10 Things We Learned from Teddy Riley on The Breakfast Club

Teddy Riley is one of those triple OG’s in the music game that only 80’s and 90’s babies really tend to appreciate and though he’s a soft spoken person who’s been through some ish!

Checking into The Breakfast Club the Harlem native breaks down his long journey in the music game to the morning trio and reveals the interesting reason he moved to Virginia from Harlem, some new info on Bobby Brown’s substance use, and why he left his R&B group Guy.

Here are the 10 things we learned from Teddy Riley on The Breakfast Club.

Though he was born and raised in Harlem, Teddy says his parents used to send him to live in the South for the summer for 15 years straight. Though he started messing with instruments since he was 3-years-old, he say the South helped shape his views on music.

Growing up he witnessed a lot of domestic violence and because of that his mother still lives with him to this day. “She’ll never leave my sight.” Props.

While people credit Teddy Riley with creating that New Jack Swing sound, he admits that he was just fusing different sounds together like gospel with blues and fusion with EDM and creating a new genre of music without a name. “I didn’t have a name for it. I just did it. You don’t really have a name until it becomes famous.”

Of course Teddy Riley feels he should get credit for creating the New Jack Swing sound over Andre Harrell. “It should definitely be me. Now Andre Harrell is a part of discovering me. So when you got the person who discovered you that makes him responsible, but I’m 24 hours in the studio.” Sounds about right.

Riley won’t say where he and Bobby Brown went wrong but he does say that situation where Bobby was paranoid for his life and ended up in some guys house and a shotgun was pulled never happened. He also remembers that Bobby was on PCP (and “everything”) at the time so he gave him milk to help contrast the effects of the PCP and Bobby fell right asleep. Being that Teddy used to bubble PCP as a teen he knew the ins and outs of it’s effects.

Teddy admits that he tried to talk Bobby out of marrying Whitney Houston. Even though he had love for her he says at the time they were working on a record and he knew that marriage equals lackluster record sales and a sex symbol can’t be married and push weight like that. He feels like ultimately he was right and his career fell off.

While he was living in Harlem, Teddy used to hang with Alpo, Rich Porter, Azie, and Slick Rick amongst others and they used to go out to Virginia to kick it before the skinheads took over. Interestingly enough their lack of a music scene is what he fell in love with as he saw a void he could fill. That’s why he ended up moving out there. Though he says he inspired Pharrell to superstardom, he also admits that Pharrell wrote his verse for his classic breakthrough “Rumpshaker.”

Teddy’s relationship with Suge Knight dates back to the 90’s and admits that he put up some money for Suge to have a doctor while he was locked up. He reveals that Suge tried to get Teddy to sign with Death Row Records and when he turned them down Tupac dropped “Toss It Up” which Teddy felt was a diss towards him due to Aaron Hall being on the record.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BdIzwL6HoPW/?hl=en&taken-by=teddyriley1

Teddy says he left Guy after he best friend was killed during Guy’s beef with New Edition. After he went to the funeral and realized he was the only person there, he knew it was time to move on from the group. Luckily Michael Jackson called him up and they ended up working together.

Teddy says he moved out of Virginia because he was “hated on by the officials, not the people” and he was used by a lot of said officials who wanted to utilize his likeness. Peeping the jig he moved up out of town and moved on. He even got swept up in a scam where some conman ended up swindling people out of their money and ended up with a $50 million dollar tab. Of course Teddy fought the claim but ended up losing his house because of said conman.