Minneapolis and Atlanta are a thousand miles apart, and in the 1990s that distance felt like the full width of Black radio. On one end, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis were running Flyte Tyme Studios with a philosophy rooted in live arrangement, Minneapolis funk, and the conviction that a vocal performance should cost the singer something. On the other, Babyface and L.A. Reid had built LaFace Records in Atlanta into a hit factory that answered to melody first, pop crossover second, and the gut feelings of two men who had played in the same R&B group together before they ever sat behind a board. These were the two dominant production camps of the decade, and the artists in this community lived between their gravitational pulls.
Jam and Terry Lewis came to their careers the hard way. When they produced the SOS Band's hit "Just Be Good to Me" in 1983, they broke Prince's rule that no member of the Time do outside work, and he fired them. A snowstorm in Atlanta had kept them from their flight home, costing them the gig with Prince and buying them their freedom. They set up an alternative Minneapolis production powerhouse, Flyte Tyme Studios, where they crafted hits for the Force MDs, Patti Austin, and Cheryl Lynn. The studio became a destination. Artists flew to Minneapolis because the sound that came out of Flyte Tyme could not be replicated anywhere else, built as it was on the particular chemistry of James Harris III's keyboards and synthesizers and Terry Lewis's bass guitar, both men functioning simultaneously as producers, arrangers, and instrumentalists. Harris served as producer, arranger, keyboards, piano, synthesizers, drum programming, and percussion; Lewis as producer, arranger, bass guitar, percussion, and synthesizers. That was the whole band, and that discipline showed in how tight the records felt.
New Edition's 1988 album Heart Break is the clearest proof of what Flyte Tyme could do when given a group with real vocal range. "If It Isn't Love," written by James Harris III and Terry Lewis and produced by the pair, was recorded at Flyte Tyme Studios in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and released as the first single from the album on June 9, 1988. That record gave New Edition their first Billboard Hot 100 Top 10. The album as a whole, with Ralph Tresvant, Johnny Gill, and the full New Edition complement working against Jam and Lewis's synthesizer architecture, showed how the Minneapolis duo handled vocal groups: they gave the singers room, built the track around the emotion rather than the groove, and let the arrangement breathe. "Love Will Never Do (Without You)" for Janet Jackson was recorded using an SP-1200 drum machine and an Ensoniq Mirage keyboard, a combination that placed hip-hop's rhythmic logic inside an R&B frame years before that became standard practice. Jam and Lewis were behind nine of Janet Jackson's ten number-one hits between 1986 and 2001. That run is one of the most sustained producer-artist partnerships in popular music history, and it anchored Flyte Tyme's reputation as the place where serious R&B got made.
The LaFace story begins differently, warmer and more collaborative at the root. In the early 1980s, Edmonds and Reid started working together in Indianapolis, Indiana, when both were members of the group the Deele. After three albums with the group, the pair moved in 1985 to Los Angeles, where they established themselves as a songwriting and production team, working with the Whispers, Bobby Brown, Whitney Houston, Boyz II Men, and Pebbles, among other acts. The band background mattered. Babyface understood how singers thought because he was one, and that empathy translated directly into how he wrote for other voices. He had been nicknamed "Babyface" by funk superstar Bootsy Collins while still a teen. By the time he and Reid founded LaFace, he had already developed a gift for writing songs that felt confessional without being confessional, songs that belonged to the singer the moment they opened their mouth. Founded in 1989 as a joint venture with Arista Records, LaFace produced thirty-three number-one singles by artists including TLC, OutKast, Usher, and Toni Braxton.
The Toni Braxton debut is where the LaFace aesthetic reaches its clearest expression. Released as the lead single and opening track on Toni Braxton's self-titled debut album, also produced by Babyface, Reid, and Daryl Simmons, "Another Sad Love Song" was her breakout hit, earning her a Grammy Award for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance in 1994. "Breathe Again" was recorded at LaCoCo and Doppler Studios in Atlanta, Georgia, written by Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds, and produced by Edmonds, L.A. Reid, and Daryl Simmons. The three-producer credit on that record tells you something about how LaFace worked: Simmons was a frequent third voice in the room, shaping the sonic palette while Babyface wrote and Reid pushed the commercial instinct. Braxton's eponymous 1993 debut album went on to sell over eight million copies and earned her the 1994 Grammy Award for Best New Artist. For Boyz II Men, Babyface's touch was even more direct. He wrote and produced Boyz II Men's 1992 "End of the Road" and 1994 "I'll Make Love to You," both of which established records for the longest stay at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. He received three consecutive Grammy Awards for Producer of the Year from 1995 to 1997.
What separates these two camps is not quality but philosophy. Jam and Lewis built from the room outward: the studio in Minneapolis, the instruments in the room, the arrangement serving the singer's range. Babyface built from the song inward: the melody first, the lyric as emotional architecture, the production as the frame that held the feeling. Lewis once said of vocal performance: "Tuning instead of takes is blasphemy." That sentence is a whole production school in eight words. Babyface, for his part, wrote across genres and voices with a consistency that made the song feel inevitable, as if the artist had always been waiting for those particular words. At one point, the duo of Babyface and L.A. Reid was responsible for six singles appearing simultaneously in the R&B top ten. The artists in this community did not have to choose between these two worlds. They inherited both of them, and the decade was richer for it.
