★★★★★
Essentially a four-minute full-press come-on, "No Diggity" isthe latest offering from new-jack swing architect Teddy Rileyand a retooled BLACKstreet. Beatwise, it struts confidently,accompanied by a light keyboard action. Voices, including guestDr. Dre's, croon and rap with a sexual urgency notable even bytoday's standards.
- ew.com
2011-03-03
★★★★★
Blackstreet's new jack swing anthem "No Diggity" was cool, witty, and one of the slinkiest hits of recent years. Their new album is all about what they're gonna do to your sweet titties and pink-lycra-clad asses, and is so patently wrong in so many ways that it exhibits a peculiar strain of genius. This, fused with several pop-tastic retreads of The Commodores' "Brick House" vibe, means it's guilty as sin and just as much fun...
- www.uncut.co.uk
2010-06-19
★★★★★
In the ever-changing, ever-competitive world of "urban" music, staying one step ahead of the pack is the only thing that counts. Pity, then, the lot of the pioneer, the visionary genius of yesteryear who can try as hard as they like but will fail to make an impact today. Such is the position occupied by Teddy Riley, inventor of swingbeat, the sound that dominated the early '90s and helped shape the black music landscape we currently inhabit...
- uk.launch.yahoo.com
2010-04-09
★★★★★
For the past few years, R&B; has been on the job, but distracted -- by the world domination of hip-hop, by the memory of R&B; past, by the often weak embraces of teen pop. Teddy Riley sees things clearly, though: As the inventor of New Jack Swing, he's one of the few people around who both acknowledges R&B;'s past and moves it, strongly and sweetly, into the future.
Level II, BlackStreet's new album, continues the Riley vision...
- www.rollingstone.com
2009-06-08
★★★★★
T.GIFeddy Riley's Blackstreet has regrouped for their fourth effort, Level II, a vain attempt at recapturing the chart magic of 1996's Another Level. Level II is a concept album of sorts, tracing a player's path from the club into mami's pants: Mr. Cheeks helps Blackstreet pursue the girl amid a horny, minimalist beat and barely-there hook on "Don't Touch"; "She's Hot" gets her in the car outside the club; and the sexed-up, autotuned-to-death "Deep" is about getting, well, deep...
- www.slantmagazine.com
2009-06-08
★★★★★
The forty-year progression of Top Forty R&B;, from the squeaky-clean doo-woppers of the Fifties to the harmonizing Lotharios of the Nineties, has come to rest at a hip-hop-soul hybrid that delivers huge sales, lofty chart positions and sold-out concerts best described as Chippendales shows for preteens...
- www.rollingstone.com
2009-06-08
★★★★★
He was "at the center of a swirl of events", as the late Larry Neal would put it. No, the Harlem born native Teddy Riley was not the heir apparent to the Harlem icon "Detroit Red", but Riley's signature post-soul soundthe new jack swingwas the mystic move that finally wedded the disparate worlds of 1980s R&B and the burgeoning hip-hop movement. Not nearly earth shatteringmore common senseRiley simply took the gyrating rhythms of hip-hop and layered them below old-school soul melodies...
- www.popmatters.com
2009-03-22
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