I. A Song
Ginuwine, who has sold millions and millions of contemporary R&B albums, is not mentioned anywhere on the Wikipedia page for contemporary R&B. Not even once. And I know it’s like, “Well, chill, it’s just Wikipedia.” But still. Not once? Not one single time? How can that be? Why is his history so forgotten, so ignored, so overlooked?
Was “Pony” so big that it swallowed up all of the rest of Ginuwine’s music? Sometimes it feels like that. Or, maybe more accurately: All the time it feels like that. And that’s a shame because, to say nothing of his historical importance (which I’ll talk about in a moment), Ginuwine has made at least six other truly great songs, four of which are better than “Pony.”
There was “So Anxious,” a winding, desperate-in-the-best-way, perfectly paced love song that was so captivating and charming it made it seem like referring to yourself as “a sexaholic” was a good idea. “So Anxious” remains the all-in-all best song of Ginuwine’s career, and so it’s of course better than “Pony.” (The remaining three better-than-“Pony” songs are bolded in the following text.)
There was “What’s So Different?”, which had a guest feature from fucking Godzilla, and, I mean, if you can make a song with Godzilla, then I think that’s pretty good proof of your brilliance. (Not even Puff Daddy was able to figure out how to use Godzilla on a song, and he had Led Zeppelin helping him.) There was “Differences.” There was “Stingy.” There was “None of Ur Friends Business,” a true masterwork in shading. And there was “In Those Jeans,” wherein he sincerely asked, “Is there any more room for me in those jeans?” 16 different times. (It’s honestly an exceptional way to ask someone to have sex with you. Also, he mentions immediately that the woman he’s talking to is wearing jeans that are very tight, and then he says, “looking good, looking scrumptious,” and so he’s speaking literally about trying to fit into a pair of jeans another person is wearing while also speaking figuratively. It’s all just very … “Aristotelian” is the word I’m looking for here, I believe.)
And what about his videos? Like: What about that one where he walked into his house, sat down on his couch, then started watching pornography starring himself on a holographic TV? Or what about the one for “What’s So Different?”, which has mostly been scrubbed from the internet, but trust me it was fantastic. (You can watch a very lo-res version of it here.) Or what about the one where he recreated that sweeping scene from the breakdance movie Breakin’? That one was actually doubly-great because there was a section at the end of the video where he and some of his friends revolutionized grinding on a dance floor, and I don’t know how you measure legacy, but whether or not a person revolutionized grinding on a dance floor is definitely a thing that I consider.
II. A Legacy
Q: Why did Ginuwine fade away?
A: I want to say something like, “In part, because that’s just what happens.” But that’s a bigger and emptier answer than what’s needed here. A more specific answer might be: “Ginuwine never grabbed ahold of that timelessness that someone like Missy Elliott was able to pull off.” (I mention Missy because she and Ginuwine both benefitted from early partnerships with Timbaland, the most innovative and daring producer of the late ’90s.)
But timelessness was never the point of Ginuwine. In fact, it was the opposite of the point of Ginuwine. That’s why he was so essential then, and why he should be viewed as so essential to history now.
Think on it like this: “Pony” came out in 1996. The year before that, Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It” came out. That song marked the moment when it finally became cool for rap and new jack swing to fully amalgamate. Prior to then — especially through the end of the ’80s and early ’90s — new jack swing was mostly looked at it by rap as a dumb, hackneyed, uncool thing. After that, though — after “This Is How We Do It” rocketed off the earth — everything changed. Here’s a paragraph from a thing I wrote a couple of years ago about the way the relationship between rap and new jack swing changed following the success of “This Is How We Do It”:
In 1996, Dr. Dre guest-featured on Blackstreet’s “No Diggity” — that was the next step in the coalescence. And then by 1997, Puff Daddy, who’d served under Andre Harrell at Uptown Records, mutated them into one single entity and obliterated everything; over a four-month stretch that year he had his sticky little fingers on the no. 1 song in the country 25 out of the 28 weeks. So “This Is How We Do It” was obviously the most fun song of 1995, but it was also (maybe) the most important too.
So you have all of that going on: Rap has sort of grabbed the bones of new jack swing and pulled it that direction, right? On the other side of all that was Ginuwine. He took the remaining bits of R&B and then he pulled it the other way, which is to say into a sleeker, sexier, shinier direction than we’d ever seen [1]. (I say “he,” but I’m talking about him and Timbaland, who produced all of Ginuwine’s first album and most of his second.) It was a transitional period for R&B, and Ginuwine’s success was very time-specific. He was the bridge from what was happening in R&B in the mid-’90s to what was happening in R&B in the early 2000s. He existed (and exists) as a place-marker. He was the exact right artist at the exact right time making the exact right music with the exact right producer.
[1] I want to be careful to not overstate things here. He wasn’t the only innovative person working within the R&B spectrum at the time. Usher, for example, was also tugging on it, twisting it, and shaping it into something new. As were TLC, Erykah Badu, and so on.
The intro for Ginuwine’s first album, Ginuwine… the Bachelor, is built around a clip from The Usual Suspects. “Who’s this ‘Ginuwine’? Who’s behind this album,” a man asks. And he asks it again, and then it morphs into a question asking who Keyser Soze is, and then it’s Gabriel Byrne, who plays Dean Keaton in The Usual Suspects, declaring, “There is no Keyser Soze!” Then it’s Kevin Spacey’s Verbal Kent: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist,” but they rub out “the devil” from it. The track builds and it builds and it builds, and they keep mushing together Ginuwine’s name and Keyser Soze’s name, repeating them again and again, until all of a sudden you realize they’re saying only Ginuwine’s name now. As the beat begins to trail off, there’s a slice of the frog-burp from “Pony” that hints at what’s coming. And then that’s it. Just like that — poof! — it’s over.
Listening to it now, the whole thing ended up being truer than he’d hoped, I’m sure. It’s certainly truer than he deserved. He accidentally convinced everyone he didn’t exist. But Ginuwine existed. Ginuwine exists.