I'm Dave Holmes, and there's a pop culture mystery that I have not been able to get out of my head for decades. It's the summer of nineteen ninety one. If you're a young person, which I was, you're glued to MTV or VH one or BET. These are cable channels that play music videos. It's a little bit like YouTube, except everyone was watching the same thing at the same time. Also, if you were like, oh, I have an idea of what I want to watch next, you couldn't. You kind
of just watched what they played. But they all played a new music video that summer. It was the first music video for the vocal group Boys to Men. It was called Motown Philly. There's a lot going on in the music video for Motown Philly. Throughout it there's a photographer and a short black skirt taking pictures of the groups in what a big photo album tells us is
the East Coast Family. The East Coast Family is a collection of pop acts put together by Michael Bivins, a guy who was already famous from himself being in the pop acts New Edition and Bell biv Devoue. So we see Boys to Men obviously it's their video. We see another bad creation, a young group of actual children who had two top ten singles. We see Bell BIV devou
themselves boys to men. ABC BBD, just like the lyrics of Motown Philly say, but it's what happens two minutes and thirty eight seconds into the Motown Philly video that I cannot shake. Five young guys in five white button down shirts, each with his own necktie, stand in a loose semi circle around Michael Biffins. Their name glows above their heads. Sudden Impact, Sudden Impact are all looking at the camera, and after a second, just as we're getting
our bearings in unison, the point at the camera. They point at you as if to say, here we are. We're Sudden Impact. Any questions. It's bold, it's aggressive, it's the promise of something new. It's an introduction to a young group who you know are gonna be huge. I myself could not wait to see what Sudden Impact was gonna do next. What Sudden Impact did next was disappear. And it's not an exaggeration to say I have wondered about Sudden Impact ever since.
What happened?
Did they get in trouble with the Philadelphia Mob. Was it a plane crash? Did they all fight over the same woman? Did they ever record anything at all? And if so, where is it now?
A lot of time has.
Passed and I am not a young man anymore, and everyone younger than me who is listening to this is how having the same thought right now, Dave google it. This was nineteen ninety one. There was no Internet. If you were a young pop culture obsessive with questions and theories, you had nowhere to put them. There was no twenty four hour entertainment news cycle. E News wouldn't even premiere until later that summer. What we had was one syndicated
entertainment news show, Entertainment Tonight. And there was no way they were going to do a story on the whereabouts of a boy band who were in someone else's video for two seconds and pointed at you. They had bigger fish to fry. Julia Roberts called off her engagement to keep her sevil in five days before their wedding that summer. I mean priorities. All we know about Sudden Impact is what didn't happen. I want to know what did. So I'm going to find out. I'm going to find them.
I'm going to track those guys down, one by one, necktie by. I'm going to get the story of Sudden Impact, and I'm going to try to solve the most elusive, most bewildering.
Question of all.
Why can't I stop thinking about them? This is Waiting for Impact, a Dave Holmes passion project. The story of Sudden Impacts doesn't just begin in nineteen ninety one. In many ways, the story of Sudden Impact is about nineteen ninety one. And I realize it's risky to tell a story about nineteen ninety one in a podcast. Some of you may not remember nineteen ninety one. Some of you
may not have even been born yet. If you need a mental picture of nineteen ninety one, you really can just close your eyes and imagine any episode of Saved by the Bell. Saved by the Bell was not a documentary, but it wasn't not one either. The pastel color palette, the baggy T shirts tucked into high waisted jeans, the enormous cell phones, those are actually extremely true to American life and real life kids, just like the ones at Bayside High listened to Top forty radio even if you
didn't like what Top forty radio was playing. You knew what Top forty radio was playing because it was playing everywhere your friend's car, the mall McDonald's. The early nineties is the last time in history we were all watching and listening to the same things. If you're under thirty in nineteen ninety one, you might not consider yourself a Paul Abdual fan, but you know the words to at least three of her songs, just through OUs Moses. You might not love Guns N' Roses, but you can talk
in detail about their video for November Rain. Whether you sought out the information or not, you have been briefed on the particulars of the Humpty Dance. Even the alternative was the same, small handful of bands, the replacements, the Cure, Jane's addiction. You either embraced the mainstream or you went for the alternative.
