RAMBLE ON: "1-4-All-4-1" by The East Coast Family

Yvette Nicole Brown, to me, seemed like the odd cast member out in Community – a character actress given the chance to shine, and who didn’t really seem steeped in the world of oddball comedy like Donald Glover or Chevy Chase or much of the Dan Harmon-verse. I guess that was true of all the women on the show, but Gillian Jacobs and Alison Brie were at least hot up-and-coming actresses, whereas Yvette’s character Shirley was also an odd one out, a middle-aged churchgoing mom who was alternately sweet and stern but much more grounded than the wacky other cast members. I wondered where she came from, and started looking. I found a lot of one-off guest spots on more traditional sitcoms – her recurring role on Drake & Josh, a supporting role on a short-lived vehicle for pre-superstardom Kevin Hart. What had she done before that? I looked harder. I found this.

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In 1992, Michael Bivins was riding high. Not necessarily because of his music, not at that moment in time. The band he had made his name with, New Edition, was broken up. He and two other ex-members reformed as Bell Biv Devoe and scored some big hits, but they were between albums at the moment – and when they finally did follow it up, they wouldn’t be nearly as successful. Much like Wilson Phillips, Nelson and Vanilla Ice, BBD would end up a phenomenon strictly confined to the year of 1990.

But Bivins had visions far beyond singing and dancing for a living. If New Jack Swing can be considered part of hip-hop, Bivins is maybe the first of hip-hop’s specific breed of entrepreneur – one who was making money at all ends in every avenue, in talent management, in fashion, in production. He started scouting out talent, and he unearthed a major find for Motown Records with Another Bad Creation, a group of preteen singers who had a big year in 1991. His biggest success would hit shortly after. A four-man vocal group, named "Boyz II Men" after a New Edition song, sought him out at one of his concerts, and Bivins, seeing potential, adopted them as his first clients and molded them into a prep-chic commercial powerhouse. Boyz II Men’s sales records are basically unfathomable now; they would soon have all the Philly steaks they could eat. Their first single, “Motownphilly,” had references to Bell Biv Devoe and Another Bad Creation, but the Boyz would blast so far past them in fame that those shoutouts seem almostcondescending now. 1992 also started out well for Bivins, with his next act MC Brains landing just outside the top 20 with “Oochie Coochie” (no mean feat considering that this song is terrible). Bivins was the man behind all their success, and with his three-artist development deal with Motown fulfilled, he was now cashing in that clout. Motown gave him the green light; soon, Bivins had signed a major partnership between Motown and his brand new label, Biv 10 Records.

The first thing Bivins’s new label released was a single and video called “1-4-All-4-1,” and judging by it, he built up a gigantic roster very quickly. “1-4-All-4-1” is basically a sampler platter showcasing the entire Biv 10 lineup, and by the end of the video, the first thing you will think is that there is way too goddamn many of them. How could a label spread this thin hope to make any of these people successful? That is of course me extrapolating from hindsight, because basically no one from Biv 10 (minus Yvette Nicole Brown) were ever seen again.

The thrill of finding an artifact like the East Coast Family isn’t exactly that it’s embarrassing. The early ‘90s was a time of rapid sudden change in the music industry, but New Jack Swing isn’t necessarily embarrassing the way that hair metal or pop rap was; it’s actually a key stage in the evolution of r&b, and people never stopped jamming to “Poison” or “Motownphilly.” So I wouldn’t say that it’s aged badly – but it has certainly aged. You can pinpoint the exact moment it was made by one act that actually is quite embarrassing: an act called "1010" consisting of two squeaky-voiced preteen rappers wearing their clothes the wrong way. Kriss Kross-mania didn’t last very long, so the existence of Kriss Kross ripoffs means this was made by February 1993 at the very latest. That’s only the most specific example of a vast array of period signifiers – others are the clown-colored fashions, the vests with no shirt underneath, the fact that all the rappers use the diggity-iggity rhyme pattern, the fact that it’s a New Jack Swing song at all.

So it's a glorified commercial for the label, but does it work as a song? Can it be enjoyed unironically? A big impediment to that is that posse cuts are for rappers, not r&b singers who make up the majority of the stable. A rapper can impress with eight bars, an r&b singer usually needs a full song to do their showing off. (The small handful of group acts in the mix are especially hamstrung here, having to share time with not only their labels but their own bandmates.)

