( * as part of C & C Music Factory ( featuring Freedom Williams )
Chart entered : 15 December 1990
Chart peak : 3
Number of hits : 11 ( 8 as C & C Music Factory, 2 as Clivilles & Cole,1 as part of 2 Puerto Ricans, a Blackman and a Dominican )
I'll own up to a mistake here; we should have said hello to these guys back in 1987 when they were both part of a house act called 2 Puerto Ricans, a Blackman and a Dominican and had a number 47 hit with "Do It Properly" a re-tooling of a track by house producer Adonis called "No Way Back".
Robert Clivilles was born in New York in 1964. His parents were from Puerto Rica. David Cole was slightly older and came from Tennessee. They started working together on the New York house scene in the 1980s with David Morales and Chep Nunez making up the rest of the group. After the aforementioned single Robert and David started working as a production duo and launched the Brat Pack with the single "So Many Ways ( Do It Properly Part II )".
In 1989 the quartet released another single "Scandalous", a deep house track, before Morales and Nunez went their separate ways. Their next project was Seduction. This was intended as a studio project only featuring female vocalists but when their second single "(You're My One And Only ) True Love" featuring former Weather Girl Martha Wash became a Top 30 hit in the US they put together an attractive trio of girls to become the band.
Their next single "I Need A Rhythm " sampling Arethra Franklin's Respect was released under the name The 28th Street Crew. In 1990 they abbreviated it to The Crew and released "Get Dumb ( Free Your Body ) which features a vocal sample that sounds very like Time Team's Tony Robinson. More pertinently it also featured a sample of Boyd Jarvis's The Music Got Me without permission and he sued them.
It was after that that they settled on C & C Music Factory and recruited Wash, fledglng rapper Freedom Williams who was working as a studio hand and Liberian singer Zelma Davis to do the vocals on their first album. Wash was a large lady who'd emerged in the late seventies with the similarly rotund Izora Rhodes as Two Tons o' Fun , the backing singers for gay disco icon Sylvester. In the early eighties they peeled away, re-christened themselves The Weather Girls and eclipsed their mentor with the ultimate Hi-NRG anthem "It's Raining Men" , a belated number 2 hit here in 1984. After further recordings failed to match its success they disbanded in 1988.
"Gonna Make You Sweat" was the first single released under the new name. To me it sounds pretty identical to Snap's The Power with Martha shrieking "Everybody Dance Now" instead of "I've Got The Power " , a similar staccato guitar riff and a couple of slow rap verses courtesy of Freedom. In the US they went one better than Snap, reaching number one and staying in the chart for six months. It was a big step towards hip hop's takeover of the Billboard chart and has become a ubiquitous anthem for sports events and wedding parties across the US.
Its significance didn't end there however. Robert and David decided to use the more lithe Zelma to front the group in the video and mouth Martha's parts. It should be noted that Zelma was a competent singer and made genuine vocal contributions to other songs on the forthcoming single. Martha wasn't happy and despite having knowingly acquiesced in a similar arrangement with Black Box she eventually decided to sue and won an out of court settlement. The explosion in "featuring" credits in the nineties is down to federal legislation which followed on from her case.
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