I did both.
And in nineteen ninety one, there's tension on the pop charts, a push and a pull. Wilson Phillips has had their first number one single, hold On, and their second release Me in May of that year. Kathy Dennis goes to number two with Touch Me, and the The Vinyls go to number four with I Touch Myself. Rod Stewart gets a top five single. For God's sake, the music of your local top forty radio station would play was all over the map, teen pop into hair metal, into adult contemporary.
Say what you will about Queen's Reich and Amy Grant being right next to each other on the pop charts, but that is not sustainable. Things are formless and chaotic in the way they always are just before something big is about to happen, and it was reasonable to think that such an impact could have been that next big thing. The alternative was about to become the mainstream. We'll get
into that in a later episode. Now, today someone can have one hundred million followers on TikTok and a big influencer business and I have never seen their face in my life. My nieces can be obsessed with a musician whose name I have never heard. But in nineteen ninety one, if you were famous, you were fame us. What was big was huge. The movies that summer were Terminator two and Robinhood Prince of Thieves Blockbusters. Twenty million people watched
Roseanne every week. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were the hot newlyweds. In nineteen ninety one and Katie Holmes was twelve. The mainstream was massive. Today we call it the monoculture, but back then it was just the culture. The same handful of artists and songs were blasted at you by Top forty radio, the same couple dozen stars on every magazine cover, and at the center of it all was MTV.
You may know MTV now as a network that plays skateboard wipe out videos and Pitch Perfect two, but in the eighties and nineties, it was a network that played music videos all day long. That was it, and that was enough. MTV was what you turned on to see what was happening in the world. It was a clubhouse that you couldn't really get into, but you turned it
on anyway just to feel like you were there. Fresh faced young adults like Duff and Kevin Seal would be your tour guides, Bill Bellamy and John Cencio and Idallas VJs icons, your friends who haven't met you yet, the people you wanted to be, Okay, the people I wanted to be. MTV was the one stop shop for youth culture at a time when there was such a thing as youth culture, and it had cachet. When an artist got added to the rotation, that meant something, that was
a seal of approval. It's onto these chaotic pop charts and onto this influential MTV playlist at the end of April nineteen ninety one that Boys to Men and therefore sud An Impact arrive and I'm ready.
Here's a little background on Boys to Men.
They're a vocal quartet kind of a nineties update of a doo wop group. They all met at the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts and started performing together as unique attraction until one night at a school event, they sang a song by Michael bivens old group, the popular boy band New Edition, a song called Boys to Men, and they decided that was the right name, and on.
A Philadelphia tour stop for Bell.
Biv Devo Michael bivens new group, the guys of Boys to Men score one backstage pass and it back and forth so all four of them can get back there. They find Bivens and they sing him an a cappella version of New Editions Can You Stand the Rain. Michael Bivens gives them his number and they call and call and call and call. They beg him to manage them. Michael Bivens has clout He's had a lifetime in the music industry.
He's been in.
Two groups to win multi platinum, and now he wants to move into the record mogul stage of his career become a starmaker like Motown's Barry Gordie had been. Michael Bivens is twenty two years old. Motown has given him a three artist development deal. Boys to Men wear him down and become his first signing, and the lyrics of their debut single Motown Philly pretty much tell the story about how they made it big, which is weird because again it's their debut single. They haven't made it big yet.
They're like, hello, let us introduce ourselves. We are Boys to Men and we're very big stars. Boys to Men sing the names of the group's Bivens has taken under his wing themselves, the second group Bivens signed, another bad creation, Those Children I was telling you about, and the group whose success made it all possible, Bell biv Devouls Family.