None of the performers are really given a chance to shine, but if I had to pick some highlights – there is one obvious standout and that is Hayden, a round-faced Midwesterner who looks like an O-lineman, or Donkey Lips from Salute Your Shorts, a guy so absurdly wrong for the role that he somehow becomes right. Hayden sings his short verse, he dances, he’s awkwardly holding a suit jacket so that he can finish by casually slinging it over his shoulder – a setup so contrived that you couldn’t possibly fake it. Beautiful.

A Caucasian act also provides the lowlight. This pack of dudes had previously made a brief, contextless cameo in the “Motownphilly” video under the name “Sudden Impact”; they appear here again, bafflingly renamed “Whytgize.” They’re wearing sharp suits that immediately mark them as swagless New Kids on the Block wannabes (joining 1010 in making their inspirations too obvious). The track slams too hard to give their harmonies any breathing room, and they don’t have the attitude. No one else really makes much of an impact either, although I do like the one guy who provides a house piano solo while not singing.

That’s the major problem that makes this a campy relic rather than an unearthed hidden gem -- the fact that this is a random collection of never-wases gives the entire enterprise an air of failure. Ooh, it's Tomboyy, Lady V, MarkFinesse and Fruit Punch -- who? Each and every name looks silly. (Young Money may have had to give time to Jae Millz and Gudda Gudda but at least they had Drake and Nicki in between.) The only famous people on this track are the previously mentioned Boyz II Men, ABC and MC Brains, who lend some cred but none of whom were actually on Biv 10.

In fact, Biv 10 Records never wound up doing much of anything – their one major success was the girl group 702 (Where my girls at, from the front to back! You remember it), and they signed on well after “1-4-All-4-1” was recorded. Bivins claims that he was sabotaged by the record industry – Motown’s partnership terms were too generous, and the industry sabotaged his success to make sure such deals didn’t become commonplace. It’s easy to call bullshit, and just assume that it failed because he was an immature 22-year-old juggling too much responsibility and too many artists. And yet, a brash 22-year-old hip-hop entrepreneur at an upstart label did become a wild success and upend r&b that year. That would be Sean “Puffy” Combs, and he became the model of what Bivins was trying to achieve; that year, he launched Jodeci and Mary J. Blige and started a new era he called “hip-hop soul.” Two years later, his label Uptown Records fired him, so he started his own, Bad Boy, and the rest is history. I’m not sure whether Puff Daddy’s success is evidence for or against Bivins’s record cartel conspiracy theory; is he proof that Bivins could have succeeded, or is it just evidence that Bivins wasn't as good a businessman as Puffy? Hard to say, but Puffy’s impact shows where Biv 10 failed. Mary J. and Jodeci made sure that New Jack Swing would be, while important, a thing of the past. Bivins only followed trends; Diddy started them.

Two years after I first found this video in 2019, former MTV host Dave Holmes released a passion project 10-part podcast called "Waiting for Impact," dedicated to finding out what happened to Sudden Impact/Whytgize. I listened to it over the holidays to fact-check this article, I'd say it's only partially successful – it’s interesting to examine the travails of the music industry through one of its many luckless dreamers, but unfortunately there’s just not that much to say about Whytgize. But a number of other East Coast Family members are interviewed, including Yvette and Hayden, and the most interesting thing to me about the podcast is that all of Holmes’s interviewees seem to have fond memories of Bivins, even though he sold them the moon and didn’t deliver.  (Yvette, who played Bivins’s mom in the TV biopic he produced, is especially fond of him.) “1-4-All-4-1” promises a tight, united crew of friends in Biv 10.  A black singer, Calé, sings “damn it’s gettin’ it right whether it’s black or it’s white” and gives Hayden a big high-five. I love this moment, and I love that Yvette still tweets at Hayden as old friends. The thesis of the podcast is that lack of success isn’t failing; yeah, maybe. But there’s pathos in failure – look at this happy group of people, united, about to catch their big break or so they all think. The East Coast Family actually looks like a family. The more I think about it, the more I think that vibe would have been harshed if any of them had made it. They all got nothing, so they could all share it; they truly are one for all and all for one.