What Happened to Nice & Smooth? Still Passing the Mic in 2026

If you owned a radio in 1991, you knew both of these voices before you knew the names attached to them: one high, clipped and giddy, the other low and unhurried. Nice & Smooth made “Hip Hop Junkies” and “Sometimes I Rhyme Slow,” borrowed Tracy Chapman’s guitar riff, then stole a Gang Starr record out from under Gang Starr. And then, somewhere after 1997, the albums simply stopped coming. So whatever happened to them? Less than you’d assume, and more than the record shelf suggests.

01Profile

Group name

Nice & Smooth

Members

Gregory O. "Greg Nice" Mays and Darryl O. "Smooth B" Barnes

Born

Greg Nice: May 30, 1967 (age 59) / Smooth B: August 3, 1965 (age 61)

Hometown

The Bronx, New York City

Active since

1986

Labels

Fresh Records, then Def Jam's Rush Associated Labels

Known for

"Funky for You," "Hip Hop Junkies," "Sometimes I Rhyme Slow," and "DWYCK" with Gang Starr

Studio albums

Four, released between 1989 and 1997

Now

Touring golden-era package shows; Greg Nice co-hosts Rock The Bells' "Salute the Sample"

Four albums in nine years, then nothing for nearly three decades — and yet both men were on an arena stage in New Jersey five days before this piece was published. That gap between “inactive” and “still working” is the whole story here.

02The Rise: Two Bronx Voices That Should Not Have Worked

A partnership built on a loss

Greg Nice and Smooth B were both Bronx kids who came up close enough to hip-hop’s park-jam era to have watched it happen in person. They were introduced through a mutual associate, and by Smooth B’s own account it clicked immediately — though Greg initially wanted to be a beatboxer rather than a rapper. What pushed them into the studio together was grief. In a 2020 interview with AllHipHop, Smooth B said the pair decided to record in honor of a collaborator, June Love, who had been killed.

Smooth B was not a novice when they started. He had already spent time on the road in a very different pop world:

I was touring on the road with Bobby Brown. I used to write his raps. Every rap you heard Bobby say, I wrote. — Smooth B, AllHipHop, July 2020

Fresh Records, then Def Jam

Their self-titled debut arrived in 1989 on Fresh Records, powered by “Funky for You.” When Fresh collapsed, Def Jam’s Rush Associated Labels imprint picked up their contracts — the same move that brought EPMD into the fold. It was a real promotional upgrade, and they used it.

Ain’t a Damn Thing Changed followed in 1991, and it is the record people mean when they say Nice & Smooth. “Sometimes I Rhyme Slow” looped the acoustic intro of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” under two verses about addiction, guns and consequence, and it went to No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Rap Songs chart while crossing to No. 44 on the Hot 100. “Hip Hop Junkies,” built on an unapologetically goofy Partridge Family sample plus a nod to Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative,” hit No. 5 on the rap chart. Writing about the album, critic Angus Batey argued that “Hip Hop Junkies” proved the record “should have been a ginormous global smash.”

The guest spots that outlived the singles

Here’s the odd part of their résumé: some of their most quoted work belongs to other people’s records. They traded verses with Big Daddy Kane on “Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy” in 1989. Then, after Gang Starr appeared on their song “Down the Line,” they returned the favor on a DJ Premier beat and cut “DWYCK” in a reported two-day session. Released as a standalone single in 1992 and later attached to Gang Starr’s Hard to Earn, it became one of the most durable posse cuts of the era — and Greg Nice’s verse on it is, for a lot of listeners, the single most recognizable thing either man ever recorded.

03The Turning Point: Why the Albums Stopped

Two more albums came and went. Jewel of the Nile landed in 1994 and IV: Blazing Hot in 1997, and by then the commercial center of rap had moved somewhere Nice & Smooth were never built to follow. Their thing was hooks, personality and showmanship — big samples, singable choruses, jokes delivered with total conviction. The late nineties wanted grimmer, glossier, more expensive-sounding records.

There was no announced breakup, no public falling-out reported by mainstream outlets, and no farewell tour. The releases just tapered off. What did not taper off was the live work. That distinction matters, because a group with no new music can still be a working act, and this is one of the clearest examples in rap.

• 1986Greg Nice and Smooth B begin working together in the Bronx.
• 1989Debut album Nice & Smooth arrives on Fresh Records, led by "Funky for You."
• 1991Ain't a Damn Thing Changed hits for Def Jam's RAL; "Sometimes I Rhyme Slow" tops the rap chart.
• 1992"DWYCK" with Gang Starr becomes an era-defining single.
• 1994Jewel of the Nile is released.
• 1997IV: Blazing Hot becomes their fourth and, to date, final studio album.
• 2020Smooth B releases the solo single "Before" and talks about wanting to go deeper on his own material.
• 2023Greg Nice is a co-host of Rock The Bells' "Salute the Sample" alongside LL Cool J and DJ Z-Trip.
• 2025Greg Nice issues "BUTTER SOUTH REFIXED" with CeeLo Green, Khujo Goodie and Bun B.
• 2026The duo shares a 20-artist bill at DJ Cassidy's "Pass The Mic Live!" in Atlantic City.

