cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17679698

“If It Isn’t Love” was the first single from the classic 1988 album Heart Break. The single peaked at #7 on the Billboard Hot 100 and reached #2 on the Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop chart as they were ironically held out of the #1 spot by former bandmate Bobby Brown’s single “Don’t Be Cruel.” This song tells the story of a young man trying to deny his feelings of love for a young lady but having no other emotion to describe his feelings for her. Producer Jimmy Jam said the following about the creation of the song:

We just mainly wanted to keep the fun in the music and give people the feeling that we got when we first heard ‘Candy Girl.’ We wanted people to feel when they heard ‘If It Isn’t Love,’ that same feeling. We just contemporized it using newer sounds. I remember the bass line on that song is sort of a derivative of the bass sound that we used on Janet Jackson’s song ‘Nasty.’ We thought it would be cool to have that bass line. We just wanted to make a classic chorus. I remember Terry [Lewis] came up with the lyric and melody for the beginning of the song because I didn’t have any ideas for that. The melody for the rest of the song was my idea and lyrically that was all Terry.

The music video for this song shows the group in a room rehearsing for a concert, and at the end of the video, the group is shown at the venue getting ready to go on stage. That final scene sets up the concert performance video for their follow-up single “You’re Not My Kind of Girl.”

https://genius.com/New-edition-if-it-isnt-love-lyrics

https://web.archive.org/web/20240304114348/https://genius.com/New-edition-if-it-isnt-love-lyrics