60 Songs That Explain the '90s - C+C Music Factory—“Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)”

Episode Date: January 28, 2021

Rob explores the C+C Music Factory’s debut hit “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)” by discussing the group’s rise to popularity from the underground dance scene and the controversy surrounding their exclusion of featured singer Martha Wash. This episode was originally produced as a Music and Talk show available exclusively on Spotify. Find the full song on Spotify or wherever you get your music. Host: Rob Harvilla Guest: Craig Seymour Producers: Isaac Lee and Justin Sayles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to a music and talk episode where full songs and talk segments play together only on Spotify. Best of all, you can create your own music and talk show for free with Anchor Spotify's podcasting platform. Get started at anchor.fm-fm-f-M-C-H-O-R-M-S-U-S-I-S-M-U-S-I-S-I-C-A-L-L-K. A lot of spelling there, but just do it. For posterity, the number one song in America on January 1st, 1990, was Phil Collins, another day in paradise, a somber ballad about homelessness, about gratitude, about empathy,

an awfully cold cup of coffee for a giddy new decade. One time I was riding shotgun driving with my mom, running errands or whatever, listening to the radio. I'm 11 or 12 years old, like 30% of my memories from this. period of my life or my mom driving me around as we listen to the radio. And another day in Paradise comes on and she turns to me and says, Roby, I want you to listen to this song. This is important. You need to appreciate what you have and show kindness and generosity to other people who aren't as lucky. For once, I kept my trap shut and listened to her and listened to Phil. This was an uncommonly wholesome interaction between me, my mother, and early.

90s pop radio. More typical of these interactions was the time that Bell Bibb DeVos' Do Me came on. This is their next single after Poison. Bell Biv DeVos Poison is one of the best songs of the 90s just for posterity. Paradoxically, given the subject matter, it kills at weddings. All your aunts crying out, me and the crew used to do her. Oh, well, anyways, do me is called do me and starts like this. And my mom like slapped the radio off in a panic, just whap, silence in the car for an uncomfortably long time. This was pop radio in the early 90s, a spectrum that stretched from somber empathy to pornography.

And somewhere in the middle, closer to pornography than empathy, maybe, but still safely in the middle of the road, there was this. My name is Rob Harvilla. I'm a music critic at The Ringer, and this is 60 songs that explain the 90s. And that is the C&C Music Factory. Gonna make you sweat. Everybody dance now. Gonna make you sweat, parentheses, everybody dance now.

Close parentheses. One of the biggest hits of one of the wildest eras in pop music history, in dance music history. Early 90s, pop radio was bonkers. Just chaos. A decade does not begin right away culturally. The previous decade dissipates slowly. It can take a year or two. The future, for quite a while, can sound uncomfortably like the past, or delightfully like the past.

Do you know what jazzercise is? Got huge in the mid-80s? A lot of spandex. A lot of moms. I'm sorry, that's condescending. A lot of condescension. A lot of dance music that it was never quite as vapid or pedestrian as it appeared. One way to summarize the early 90s is that upbeat dance music, including honest-to-god house music,

could simultaneously both super mainstream. and super, super weird. Which is to say that everyone and everything got a propulsive dance beat for a while, whether they asked for one or not. In early 80s tune from folk singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega, got a propulsive dance beat, courtesy of an English electronic duo called DNA, and suddenly Tom's Diner is a top five hit stateside. It did even better in Europe.

They had a better grasp on the nuances. In 1991, country superstar Tammy Wynette got a propulsive dance beat when she hooked up with a much, much, much weirder English electronic duo, the KLF for a smash pop house remix of the song, Justified and Ancient. The KLF's whole deal is way too confusing for me to even begin to summarize here, but just trust me, this was a total jam. Gregorian Chants from a German choir recorded in the 70s. got a propulsive dance beat, courtesy of the German group Enigma, and suddenly Sadness Part 1, or Sodness Part 1, is a top five hit stateside that did even better in Europe and beyond. I loved it when this one came on the radio.

