta roller rink that featured a recording studio built for another local production outfit, Organized Noize. They had already made a name for themselves by producing the first Outkast album, which was released a few months before TLC’s CrazySexyCool, but their name rang out a whole lot louder after producing that album’s standout hit and TLC’s defining song.

The work they would go on to do with Outkast and The Goodie Mob throughout the rest of the ‘90s brought Southern rap music to prominence and wrestled the genre away from the previous two party system control of New York and Los Angeles.

You can’t directly tie that to Dallas Austin and the BBD bloodline, but the influence is still there. If Dallas Austin doesn’t produce the first Boyz II Men album at the behest of Michael Bivins, chances are he doesn’t get entrusted with producing the first TLC album. If he somehow managed to mess that up, there’s no guarantee TLC would have even gotten to record a second album, which obviously would have significantly altered the future fortunes of the Organized Noize collective. They still would’ve done a bunch of cool stuff with Outkast after that, but who knows if it turns out as good if they’re producing it without the comfort of having all that TLC money in their pockets.

Either way, whether you choose to exclude Organized Noize and the explosion of Southern rap from the discussion or not, it is undeniable that some of the biggest and most influential pop acts and moments of the ‘90s, and the aesthetic that still dominates pop music today, all have roots that run directly back to what Bell Biv DeVoe started on their massively underappreciated debut album.

For all of those reasons, Bell Biv DeVoe is one of the most influential music groups of all-time.