Michael Bivens is so confident his acts are going to succeed that he's basically taken the debut single from the group that would become his most successful by a mile, and turned it into a promo for his own development deal that is bold. The Motown Philly video is eye catching, and only partially because Boys to Men are in pastels. Pull it up, watch it now, I'll wait. It's good, right as you saw. It's staged as a reunion for
the East Coast family. And here again it's strange that it's a reunion because we're meeting most of these people for the first time. But we didn't overthink it. A photographer takes pictures of the artists and the lyrics with one of those old timey cameras where you have to put a cape over yourself and hold up a giant flashbulb,
which feels very steampunk for nineteen ninety one. But there's Boys to Men, there's ABC, there's BBD, and then near the end Sudden Impact, who are not mentioned in the lyrics and whose appearance is not explained in any way. It's just Hi, We're sudd An Impact. How are you? I mean I sat up and took notice. Nobody else around me really did. And what didn't exist in nineteen ninety one, what not even screech not even the nerds could invent for you was the Internet. In my college
at the time. If you wanted to use a computer, you went to the computer lab, where there were like eight of them. If you knew how, you could send short text messages to one of the other computers in that room, messages like I'm three feet away from you or why are we doing this? And even that didn't happen until nineteen ninety three. There was nowhere to go if you had questions about Sudden Impact, questions like Who's
Sudden Impact? Or is anyone else seeing this? If you were obsessed from the second you saw them, as I was, you did two things. One you kept it to yourself and two you waited for Sudden Impact to show up on MTV. Sudden Impact never did show up on MTV a few years later, though I did, and like Sudden Impact, my debut was in a thing. A lot of people saw a thing that didn't go the way that I was planning, for those who don't know me or who had better things to do at that time in history.
In nineteen ninety eight, MTV had an open call for VJs that on air. Master of Ceremonies Job Duff and Kevin Seeal had the VJ position. Was my dream gig, a huge, high profile TV job. I hate that I'm saying this, but kind of a high profile early version of an influencer. And in nineteen ninety eight, MTV just opened the application process up to the public, so if you didn't have experience or an agent or good common sense, you could just stand in line and take your swing.
I stood in line and took my swing, and I made it to the top ten, and then the top five viewers got to vote on who they wanted to get the gig buy telephone because again no real internet ever MCV one of the ejay contests, and.
They voted in droves four.
Not me. Now, this is a moment that people remind me about a lot, like a lot lot. Not every day, not anymore, but easily once a week, particularly if they're trying to insult me on Twitter and they don't have much of an imagination. And I have to be honest here, I don't love talking about it. Does anyone love talking
about a time they lost in public? I mean, get this, I skipped a college friend's wedding to be there for the finals, and I remember the groom, wishing me luck and telling me they'd turn on the last few minutes in the bar of the wedding venue and watch, And I think they did. A whole bunch of my friends stood and watched me lose informal wear.
Yikes. I've never talked about that with any of them.
By the way, I kind of lost touch with most of them, so I wouldn't have to talk about that.
But in that moment, I remember thinking two things.
If I got this close, I needed to put my back into getting some kind of job at MTV, otherwise I would regret it for the rest of my life. And two, this moment is going to be the first line in my obituary, So I put my back into it. I stayed in touch with the people I met there. I set up some meetings and made some pitches and generally behaved like someone much more confident than I am. And one thing led to another, and they finally gave me a job.
And we're gonna check in with Dave.
Who's outside?
How you doing there, ladies?
Hello, Hope you're all nice and cozy in there. It's so hot out here, can't even tell you.
But we got a ton of adorning fans, one of whom is right here.
Yes, that is Britney Spears. She was co hosting TRL that day with Melissa Jonhard. And if you have a podcast, you have to mention Britney Spears in it. That's a new law. Anyway, I did not get a job. I got the job my dream life, a position at the epicenter of the pop culture universe, a golden ticket to the Banka Factory. I was there for four and a half years. It was everything I hoped it would be. Honestly, it was more. It's led me to where I am now.
I still get to do what I love, and I truly believe that if I keep working hard, keep challenging myself, keep hustling, someday that want to be a VJ moment will be the second line in my obituary. I worked in TV for a few more years, and then I started writing more, and eventually that became my focus. And now I'm an editor at large for Esquire, the magazine I grew up reading. I love my life. I'm not rich,
I'm not famous, but I've gotten what I wanted. And then I wake up and I turn on the television and there's my old colleague Carson Daily hosting one of his two big network TV shows. Ryan Seacrest has two speeds. He's either on live television or he's asleep. And if by the time this show drops, he's sold his Apple Watch sleep tracker data to Netflix as a competition reality show, none of us will be surprised. I'm doing what I love.