I would think my deepest 12-year-old thoughts to Sadness Part 1. Phil Collins, for the record, reunited with his old Prague rock buddies in Genesis and had another big pop hit in 1991, with a very goofy song called I Can't Dance. chaos. The C&C Music Factory almost made sense by comparison, but there is chaos a plenty here also. Musical chaos, fashion chaos, ethical chaos, legal chaos, possibly ongoing, present tense, legal chaos. Some people in the C&C Music Factory took the factory part a little too seriously. For example,

the single most important element of gonna make you sweat, the musician most responsible for it, coming an enduring smash hit. It took her quite a while to get the credit she deserved to get the proper name recognition to get named it all, really. I'll give you a hint. It's Martha Wash. Disco, gospel, house, and radio pop diva extraordinaire. At first, it was not readily apparent to most people that this was Martha Wash's voice. You didn't see her on the album cover. You didn't see her in the video. This is absurd in retrospect. In retrospect, who the hell else could this possibly have bin. It turns out that one's opinion of the factory depends on whether you own the factory or just clock in there. So first, let's meet the owners, the two Cs in the C&C Music Factory. Real quick,

my buddy Tommy is going to be pissed if I don't tell you that one time we were at an Oakland A's game. The A's were playing the Yankees. C.C. Sabathia was dealing for the Yankees and Tommy yells out, your music factory sucks. Got a huge laugh. You had to be there. Anyway, the two Cs in the C&C Music Factory were Robert Clovillis and David Cole, who met in the late 80s at the famed New York City Dance Club Better Days. Robert primarily was a DJ, David primarily played keyboards. Early on, they worked together as part of a group called two Puerto Ricans, a black man, and a Dominican, and then another group called the 28th Street crew. But just as a duo, Clovillis and Cole would soon flourish as writers, as producers, as remixers, as talent scouts,

as ethically dubious hitmakers and pop stars in their own right. They worked with Mariah Carey on her 1991 album Emotions. They worked on Whitney Houston's remake of I'm Every Woman. They remixed Taylor Dane and Natalie Cole and Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam and Aretha Franklin and New Kids on the Block. These shepherded young pop house and Latin freestyle groups, including one called seduction and another one called trilogy. In 2016, Clavillis told Vy. that he and Cole first offered Gonna Make You Sweat, the song,

Two Trilogy, who turned it down. Next thing you know, he and Cole are playing an early version for Sony, Columbia Superstar Music Executives, Tommy Motola and Donny Iiner. And boom, five-album deal for the newly christened C&C Music Factory.

Going to Make You Sweat, the album, came out the week before Christmas, 1990. Pictureed on the cover, Glovillus, a Liberian singer-model actress, Zellma Davis and a Brooklyn rapper named Freedom Williams. There's your factory. I owned this album on cassette and monster side A as cassettes go, starting with Gonna Make You Sweat and then two more minor hits. Here we go, let's rock and roll, kicked off with some print style guitar shredding

and had one of those rad MTV videos set in like a sexy factory. It's a very popular tableau. Things that make you go, hmm, on the other hand, was inspired by a slightly bawdy Arsenio Hall routine. It was a playful showcase for the slightly bawdy Freedom Williams who met Clavillis and Cole while he was working as a janitor at a studio they were using. I'm guessing Freedom was not shirtless while being a janitor, but as a minor pop star rapper, he'd be shirtless a great deal over the time and somehow sound like it. I'll ask my girl, I know she only loves me.

Wasn't I the one who took your virginity? The look on her face, red so in bloom, she said. Yeah, why you guys always ask me that? And slap. The radio goes off again. Great Side A. I have no memory whatsoever of playing side B of the Gonna Make You Sweat tape. Even once, no idea what's going on back there. Didn't matter. In 1990, you were golden with just three songs. Hell, you were golden with just one. And gonna make you sweat, everybody dance now, was the one. It was dance pop to its core. But that cut-up guitar riff sounded just rock and roll enough, I guess, to make it a crossover hit, to make it a coveted

jock jam. Then and now, this song is like a giant, sentient t-shirt cannon. The song hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in February 1991. Per Billboard, it was the third biggest song of 91 overall. After Brian Adams, everything I do, parentheses, I do it for you, close parentheses, and color me bads, I want to sex you up. Slap, almost more importantly. Going to make you sweat was the music cue for the single funniest Simpsons joke in history, also involving a sexy factory. We work hard, we play hard. I was shooting pool at my college's student union once, and that episode was on TV, and a room full of people busted out laughing. It is hard to do. It is legitimately a profound artistic achievement to create a song whose first 10 seconds are immediately a punchline, almost without accompaniment,

