The Culture Corner: 40 years ago, Boyz II Men flipped the script on R&B

XPN | By John Morrison,

Published June 16, 2025 at 3:38 PM EDT

Boyz II Men's Cooleyhighharmony — Boyz II Men's *Cooleyhighharmony*

Forty years ago this year, in Philadelphia, one of music's most influential singing groups was born. They would call themselves Boyz II Men.

A few years after Nathan Morris, Wanya Morris, Shawn Stockman and Michael McCary found each other, they put out "Motownphilly."

World Cafe correspondent John Morrison has a new book called Boyz II Men: 40th Anniversary Celebration. Today, he joins us to talk about how the group changed popular music.

"When Boyz II Men came out in 1991, they updated that old-school R&B male vocal group archetype, but they did it for the hip-hop generation," Morrison says.

In this edition of Culture Corner, Morrison dives into the career of Boyz II Men, how they were shaped by what came before them, and about their impact on everything that came after.

This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Kimberly Junod. The web story was created by Miguel Perez. Our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.

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John Morrison

John Morrison is a writer, DJ, and sample-flipper from Philadelphia. As a writer, his work has appeared in NPR Music, Bandcamp Daily, Jazz Tokyo, Grammy.com, and more. He is also the host of Culture Cypher Radio, a hip-hop radio show on NPR member station WXPN.

Raina Douris

Raina Douris, an award-winning radio personality from Toronto, Ontario, comes to World Cafe from the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), where she was host and writer for the daily live, national morning program Mornings on CBC Music. She was also involved with Canada's highest music honors: hosting the Polaris Music Prize Gala from 2017 to 2019, as well as serving on the jury for both that award and the Juno Awards. Douris has also served as guest host and interviewer for various CBC Music and CBC Radio programs, and red carpet host and interviewer for the Juno Awards and Canadian Country Music Association Awards, as well as a panelist for such renowned CBC programs as Metro Morning, q and CBC News.

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Kimberly Junod

World Cafe senior producer Kimberly Junod has been a part of the World Cafe team since 2001, when she started as the show's first line producer. In 2011 Kimberly launched (and continues to helm) World Cafe's Sense of Place series that includes social media, broadcast and video elements to take listeners across the U.S. and abroad with an intimate look at local music scenes. She was thrilled to be part of the team that received the 2006 ASCAP Deems Taylor Radio Broadcast Award for excellence in music programming. In the time she has spent at World Cafe, Kimberly has produced and edited thousands of interviews and recorded several hundred bands for the program, as well as supervised the show's production staff. She has also taught sound to young women (at Girl's Rock Philly) and adults (as an "Ask an Engineer" at WYNC's Werk It! Women's Podcast Festival).

See stories by Kimberly Junod