The nineteen ninety one version of me would lose his mind if he saw how I got to spend my days. That big swing that I took back then showing up and standing in line to audition at MTV bought me a career I'm proud of. But in terms of money or fame, I'm definitely the sudden impact in someone else's story. I don't love talking about losing on national television, but it did lead to something good, and I've always wondered
whether the same is true for sudden impact. I don't know whether they want to talk about getting a huge boost at the beginning of their career and then vanishing. They didn't become stars, They didn't even release a single as far as I know, But does that mean they didn't make it? Sudden impact never happened, but something did, and just because we don't know what it is, just because it didn't unfold in a way that we could see, doesn't mean it wasn't good.
Maybe it was actually better.
However, you get it, and at whatever level you get it, fame does a weird thing to you. I eventually got that MTV job in nineteen ninety eight, right when it really solidified its place as the epicenter of the monoculture for maybe the last time. In nineteen ninety eight, MTV had that huge studio overlooking Times Square with those massive floorid to ceiling windows.
We called it the Fishbowl.
Kids would stand in the middle of Broadway and just scream up at those windows. It didn't matter who was there, whether it was Backstreet Boys or the Q card guy. If you were there, you were somewhere exciting, and the kids had no choice but to scream at you. I used to love going up to that window and waving and hearing the screams. I knew those screams were not for me, not really, but it was a nice reminder that I used to be out there and now I'm
up here. It was a moment to be grateful. The day MTV called me up and gave me a job. Might have been the happiest day of my life up until that point. Who am I kidding? It was by far. I remember telling my parents this in these words. I don't care about getting rich. I don't care how famous this job makes me. All I know is now I'll get to talk about the things I'm obsessed with and make things I know how to make. And I want this job to allow me to keep doing that for
the rest of my life. I want this to be the start of a career I'm in love with. I thought about the future. I thought about the fact that once it was all over, maybe i'd have a high enough profile to write a book or two. I thought I might transition into production and express myself that way. I thought about the new ways I would get to use my talents now that I was in a place where remembering things like sudden impact was considered a talent. I thought about all the new stuff i'd get to
learn how to do. And I did, and I loved it there, and loving it was enough at first. But something happens when you're in the epicenter of the monoculture at a very hot time, when you're surrounded by the rich and the famous. Whether you notice it or not, you start wanting to be rich and famous. You don't even notice it. It's not a decision. It's not a switch that you flip. You just see how some people are living and you think, sure, I'm happy, but that's success.
You see your peers in magazines and on talk shows, and you start wanting to get in magazines and on talk shows. You start to think, if people can't see me all over the place, am I really successful? When you get what you want, you just start wanting more. You go up to that window over Broadway and you wave at the kids standing out there, and they scream at you because you're inside, and your first thought isn't how lucky you are to be up there. Your first
thought is did they scream louder yesterday? You forget that all you wanted in the beginning was just to be a part of it. You forget that it all started because you were a fan. Being a fan can be an isolating experience, especially before there's an Internet where you can find other fans. I was in college in nineteen ninety one at a place where very practical people were learning, very practical things that would make them very effective in
their very practical careers. I was obsessing over things like sudden Impact and feeling.
Like a real weirdo about it.
What's great about making a life out of your obsessions is that eventually you meet other weirdos. What percentage of the population do you think consists of people like us?
Very very very few? And if it wasn't for the Internet, it would seem like nobody and I do worry that we're a dying breed. It feels like a very Generation X thing.
This is my friend Scott Kimple. Scott and I met just after I moved to LA We were doing shows at an improv comedy theater that, like a lot of improv comedy theaters, doesn't exist anymore. Scott is one of the funniest people I know, which is very strange because he's also the chief content officer for the Walking Dead universe of TV shows and movies and video games.