to craft a hook with that much personality, that much cultural weight. That's not a joke. on them. That's a joke they're in on, not to mention financially compensated for. Even if the song always sounded campy to you, even if it's disposable, you ignore the impact of going to make you sweat at your own peril. I couldn't say how many people first heard a rapper on the radio, thanks to going to make you sweat, but it's not zero people. You will not see Freedom Williams on anybody's list of the greatest 50 or even 5,000 MCs alive, but he got the job done. The job was to sound sexy and cool, primarily to people who didn't give much of a shit about actually being sexy and cool. One of my core beliefs is that any song that rhymes pants with dance is automatically good. I don't make the rules. Okay, I made this one, but I stand by it.

I have no such position on rhyming nuts with butt. It depends. Let's leave it at that. So the C&C Music Factory are pop stars now. They anchor an entire 1992 episode of the Spunky Hit NBC sitcom Blossom, starring Myambialic as Blossom. Do not read MiamiMBialik's parenting book. In this episode, Blossom and her best friend Six want tickets to a CNC Music Factory concert

so they camp out overnight for them. That used to be a thing. Three members of the real-life CNC Music Factory pop-by. Not Freedom Williams. Maybe they told him he had to wear a shirt and he refused to appear on camera. Instead, his bandmates explain to Blossom that they're there to give front-row seats

to the people who got the lousiest tickets. That wasn't a thing at all. But Blossom and Six do get to dance to things that make you go, hmm, with the band. Blossom took place in a whimsical alternative sitcom universe, so sure, that's a thing. At the 1992 edition of the American Music Awards, a sort of sub-grammys that also take place in a whimsical alternate universe, the CNC Music Factory of the night's big winners snagging five awards, including Best Dance Song for Gonna Make You Sweat and Favorite Pop slash Rock, Band, Slows, Slash, Group. They are presented with the award for favorite dance new artist by none other than naughty by nature, who opened the envelope with like a machete. My mom asked me, point blank with the naughty by nature song OPP really stood for. Can you imagine? I had no choice.

I said it stood for other people's privates. No one is arguing I handled this well. I thought that would soften the blow. It did not silence. C&C Music Factory take the stage and take the trophy from naughty by nature. And then a very strange thing happens, which is that David Cole, after thanking God, says this. I really am deeply grateful to you all for believing in us and not

falling prey to this whole lip-syn thing because we are not a lip-sync group. We are for real 100%. And Ms. Zellma right here can sing! And then Zelma sings into the microphone

at the podium where her group is receiving one of five awards, all based on for a song on which officially she sings. This leads one to recall another strange award show incident when the CNC Music Factory were accepting the trophy for best dance video at the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards,

and Zelma thanked MTV, quote, for showing that I can sing and I am talented, end quote, what is going on here? Do you know what the Streisand effect is? When a famous person tries to debunk a rumor or suppress personal information in a way that only draws your attention to the thing they don't want you to hear about, Barbara Streisand can sing and it has talent, by the way. Don't. Don't come after me, Barbara. So the deal here. And this is obviously super pre-internet is that word is spread that indeed Zelma Davis does not sing the hook on going to make you sweat everybody dance now. She's on the album cover. She sure is how lip-sinking and the award-winning MTV. video. She's singing the song live now, often on award shows, but that's not her on the original song. Recall that the Millie Vanilli scandal had broken right at the turn of the 90s, and so lip-syncing has become a capital offense, and now Zelma Davis stands accused. So who is actually singing on

going to make you sweat? It's Martha Wash. It's this woman. Martha Wash was from San Francisco. She grew up singing gospel in her early 20s, back in the mid-70s. She auditioned to be a backup singer for the disco star Sylvester. She got the gig, as did her friend and fellow gospel singer, Isora Armstead. They were on their way. Soon, Martha and Izora broke out as a duo, first under the name Two Tonzo Fun, then as the Weather Girls, whose big hit, indeed, was the campiest song possible, played as straight as humanly possible.

