1991: Boyz II Men, Cooleyhighharmony

By OlatundE Osinaike

for Ayo & Kunmi

Brothers, you know how I ramble so bare with me. We don’t spend a lot of our time speaking on the day as it is, so I shall point you to this picture. Temptations on the floor: this is what you’d find if you’d stroll into my home office at any time this past year. Temptations, because there is something in the shape of delight when I recall the pitch Grandma unveils as she sings "it was just my imagination running away with me” to this day. On the floor, because well the command strips have lost their way and I haven’t taken the minutes necessary to acquire more. But you know, as well as I do, the key of her soprano, the way we look her and her indelible covers in.

I didn’t too much enjoy high school. “Patience is a virtue” was our mom’s counsel but, in those days, I hid from it because I assumed I’d possess that virtue or at least be able to mimic its strength over time. Time back then was unforgiving, neglectful as a tape that rolls or walls that wall you in. It was around that time I started to consider belonging a life skill. Like an equation with a number for an answer you’d need to round to keep from going on forever, it became this incalculable rejection loop. Likeability became a tool for career progression (read: life survival kit stuff). I downplayed my pigeonhole fascinations in the name of sensibility and convenience (read: likeability). I grew gently skeptical of and eventually nauseated by small talk. The business of relationships permeated most social gatherings. But if I had one soothing moment, it was the late afternoon I scrolled past a quote I couldn’t slide my thumb across quickly enough to post to the once-deserted Favorite Quotes section of my Facebook profile: “if you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it”. Death would’ve been a deputized exaggeration for the alternative noted here by Zora Neale, however her words struck me as fair if for nothing else than a new noticing within the tradeoff. Not only what selfishly could be gained when you are silent but what has been lost and can’t be salvaged for the one meant to take it in.

Some three months after Cooleyhighharmony was dropped into the tail end of April showers of ‘91, music critic Amy Linden tossed around words like “uninspired” or “unoriginal” to describe Boyz II Men’s debut. Of note to Amy, the album’s reversal of sequencing, of tone and pace in the track makeup shifted the album into a blueprint for how “routine” the slow stuff can be. “Don’t they know that you start the party kickin”, she says. I read this and thought of you both. How concerned we were with the oddities a week of tomorrows would rewind for us: the little lulls in crew laughter spotted across a train car, the club of junior antagonists animating our lookalike as we greeted them and our choreography as we exited, the cellulite doting our sizes we’d sooner ignore and angle away in photos, the trick and vigor of lugging those full bodies around as though we knew what to make of ourselves when we hadn’t yet. In the ‘99 and 2000s, no less, we were used to a space’s stuffy nature, to our quiet.

Quiet, at its most true, is stirring and quite foolish. Natural, even, but never neutral. See, I can indict this illusory neutrality because of two folks. One I’ve noted already and the other: Johnny Gill. So often the bridge that takes us home is made of minor pit stops. Like Nathan (Morris) calling (Michael) Biv(ins) for two weeks straight leaving him an album of voicemails just for the chance to talk though he wasn’t there. Or Johnny who I read, singing lead for the closing now-titular track on Heart Break, worked past his own brooding hesitation with the song’s concept. In both scenarios, it could have been that the feeling of being trapped prevailed. But, luckily, for us and for Boyz II Men, there are brothers who make room for sound and what comes after. Brothers, by blood or harmony, that they were accountable to and, like us, the quiet gave them permission to work on new traditions alongside those brothers. Between Nate and B2M, Johnny and NE, or us, the crisp chapel of song planted with that promise to voice our stomached, our beacons, our prone and passable peace.

That day that I first encountered Zora Neale’s words fell in the last month of my sophomore year of high school though I only recall three other events of consequence that year. It was the year I finished convincing my larynx to thicken and my voice to deepen in hurry and insistence so as to shorten my proximity to masculinity’s model depiction. What I achieved was more or less a small hedge at the canned sacrifice of my once-ease. It was the year I first saw Cooley High, the ageless Chicago classic, on a worn couch on Warren and Leavitt with a bowl of Apple Jacks in hand. But it was also the year we learned Kunmi was getting recruited to choir school some 800 miles away. It is not so insignificant what Boyz II Men achieved in reminding boys like us, boys from Chicago, boys who might or might not matriculate from Cooley High that there’s a world outside of Chicago, even further than Philly, where the music might cushion our liberty to play with our own loud choices to make.

We don’t spend a lot of our time speaking on the day as it is; enough however is the detail that we were born three sons of a daughter of New Jack Swing of a daughter of Motown. And I understand, the music was the very one risk we didn’t have to take. Our mother is many things, including uniquely loving which made her the best pseudo-manager for those days when we would “tour”. Family picnics or upon meeting her newest coworker, she embraced every moment to show us how she loved us as she does now – unafraid of our sound. And though we dreaded those performances as unsuspecting kids do, it sustained us with a pyramid that resembled a structure she could be certain of. In those days, when Allen, Lindblad and others would coach us up on how to cradle kyrie eleison among other chants in the throttle of our old St. Gregory’s choir, when our voices were familiarized with each other’s solfège. Mornings after her third shift, she’d conduct our succinct a capella stage rehearsals standing at our bedroom’s header clapping the tempo for the love of groove. But what did it mean for us three Black boys to praise in an unrecognizable language? What did we know of comfort? Our harmonies might not have been home but we were a frequency.

Brothers, I disagree with Amy. As you both know, a book comes out in December. I wrote it thinking of our songs, how no harmony arrived or left the same. I read somewhere that they completed this album in six weeks, but some melodies last longer than the date expects. Cooleyhighharmony was an album that certainly did start and simmer with its trinity of slow ballads chock-full of nayhoo dopplers while adding a touch of arithmetic that made it appropriate for both the ears of Beyoncé (sample lore) and teenage impressionable boys to tune into. But it was also an album that moved Black boys to the doorstep of an East Coast family and made possible the party that took us anywhere the run could go.

Even now, I sit here wanting to make this thing I supply out of respect for my own desire beautiful. I, for one, can relate to the need for a slow start. Of those next steps even in slow and sudden relocation, of the appetite to remain foolish beyond my self-appointed youth and resound “I have time”, of knowing and not having that luxury, of then naming that a stumble and not progress. I, for one, can recognize the unique need to find your footing in a North that snows over the path you’ve devoted your short-sided spark’s half-Iife to. Distance can be a funny thing, and when I say funny I mean laughable in the way that keeps from worry, and worrisome at a time to deny thought. But it can also be felt and the very thing too true to forget. We would be incomplete without those stretches that held us together: a hope-laden goal, a regret-run fear, and a music’s bridge unabridged. Who are we without the mistakes we never made? Who are we to dispose of those miracles? What we became with our love and the like, our good and the bad, our slow and its just right.

Originally from the West Side of Chicago, Olatunde Osinaike is a Nigerian-American poet, essayist, and software developer. He is the author of Tender Headed (forthcoming on December 5th later this year from Akashic Books), which was selected by Camille Rankine as winner of the 2022 National Poetry Series. Other honors include winner of the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, semifinalist for the 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize, and honorable mention for the Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Award in Poetry. His work has received fellowships and support from Poets & Writers, Hurston/Wright Foundation, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University. You can link up with him (@tundelasoul) on IG and other social platforms or at www.olatundeosinaike.com.