Hip hop soul is a subgenre of contemporary R&B music, most popular during the early and mid 1990s, which fuses R&B or soul singing with hip hop musical production. The subgenre had evolved from a previous R&B subgenre, new jack swing, which had incorporated hip-hop influences into R&B music. By contrast, hip hop soul is, as described in The Encyclopedia of African American Music, "quite literally soul singing over hip hop grooves". The genre was most popular during the mid and late 1990s with artists such as Mary J. Blige (known as the "Queen of Hip-Hop Soul"), Jodeci, Faith Evans, TLC, and R. Kelly. By the late 1990s, hip hop soul would lead to the creation of neo soul, which retained the hip hop and R&B influences while also adding elements of classic 1970s soul music. Description Hip hop soul evolved directly from new jack swing, a form of contemporary R&B popularized by artists and producers such as Teddy Riley and his group Guy, Keith Sweat, and Bobby Brown. New jack swing had incorporated elements of hip-hop music—primarily hip-hop-inspired drum tracks and rapped verses—into contemporary R&B music also heavily inspired by the work of Prince. Hip hop soul shifted from new jack swing's reliance on synth-heavy production and took the hip-hop/R&B synthesis further by having R&B singers sing directly over the types of sample-heavy backing tracks typically found in contemporary hip-hop recordings like boom bap. The creation and evolution of hip hop soul led to an increasingly symbiotic relationship between its parent genres. Hip hop soul acts presented themselves in styles and personas comparable to those of rappers—dressing in hip hop fashions and adopting a tougher image than the traditional pop-friendly personas of R&B artists (the existence and popularity of hip hop soul also had the opposite effect on mainstream rappers, who took on some of the elements of the R&B artists' personas to become more palatable to mainstream audiences). The subgenre increased the popularity of R&B music among the younger hip-hop audience, leading to better sales and airplay success for hip hop soul recordings versus previous forms of post-disco R&B, on the Billboard pop music sales charts. It also increased the popularity of hip-hop music and culture with older audiences and corporations looking to market urban music. However, the creation of hip hop soul has been argued by music journalists and fans of R&B music to have "killed off"