Fantastic. They sang backup on Bob Seeger's Like a Rock. They sang backup on Aretha Furriff. Franklin's freeway of love. Martha Wash had the range and already had a fascinating career when she first met David Cole, who was the musical director and piano player for the weather girls for a while. Now, of course, David is a budding producer and pop star, and Martha starts singing demos for him as he's churning out hits for his various projects and schemes. Incredibly. Gotta make you sweat is not the first time Martha Wash didn't immediately get credit for a big Clevelis and Cole hit. You're my one and only true love. Parentheses, you're my one and only,

close parentheses, true love, was a big hit in 1989 for the trio seduction, which did not include Martha Wash, even though Martha Wash sang almost all of it. Martha recorded the song, Gonna Make You Sweat ostensibly as a demo. Court documents later suggested she got paid less than a thousand bucks to do this. There's a great 2014 Rolling Stone profile of Martha Wash where she says, I was told it was going to be a demo for another singer. Also Incredibly. Gonna Make You Sweat was not even the best pop house radio hit with uncredited lead vocals by Martha Wash released in 1990.

This honor would go instead to Everybody, Everybody, by the Italian group Black Box, who slapped a model slash singer on the cover of their album, Dreamland, even though Martha sang uncredited lead vocals on basically all of it. I was a bit of a sad loner in junior high as a 12-year-old or whatever. Everyone was. I understand that now. I was not aware of that.

At the time, I did not own Dreamland on cassette. That would have made me cooler. But I'd hear everybody, everybody on my little boombox radio, say on my pop radio station's Saturday night dance party while I'm sitting in my room, looking at my cool see-through touch-tone phone. I might have bought that at Spencer Gifts at the mall. And the phone wouldn't ring because I was a loner. and I just listened to everybody, everybody,

which seemed to describe a party at which one could find everybody except me. I'm fine now, thanks. It was dismaying. It is continually dismaying to learn how rad pop hits like this are often made. Frankenstein together. Key players getting ripped off or cut out altogether. I did own the Technotronic cassette, pump up the jam. Technotronic were from Belgium, and they put a model on the cover also,

though that whole deal wasn't as acrimonious. If you want maximum Frankenstein pop hit chaos, the power by the German group Snap, has a genesis convoluted enough to sustain a 15-minute read Q-point article and medium that I highly recommend, even if it requires a flow chart, well, with all the samples, the rappers, the new versions. Shout out, Chill Rob G. This is an aside and beneath all of us, but I have a minor quibble with the cover of the vinyl single version, the 45 of the power, which is that the font they use for the words the power make it look like the boner. It's a typographical issue. The P and the O are so close together that it looks like a B,

and then the W in power is kind of cut off, so it looks like an N. I had not previously meditated on how similar the words power and boner could be visually really makes you think. I'm not the first person to point this out, but I am the most amused by it. This is the stupidest thing that I've ever burn it that that I got the bone it's getting it's getting kind of awkward I am 42 years old

anyway Martha Wash's various indignities are straightforward by comparison there's a great stereo gum article from 2019 about everybody everybody and the lawsuits Martha Wash filed against both Black Box and C&C Music Factory

which helped change the industry paradigm from anonymous session player to fully credited feature performer. Martha Wash would get her due, would get her Rolling Stone profile, would get, in retrospect, the lion's share of the acclaim for these songs as they popped up on best of the decade lists and whatnot. Is that better for Martha, ultimately, than getting to be MTV famous at the time? You'd have to ask her. Maybe don't ask her. I should add that Zelma Davis sings a great deal elsewhere on the Gunna Make You Sweat album. That's really her on the hook to things they make you go,

for example. I feel bad for Zelma, all the apologizing, all the I can really sing and have talent protesting she had to do. So I've done 12 episodes of this show so far, and I'll tell you what I hate. I hate when we reach the here's all the bad stuff that happened after their big hit portion of our program. We got to bust this format. We got to change the narrative. I'm working on it, but I can't change history. I'm not a magician, and I'm obliged to inform you of the following. after the lawsuits Martha Wash became an actual member of C&C Music Factory publicly for the group's second album, 1994 as Anything Goes, exclamation point, which it will not surprise you to learn was not a success on the same scale as its predecessor. Freedom Williams is long gone. It's just clavillis and Cole on the album cover now.

