A Brief Review of the New Edition Tour

Alright folks, a quick review

I traveled to Nashville to attend the New Edition, Boys II Men, Toni Braxton concert on Friday. I enjoyed it, mostly the idea of listening to music from years, no, decades ago, and seeing the folks perform it live. For some reason, with this show, Toni Braxton felt more like a sidenote. She performed only a few songs, and the other two groups performed more. Maybe it'll be different later this week when they perform here in St. Louis. But New Edition and Boys II Men were the real highlights. They were still hitting all their notes and moves. Well, that is, except my dude Bobby Brown, who can't move like the rest of them. But he was hanging in there.

Nashville is just like St. Louis in the sense that at an R & B concert, the audience is mostly Black women. "Look at us twinning," R & B audiences say to Black church congregations. But having said that, I was reminded that it had done something deeply positive to my young mind and the youngsters in my environment back in the day as we grew up witnessing those Black boys and young Black men groups doing coordinated dance moves together as they sang. (Y’all already know, so I won’t even point out that New Edition is criminally under-credited for creating the blueprint for the white boy bands that followed.)

Back to Black girl, now senior woman audiences: The early 1980s up through the 1990s were a unique moment for the amount of wholesome, affirming songs focusing on Black girls. From the 1983 “Candy Girl” up through maybe Tevin Campbell's 1993 “Can We Talk,” it was a brief, yet golden moment for songs that placed Black girls in the spotlight in a loving, not overly sexualized kind of way. This pattern of Black girl songs was less visible or plentiful in earlier decades and, lord Jesus, far less common in subsequent decades that followed.

This show didn't invest a lot in staging, not on the levels of Mariah Carey or Usher. This was more on the lower-level production, like Fantasia or Fred Hammond & Co. As a reunion tour, I enjoyed this better than Brandy and Monica. Still, they could've added more here and there to really contextualize the time and work they've covered. We're talking about a group that formed in 1978 and debuted in 1983.

I'm sometimes reluctant to give the South too much credit, but there's this fact: Nashville has a much more robust music scene than St. Louis. Beyond the concert venue, Bridgestone Arena, their downtown scene has various live music spots and bars. The most prevalent forms are country and southern rock, and a persistent indie vibe. Y'all know I've gone to a lot of music events in St. Louis, but the city itself doesn't have a really robust infrastructure for music. Of course, Nashville is majority white, and St. Louis is majority Black. I assume that all kinds of racial barriers prevented folks in St. Louis from building structures for a thriving music scene. I get that, but still............