04The Catalog That Kept Working Without Them

Think about what a Nice & Smooth song has to survive to stay in rotation for thirty-five years. It cannot depend on a video budget, a trend, or a beef. It has to be a good time on contact.

That’s exactly what their catalog is, and it explains why they never really disappeared even during the years when they released nothing. “Hip Hop Junkies” is still a reliable DJ weapon. “DWYCK” gets pulled out at every function where somebody has to prove they know their history. And “Sometimes I Rhyme Slow” has an unusual second life: because it sits on top of “Fast Car,” the song keeps getting rediscovered every time Tracy Chapman’s original comes back around, which over the last few years it repeatedly has.

There’s also the sampling economy. “Funky for You” and “No Bones in Ice Cream” were both sampled into “DWYCK” itself, and Greg Nice’s ad-libs and vocal snatches have been lifted onto other people’s records for decades. Being quotable turned out to be a more durable asset than being current.

The result is a strange kind of career: a group whose Wikipedia entry is a stub, whose last album predates most streaming platforms, and whose songs are nonetheless permanently embedded in the standard golden-era set list. When promoters build a bill of nineties New York icons, Nice & Smooth are on the shortlist — not out of nostalgia charity, but because the records work in a room.

05What They Are Doing Now

Back on an arena stage this month

The most recent confirmed sighting is very recent indeed. On Friday, August 7, 2026, Nice & Smooth were part of DJ Cassidy’s “Pass The Mic Live!” at Hard Rock Live at Etess Arena in Atlantic City, a one-night bill uniting roughly twenty golden-era acts — Doug E. Fresh, Slick Rick, Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, MC Lyte, EPMD, Onyx, Monie Love, Grand Puba, Rob Base, Special Ed, 3rd Bass, Chubb Rock, Milk Dee and Treach among them. Cassidy, who has built the franchise around exactly this kind of lineup, framed it in unabashedly reverent terms:

Sharing a stage with twenty of my Hip Hop heroes at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino last August will forever be one of my life’s greatest honors. Each one of the Hip Hop legends on this year’s lineup shaped who I am as a deejay, an emcee, and a music lover. — DJ Cassidy, Shore Local Newsmagazine, 2026

It wasn’t a one-off. The duo also turned up at the Apollo in Harlem in March 2025 for D-Nice’s Club Quarantine fifth-anniversary show, and played the Prudential Center in Newark in November 2024, plus festival dates on the West Coast. For a group with no album to promote, that’s a working calendar.

Greg Nice became hip-hop’s sample explainer

The second act nobody predicted belongs to Greg Nice. He co-hosts “Salute the Sample,” a Rock The Bells series in which he, LL Cool J and DJ Z-Trip sit down and unpack where classic rap records got their DNA — Isaac Hayes, Bob James, The Meters, Zapp & Roger, and the well-worn “Tramp” and “Champ” breaks. The show has run for multiple seasons since 2023 and was still posting new episodes through the summer of 2026. It’s a genuinely good fit: Greg Nice is a natural talker with an encyclopedic memory of the era, and the format lets him be a historian without pretending to be a professor.

He’s also kept a trickle of music going on his own. “Butter (Special Version)” appeared in 2024, followed in June 2025 by “BUTTER SOUTH REFIXED,” a Southern remix featuring CeeLo Green, Khujo Goodie of Goodie Mob and Bun B — a pretty deliberate signal that he’s still interested in making records rather than only performing old ones. Apple Music also lists a 2026 video for “That’s That,” credited to Greg Nice with fellow Bronx veteran Positive K, though details on that release are thin.

Smooth B keeps it selective

Smooth B has been the quieter of the two. He released the solo single “Before” in 2020, telling AllHipHop that crowds at Nice & Smooth shows had been pushing him toward his own project and that he wanted to write from lived experience rather than chase whatever was charting. He remains active on the group’s official channels, where the duo still bills itself as “the original hip hop junkies,” and he continues to appear at the legacy shows. Beyond that, he has kept his day-to-day out of public view, which is his right and worth respecting.

06Summary

The honest answer to “what happened to Nice & Smooth” is that they stopped doing the one part of the job that gets tracked — releasing albums — and kept doing everything else. No scandal, no collapse, no bitter split on the record. Just two Bronx MCs who made a handful of songs so sturdy that they’ve been able to live off the goodwill for three decades, while one of them quietly built a parallel career as the guy who explains the music.

If you want to hear what made them matter, don’t start with the albums — start with “DWYCK,” then “Sometimes I Rhyme Slow,” then watch Greg Nice break down somebody else’s break on a Rock The Bells episode. That’s the whole arc in about fifteen minutes: two guys who were never the biggest act in the room, but who wrote lines other rappers still recite, and who are still getting handed a microphone in 2026 because of it.