The lead single was called Do You Want to Get Funky? Question mark and featured Martha Wash and Zelma Davis and Trilogy. heard do you want to get funky in full exactly once in my life caught it on m tv i've listened to this song once and yet my brain took the liberty of committing to memory a few bars from the rapper they got to replace freedom williams specifically these bars i got the power to freak it more than an hour To freak it more than an hour, with so much mad funk, I need a shower. This pops into my head, let's say six times a year. Doesn't app it often, but it happens consistently. This is not part of the bad stuff that happened, unfortunately.

David Cole died in 1995 of complications from spinal meningitis. Robert Kovillis kept the C&C Music Factory name alive or tried to, but per that 2016 Vice article, Freedom Williams swooped. in to trademark the name in 2005 and went on to tour as CNC Music Factory. The vice article includes a flyer for the going to make Australia sweat tour. I'm sorry I missed that. At least back then, Clavillis was mulling over legal action. Is it fun ultimately to explore the sordid and Machiavellian and often quite tragic histories of frivolous pop songs like this? Are we better off not knowing. Is ignorance really bliss? Frivolity is definitely bliss. You know, it's another great

frivolous dance pop song from an eccentricly dressed group of people released in 1990. D.Light's groove is in the heart. At junior high dances, I just walk the perimeter of the dance floor in the gym being way too nervous to approach any girls to the tune of Groove is in the heart. D. Light played Saturday Night Live, and I still remember the way Roseanne Barr, who was hosting that episode said Delight in a very blithe Rosanne Barr sort of way. They didn't even play Grooves in the Heart on SNL because they had integrity. But to this day on Twitter or Slack or whatever to express happiness, to express delight, when my sports team wins or whatever, I often just drop in a link to the Grooves in the Heart video.

I bet that song, and Delight as a whole, has a fascinating, sordid Machiavellian and maybe even tragic history. Let's not find out. My guest today is Craig Seymour, long-time critic and author who's currently working on a book called When Geto Fabulous Went Pop, the Inside Story of 90s R&B. Craig, thank you so much for being here today. Thanks so much for having me. Oh, absolutely. I really wanted to talk to you about, first of all, the prehistory of C&C Music Factory.

Like, I think Martha Wash's deal is pretty well known at this point, but I'm curious about the scene that Clavillis and Cole came out of. Like, do you have a sense in late 80s, New York City Nightlife that everyone was chasing some kind of huge breakout mainstream pop success, like was going to make you sweat always the plan? I mean, not really. I was there. I mean, I used to, in the late 80s, I was in New York. I was, you know, going to all the clubs. And I was part of the scene. It was all very much kind of like freestyle. And then it kind of transitioned into house. And Better Days was a black gay club. near Times Square. And that's where Robert Clavillas used to DJ. And David Cole, who grew up in Tennessee playing piano in the church, he started going to better days and playing keyboards over the records that Robert Clavillas was playing. And then that's kind of how they came together.

And I mean, just speaking generally for them to see, I mean, I think there was a certain extent of once Madonna broke out of that New York dance scene. But it was kind of like people thought that that was a possibility. I mean, I think she maybe expanded the parameters, but with CNC, what would happen more often is that top DJs would get remixing gigs. And so, you know, all the pop hits would have remixes. Well, CNC got a long way doing remixes, but at a certain point, they were like, hey, we want to be the stars. We want to do. And that's when C&C Music Factory came along. So I can't say that that was really a goal for everybody, but it was a just kind of a way of not being marginalized just as remixers.

Right. From within the scene, was it evident to you that, like, they could be stars? Like, if you were going to tab, like, the breakout artists at that club in that scene, is that they who you would have picked? Well, see, they weren't really artists. That's the thing. It's like, it was, like, all of a sudden, you would go from, they would remix, like, a big Natalie Cole record or be producing Liz Torres as one of the big house divas and stuff. And then all of a sudden they had this project and like this big glossy video and like they were in it and everything. So it was really kind of shocking.

