Bell Biv Devoe

Welcome to “Career Killers” – a look at albums that were so bad, ill-conceived, or disastrous that they took down (or irreparably damaged) the artist or band that recorded them. So here’s the first entry. Let’s see how long I stick with this.

In the early 90s, faced with changing musical tastes, overexposure, an intense critical backlash, and its own fans growing out of bubblegum pop, New Kids on the Block decided it needed to change. Out went the name (they started going by more adult sounding “NKOTB”) as well as its longtime association with boyband Svengali Maurice Starr. Most importantly, it was time for a new sound. For its fourth studio album, 1994’s Face the Music, the band, which was created as a successor group to New Edition, would instead adopt the New Jack swing and hip-hop stylings of its spinoff group, Bell Biv Devoe.

It was not successful.