The 1990s File Feature
That's The Way Love Is
That’s The Way Love Is — Bobby BrownThe King of New Jack Swing in TransitionBobby Brown arrived at 1993 from a place of extraordinary commercial success and …
01 The Story
That’s The Way Love Is — Bobby Brown
The King of New Jack Swing in Transition
Bobby Brown arrived at 1993 from a place of extraordinary commercial success and personal turbulence in roughly equal measure. The years between 1988 and 1992 had turned him from a former New Edition member into one of the defining pop figures of an era, riding the new jack swing wave that producer Teddy Riley had helped invent to a succession of chart-topping singles. By early 1993, though, the landscape was shifting. The same production style that had made him inescapable was beginning to sound like a template rather than a revelation, and the competition on the charts had grown considerably more sophisticated.
That’s The Way Love Is arrived in this context as a single from his Bobby album, a record that had already yielded significant hits and was still moving commercial units by the time the track was dispatched to radio. The song showed Brown reaching for something slightly different from his sharpest new jack swing material, a smoother, more romantic R&B direction that acknowledged the evolving tastes of an audience that was beginning to absorb influences from both the emerging adult contemporary R&B market and the harder edges of hip-hop.
A Moderate but Meaningful Chart Run
The single’s chart performance reflected a commercial moment that was complicated for Brown, regardless of his continued stardom. The track debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on April 24, 1993, entering at position 84, and climbed steadily through the spring. Its peak came on May 15, 1993, when it reached number 57, which placed it solidly in the middle tier of that week’s Hot 100 but did not match the top-20 peaks that his biggest singles had achieved.
The song spent 9 weeks on the chart in total, a run that signals a dedicated fanbase keeping the record alive even as broader radio support remained moderate. Nine weeks is not a career-defining number, but in a chart cycle as competitive as 1993’s, it represents genuine traction. Radio programmers in the R&B and urban format were spinning the track, and the audience that responded was real and consistent.
The Sound and the Setting
What the song captured was a version of Bobby Brown that was trying to demonstrate emotional range alongside his well-established showmanship. His voice, always an instrument of considerable expressive power, carried the track through its romantic declarations with the kind of confident delivery that had made him a star in the first place. The production leaned into the smoother end of contemporary R&B, all polished percussion and warm keyboard textures, positioned for crossover appeal without abandoning the funk-influenced grooves that were Brown’s natural habitat.
The year 1993 was a crowded one on the R&B charts. Mariah Carey was at the height of her first commercial peak, Whitney Houston’s soundtrack work was dominating multiple formats, and a new generation of male R&B artists was beginning to emerge with approaches that would eventually reshape the genre entirely. Within that competitive environment, Bobby Brown’s continued presence on the chart was itself a statement of durability.
The Bobby Brown Phenomenon
To understand That’s The Way Love Is properly, you have to understand what Bobby Brown meant to popular music between roughly 1988 and 1993. He had helped establish new jack swing as the dominant sound of the pop-R&B crossover market, worked with producers at the cutting edge of what contemporary rhythm and blues could sound like, and developed a performance style that was physically electrifying in ways that influenced countless artists who came after him. His tours during this period were spectacular productions, and his stage presence was something that translated even across the limitations of a music video.
Holding the Legacy
By the time That’s The Way Love Is charted, Brown was navigating the particular challenge of being a dominant artist during a period of genre transition. The single serves as an honest snapshot of that navigation, a talented performer meeting his audience where they were while reaching toward where music was going. With 23 million YouTube views, the track has accumulated enough affection across the decades to confirm that its moment was genuinely felt.
Put this one on and you get 1993 R&B in a single track: polished, ambitious, and slightly uncertain of where to land next.
“That’s The Way Love Is” — Bobby Brown’s singular moment on the 1990s charts.
02 Song Meaning
The Meaning Behind That’s The Way Love Is
An Honest Accounting of Romance
Bobby Brown’s That’s The Way Love Is occupies a specific emotional register that was somewhat unusual for the new jack swing era: it is reflective rather than boastful, philosophical rather than performative. The song’s central argument is that love, for all its difficulty and unpredictability, is worth the trouble. The lyric does not pretend that romantic relationships are easy or without pain. Instead it accepts the complications and finds meaning in them.
That kind of honest accounting of romance gave the song a different texture from the more confidently assertive material in Brown’s catalog. Where songs like his earlier hits traded on swagger and energy, this one asked the listener to sit with something more nuanced. The emotional tone is one of acceptance rather than conquest, which represented a genuine artistic stretch for an artist whose brand was built substantially on confidence and attitude.
Love as a Natural Force
The title’s framing is significant. By describing what happens in the lyric as simply “the way love is,” the song positions romantic experience not as something to be fought or fixed but as a natural condition to be understood and accepted. There is something almost philosophical in that stance, a recognition that love operates according to its own logic, independent of what the people involved in it might prefer.
This kind of resigned acceptance, delivered with warmth rather than bitterness, resonated with an adult R&B audience that had outgrown the uncomplicated romantic fantasies of early teen pop. The song’s emotional intelligence was part of its appeal in 1993, a year when the R&B audience was increasingly sophisticated and hungry for music that reflected real emotional experience.
The R&B Moment and Its Demands
To understand what the song was reaching for, you need to understand where R&B was going in the early 1990s. New jack swing had made rhythm and blues into a commercial juggernaut by marrying hip-hop drum programming to traditional soul singing and pop structure. But by 1993, listeners were beginning to want something that felt warmer and more emotionally direct. The sound that would eventually be called quiet storm R&B was gaining ground, and artists who could navigate between the energy of new jack swing and the intimacy of traditional soul were in a particularly strong position.
Bobby Brown’s willingness to explore that softer register on this track showed an artist reading the cultural moment accurately, even if the specific single did not generate the same commercial response as his peak-period work.
Vulnerability as Artistic Currency
What the song ultimately offers is a version of Bobby Brown that the public did not always get to see. His image was built on confidence and charisma, but That’s The Way Love Is allowed vulnerability to surface. The acknowledgment that love is difficult, that it can hurt, and that it is worth continuing to pursue anyway is an emotionally generous position that the lyric inhabits convincingly.
That vulnerability was and remains the song’s most enduring quality. Decades later, the track’s 23 million YouTube views suggest that listeners keep returning to it not for the production innovation but for the emotional honesty it contains. The song peaked at number 57 on the Billboard Hot 100, a modest commercial result for a major artist, but commercial results do not always track emotional resonance, and this is a song that clearly resonated beyond its chart position.
→ More from the 1990s File
View all 1990s hits →
Keep digging