It was very, very different from what people were doing at the time or what anybody in the kind of DJ scene, dance scene was doing at the time. Right. For people in that scene, is it dismaying when a song like gonna make you sweat becomes this gigantic crossover hit? Like is a song that gets that big inherently sort of compromised

and diluted from the scene it came out of? I mean, not, in some cases, yes, in some cases, no. I mean, that song always was coming from that pop hip house sort of thing. And hip house, you know, it always been big, like, in Jersey, Queen Lativa had a hip house song on her first album, coming to my house and things like that. So that was kind of within that lane. And then the other thing is that when a record, like, going to make you sweat came out, you know, it would come out with a billion remixes. And so it was like the underground dance community would be kind of served by one of those remakes. And there were a lot of times, because I always went, you know, mostly went out to clubs and just listened to club music,

there were a lot of times like I would hear a song on the radio and we'd even recognize that that was like a song that I knew and was like a big song. So, I mean, the big surprise with that record, I think, was seeing the way it was visualized in the video and when seeing it on MTV. and it was so stylized and so it's just so different. And it seemed to have a budget where most dance stuff at the time really was low budget. So that's the thing that was shocking. I mean, there are other instances with, let's say, like a C.C. Penison finally, where that starts within the clubs. And then by the time that gets really big, people in the club community are just so sick of it.

So it's less not liking the song than just, oh, my God, you know. It's played out, yeah. Yeah. David Cole and Robert Calvillis had so much credibility inside the community that I don't think anybody was mad at them trying to make a buck. Do you have a personal favorite crossover hit from this era? Like, I understand why it's going to make you sweat is way bigger historically than everybody, everybody. But like, everybody, everybody is still definitely my favorite. Well, I love Martha Washington's voice.

So, you know, I would say if it's not everybody, everybody for me, it would be like, I don't know anybody else. You know, one of the black box. Sure, strike it off. yeah, except that has that corny rap on it. I'm not a big hip-house person. Let me just say that. Sure, sure. I've, like, searched my life.

Like, I'm not sure I ever found, like, a great strike-it-up mix that doesn't have any of the rap. Okay. That's been sort of something I've been on a journey for. The Holy Grail, yeah. Since, you know, like the early 90s. But, yeah, you know, I think finally is a really great record. I think the delight album is a really great album. Yeah, yeah.

I get soul to soul. I think those are really great authentic dance records. So all of those things work for me. I was going to actually ask you about the rapping from this era, which I'm fascinated by. Like, going to make you sweat, groove is in the heart, the power. Like, are we underrating, if not the technique, than just the impact that those rappers had and like helping rap become mainstream pop? No, I think you're underrating it just appropriately. Yeah, okay. Because I really think that the way that rap was being used on hip house records was still very much in the vein of rap being a novelty. Mm-hmm. You know, so you have, it was almost like the same thing as rap being in like a serial commercial or something. You know, it had that degree of authenticity.

Yeah. Like, at the same time, I mean, there were legitimate, like, hardcore rappers, like with, like, the Big Daddy Cains and the cool-de-wraps and the records. and the Raqims and all this kind of stuff. That's very different than what Freedom Williams was doing, or Turbo B or just about Ya Kid K. I mean, they were doing, you know, the one difference there, the one sort of exception is Q-Tip on Groove is in the heart,

because, of course, the tribe called Quest was a very legitimate, respected hip-hop group. But everybody else, you know, might as well have been Vanilla Ice, really. Right, yes. Best case scenario is Vanilla. Nice. That's dark, but it's the truth. At the time these songs were on the chart, like, how aware were you of the Martha Wash controversy and like the convoluted history of a song, like the power? Like, did these backstories

affect the way that you heard the songs? Well, see, I was born in the 60s. So we're talking about I was in my early 20s at the time. So I was very aware. And I was a big Sylvester fan. So, and therefore I was a big. And Martha Wash and Izora, they were, his background group tons of fun and then they became the weather girls and so a lot of people know it's raining men from that and then they split up and went their separate ways and martha wash did a lot of session work so i mean i know two tons of fun songs that are classic like underground disco songs like just us so i i immediately knew that was martha wash's voice there was no question that that was martha wash's voice um i guess because we're talking about back in the day where

dance music was largely through 12 inches, and they really didn't have pictures on them most of the times. So it wasn't really a big deal to like connect a face with the name of the artist. And dance music was always so production driven. So it was no surprise to hear to know a singer and see a different group name and then hear that same singer on another, and none of them would have pictures. Because that was just the market. It was 12 inches. You know, videos weren't being made. It just really didn't matter what it was called or who was actually in it. Yeah.