He's a big deal.
He's also the only other person I know who paid attention to the sudden Impact moment.
That's the other thing that got me is Michael Bivins is saying here it is, you're going to love this, this is my universe, this is my record label. Enjoy, thank you, our pardon me. You're welcome.
I'm not only giving you the story of Boyce to Men in a video. I am actually telling it to you in the middle of a song that's going to get played on the radio for decades to come.
Yeah, which again his storytelling us a narration. You know, he talks about how he met them. The song itself is like they're going back to their schools, saying how they were dreaming of it. It's join us in our success. Yeah, and I believe both of us said yes.
I don't know.
I mean, why why did I never stop thinking about it?
Scott and I bonded over a few things when we first met, a shared love of those digital trivia games used to be able to play in bars, the movies of Wit Stillman, You Don't Know, Jack, and somehow Sudden Impact. Scott's passion is storytelling, so it makes sense that he would connect to a moment like this. To a storyteller like him, the Sudden Impact moment feels like a cliffhanger
to a pop culture nerd like me. It's a detail to obsess over, but the point is we both remember the point I seem to remember in the early days of our friendship, the iconic sudden impact point being a greeting.
Yeah.
I think we held on to that for a little while. Yeah, which I will say in revisiting it, we put a bit more flourish than they did.
I mean, he's not wrong. The guys do look a little nervous, and who could blame them. It's a big moment. It's a moment freighted with promise. Plus they're dressy, like they're on their way to church. Some people can't relax in a time anyway. Scott and I are friends now, but we were on very different tracks back in nineteen ninety one. I was studying self loathing in college, which we will address at some point. Scott was studying film
at USC. We both had huge dreams, but unlike me, Scott had a plan.
At eleven years old, I said, Okay, this is what I'm going to do. I am going to become I'm going to work to become an intern at DC Comics. Then I'll become an assistant editor. It's incredibly pragmatic. Then hopefully I'll become an editor, and then after that, hopefully I will be writing a couple of comics. Then, because I'm at home as a freelancer writing comics, maybe I can start working towards TV and film. And that was my plan from eleven years old.
Things didn't work out that way.
By the time Scott was out of college, the comics industry was actually briefly in decline. So he started working in TV, first as a production assistant, then as a writer, then is the person in charge of the biggest show
in the world. Scott's one of my closest friends. But sometimes even with good friends, there are things you don't know, areas you don't address until you're recording a podcast about sudden impact, like the fact that for all he's accomplished, he's still not giving up on that eleven year old.
I still aspire to have a monthly comic and it's still something I'm aspiring working towards. And it's cool to have that goal. And there's a comic that I have that I co creative with Robert Kirkwin that we do, but you know, Robert's the anchorman on that. Yeah, and I've done some comics along the way, but yeah, I still have a goal in that area. And I still owe that eleven year old some.
Achievement.
So you're determined to come full circle to the original.
Dream, Yeah, yeah, I mean literally. I might be seventy, I might be eighty, but I'm yeah, absolutely, And maybe I also feel that I'm not trying hard to bring it full circle here. I swear to God I'm not. But I don't like the idea of endings. I don't like the idea that there are endings. And yes, do I hope that a Sudden Impact album comes out?
Yes?
And am I still holding onto that hope, which is a kin to the hope that I had back in ninety one, like, oh, I can't wait to see this. I still have that because I don't like thinking that it's over for anybody. I don't like the idea of whatever happened to I don't know if that's like a cock eyed optimism or something, but I know with myself it takes me a while to get to certain things, but I do get to them right, And I guess I put that on other people too.
I have no idea why I never stopped thinking about such an impact, but Scott has a theory about why it's still on his mind.
In retrospect, I realized that it also it hit me in the sweet spot of my pop culture loves being someone who you know, loved comics, loves comics, and you know, this was before Marvel was making movies and stuff, and shared universes were basically in comic books.
But this is a shared universe.
