New jack swing is a hybrid style popular from the late-1980s into the mid-1990s, which fuses the rhythms, samples and production techniques of hip-hop with the urban contemporary sound of R&B. It uses mellifluously soulful solo or harmonizing vocals sung over rhythms and "street" beats derived from urban musical influences.
New jack swing did not take up the trend of using sampled beats, and instead created beats using the then-new SP1200 and Roland 808 drum machines to lay an "insistent beat under light melody lines and clearly enunciated vocals." Encyclopedia Britannica states that the "key producers" were Kenneth Brian "Babyface" Edmonds and Teddy Riley. New Jack Swing continue to be successful until about 1997. Afterwards, it went underground as it waned in the mainstream. In the mid 2000s, a New Jack Swing revival started. Since then, some of the music styles' artists have released new albums. By the 2010s, remixes of popular songs from the 2000s and 2010s in the New Jack Swing sound have started to pop up on such sites as YouTube. .