In a universe where Martha Wash is in The Gunna Make You Sweat video, she's on the album cover, like she's on stage at the VMAs, like she's the face of the chart-topping C&C Music Factory from the beginning. Does that Martha Wash become a legit pop star in her own right? Or was she always destined, do you think, to be more of this sort of closely guarded secret? I honestly think they could have made it work. I mean, they could have, I mean, now all of this just starting off, yes, it's sexist and it's unfair to black women and music and just understanding all of that.

But within those parameters, there were women that didn't kind of fit the sort of thin, white stereotype that had dance hits and stuff like that. They would just cut the video a certain way. So I think they could have done it. I mean, I honestly think that just knowing so much about the stories and everything like that, like it really does make sense to me that, Martha Wash just went in and cut a bunch of songs with them and got the check because a lot of session singers do that. And it's easy. I wrote a book on Luther Vandros. And he talked about a period of his career where he wasn't really trying to be a part of a group because he didn't want to have to take the pictures and do the interviews and tour and all the stuff you have to do. He was fine just showing up in the studio singing a couple la la la laas or just doing a demo vocal and getting the check and going home and living his life. I don't really know that Martha Watch has ever been pressed to the fact of like, did you really want to be in a group at that point? Was that really something that you wanted to do in any of these cases? I think, as with most things, once money comes into it and once a great deal of money comes into it, then obviously it becomes an issue. But otherwise, I think from a perspective of that, she's probably thinking she's going to make more money from the initial check for the sessions than she would ever from royalties, because royalties are so

small, and these record companies, most of the dance record companies were really independent and stuff. And then with Black Box, that was like an Italian company. I mean, Lord knows, when she would ever have received those actual royalties of the accounting. So she's probably making, you know, not want to speak forward, but she's probably

making the calculation that one good check for a studio session was going to yield more money than, you know, some trip-drab royalties from overseas. we're ever going to bring. But then once it becomes this big thing, of course, like anybody else,

she'd be like, well, now, wait a minute, I didn't know this was going to be a hit. That changes the calculation. You described yourself to me as a David Cole fan, which I don't hear often. People love songs that he worked on, but he's rarely the focal point. What typifies the David Cole sound for you?

Well, that's just coming from kind of like just really knowing his background and following his career from the very beginning. And he had a record in 88, his own just a solo record called Take My Breath Away, where he sings and he plays piano. And I think what's so great about David Cole is just that he really represents authentic house music and where it came from. You know, he grew up playing piano in the church. And house music has that kind of church type feel in the sense of the way people took to it. It almost like, you know, you'd go to house clubs and a great house party,

and it would have a revival-like feel, and people would be kind of spiritually nurtured by this kind of music. So David had all of that. But the other interesting thing about David is that, like, let's say a Mariah Carey record, right? You would think when he started to work with Moriah, when he and Robert Clavis started working with Mariah, you would think that that would really be a kind of pop thing. But he would always kind of put in little touches that the dance community would know.

It ultimately got him in trouble because it got him sued a couple of times. Too authentic, yeah. But like on Make It Happen, anybody that knows Alicia Myers, I want to thank you, instantly knew that that's what was being evoked on the album version of that song. And so, you know, it's almost like knowing a secret. So to be a part of the dance music community and you hear this song by this big pop artist done by Coling Luz, and you know that they're kind of speaking to you in this one melodic way. And the remix of Make It Happen that they did has the melody line from Dr. Love, which is a huge song by a group called First Choice, which is a huge underground dance record.

So just being able to work with these big acts, but to always have these kind of touches that nodded to the underground dance community, that's just something I've always admired. Craig, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for being here, man. Sure. Thanks very much to our guest, Craig Seymour. thanks to our producers Justin Sales and Isaac Lee, and thanks to you, as always, for listening. And now, without further ado, here's the C&C Music Factory with gonna make you sweat,

Everybody Dance Now. We'll see you next time.