This is ABC, this is Boys to Men, this is BBD, this is some Impact And there's something to that that was that that these there's a connection to to Marvel and DC of these these groups of heroes, and Michael Bibvens is sort of laying down that there is a narrative here. They're there to succeed. You know, they are like, hey, we want to I mean, I will say boys. Command is like, hey, we're doing it just for you. We
were dreaming about this. But there's an aspect to shared universes that I think also just hit me right where, you know my heart pumps.
Now, if that sudden Impact moment had happened in twenty twenty one, there would be five thousand memes immediately. Someone would replace all their faces with the Real Housewives of New York or something. There would be online quizzes which Sudden Impact, are you BuzzFeed would run a story like the Internet just noticed that the second Sudden Impact guy from the left is not looking at the camera and we are literally shook. In twenty twenty one, you can't disappear.
Sudden Impact doesn't bring up much on Google. There's a Canadian thrash band by that name, probably not the same guys. There's a nineteen eighty three Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry movie called Sudden Impact. That's the one that gave us go ahead and make my day. But the group from the Motown, Philly video is nowhere to be found, not even a GeoCities fan site.
Nothing.
In fact, it is the nothing that makes me want to find them that much more. Information about Sudden Impact is the last hard to find thing in a world where there is no longer any such thing as scarcity.
I can't have it, so I must have it.
It's Scott who sends me a second video from Michael Bivens East Coast Family. This one is from nineteen ninety two. It's called one four All for one, and it's got boys to Men, another bad creation and a whole slew of new faces, including five white guys called white guys, whytgize. Now these guys look a little like sudden impact, which I feel like might be a clue of some kind. But then I go on the internet and I search for information on white guys and there's not a whole
lot of that either. But it's not until the second or third time through the one four all four one video for both of us separately that we realize something. We recognize someone a young singer in a vest and a tie, in a warm smile. She goes by the single name Yvette. Wait a minute, is that go.
And look for yourself.
It's Yvette Nicole Brown twenty twenty one Emmy nominee a Vette Nicole Brown. Now Vette is a Walking Dead super fan. She hosted The Talking Dead for a little while. She and Scott are friends. People we know somebody in the East Coast family.
We have an inn.
Scott. It's not only Evet Nicole Brown. But she sounds great, like.
She sounds great, has that smile, Yeah, does the not only her primary vocal, but some backing vocals with some flourish, And it just blowsed my mind. She was there, and I know she's at this point like just out of Cleveland. So I even want to know, like, how does that happen? Is there a Philadelphia base? She must still have been living in Cleveland.
I mean, I guess parts of Ohio are Eastern time zone, So I mean I guess in that way, she could be part of the East Coast family.
Oh my god.
She knows some of the answers, she has some of the stories, and she's someone I literally can call whenever.
Yeah, so Scott that ask, oh would you?
Oh yeah great?
If anybody in our orbit has a connection to Sudden Impact, it's event. And if she does, we can track them down one by one. We can get closure on this thing. We can find out what happened. We can maybe even get them back together. But this is not just about Sudden Impact. It's about why I can't stop thinking about Sudden Impact.
It's about why.
Their story arc is a thing that I am still curious about. So while I'm looking for them and looking back at this moment in pop culture history, I'm going to track down some other fascinating faces and names of the early nineties. People I know personally and people I watched, People who made an impact and then changed direction, people who thought their lives were going way one way and ended up going way another, and maybe that was way better. This is a podcast about the nineties and about what
we left there. It's about big swings that didn't pan out and unexpected good things that did. This is Waiting for Impact, a Dave Holmes passion project. This has been an Exactly Right production written by me Dave Holmes, produced by Hannah Kyle Crichton, recorded, mixed and sound designed by Andrew Eapen. Additional engineering and assembly by Analise Nelson. Music by Ben Wise, artwork by Garrett Ross. Executive produced by
Karen Kilgareff, Georgia hard Stark and Danielle Kramer. Follow the show on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter at exactly right and follow me at Dave Holmes. For more information, go to Exactlyrightmedia dot com. Binge the show add free on stitch your premium for a free month. Head to Stitcherpremium dot com, slash Impact and enter promo code Impact and you select a monthly plan. Listen, subscribe and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.