Robert Clivillés wrote and produced an instrumental track that was to become "Gonna Make You Sweat". He offered the track to vocal trio Trilogy, but when they declined to record it, Clivillés decided to use the track for his and David Cole's C+C Music Factory. The rap verse was performed by Freedom Williams and the female vocals by Martha Wash. The official music video featured Zelma Davis lip-syncing to the actual Wash's vocal parts.
After discovering that the group was using model-turned-singer Zelma Davis in the music video, Wash unsuccessfully attempted to negotiate with the producers of the C+C Music Factory for sleeve credits and royalties. Additionally, the song used an edited compilation of vocal parts that Wash recorded in June 1990 for an unrelated demonstration tape. On December 11, 1991, Wash filed a lawsuit in the Los Angeles Superior Court against C+C Music Factory's Robert Clivilles and David Cole, charging the producers and their record company, Sony Music Entertainment, with fraud, deceptive packaging, and commercial appropriation. "Gonna Make You Sweat " is a hit song by American dance group C+C Music Factory.
It was released in late 1990 as the debut and lead single from the album Gonna Make You Sweat. The song is sung by singer Martha Wash and rapper Freedom Williams. It charted internationally and achieved great success in the United States, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, where it reached number one on the charts. It was released in late 1990 as the lead single from the album, Gonna Make You Sweat.
The song charted internationally and achieved great success in the United States, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland where it reached number one on the charts. Music critics praised "Gonna Make You Sweat" for Freedom Williams' Ice-T-like rap delivery in conjunction with Martha Wash's powerful, exuberant, post-disco vocals and deemed the song as a bona fide classic. C+C Music Factory set the tone for '90s dance music with its worldwide hit, "Gonna Make You Sweat ." With an unforgettable synth guitar riff and a beat that got the party people in the house moving, the track soared to the top of the charts around the globe. This iconic '90s dance track will be available for 240 Microsoft Points in Dance Central 2's in-game Music Store, or from Xbox LIVE Marketplace. When it was first released, "Gonna Make You Sweat " enjoyed widespread commercial success.
Topping charts in several countries, the song dominated the airwaves while its accompanying music video received constant rotation on MTV. With its instantly recognizable staccato guitar riff and soulful, core-rattling refrain—"Everybody dance now!," scream-sung by 90s vocalist Martha Wash—the song has become something of a pop music cliché. According to Wash, she was paid a flat fee to record demos to be presented to other singers.
Instead, the producers included her vocals on nearly every song on Black Box's debut album Dreamland, including future hits "Everybody Everybody," "I Don't Know Anybody Else," "Fantasy" and "Strike It Up." Wash was never credited in the album's liner notes. While none of the producers in Black Box publicly said why Quinol was used as the face of Black Box in videos over Wash, it wasn't hard to figure out. When Dreamland was released in May 1990, the cover featured a crouching Quinol, clad in a cropped jacket and mini skirt, showing off her toned legs and staring longingly.
The song held the top spot in the US Billboard Hot Dance Club Play for five weeks in December 1990, and topped the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks in 1991 (February 9 and February 16.) It also topped the Canadian RPM Dance Chart. In Europe, it peaked at number-one in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland. The single managed to climb into the Top 10 also in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Greece , Iceland, Norway, Spain , Sweden and the United Kingdom, as well as on the Eurochart Hot 100, where it hit number 2. In the UK, "Gonna Make You Sweat " peaked at number 3 in its sixth week at the UK Singles Chart, on January 13, 1991, a full month before its American pop success.
It even found success in the urban contemporary music world as it crossed over to the R&B charts where it reached number-one for a week. Additionally, it was a Top 20 hit in Ireland and a Top 50 hit in France. In Oceania, the single peaked at number 2 and 3 in New Zealand and Australia. It earned a platinum record in the US, after 1 million singles were sold there. Then in his mid-20s, Williams had a rich, baritone timbre and a rhythmic flow that was at once deadpan and bombastic. (According to Discogs, Williams also has writing credits on four other tracks from Gonna Make You Sweat. Wash was listed as a backup singer on the album, though not the lead singer).
Clivillés claimed that's as far as Williams' contributions went. "He had nothing to do with the photo or video sessions, the creation of the music, or the rest of the songs in the [C&C Music Factory] catalog," Clivillés said. In 1989, Wash received a call to record with a trio of Italian house music impresarios named Groove Groove Melody, who produced for outside singers. Although a settlement was eventually reached, the trio subsequently hired British singer Heather Small to replicate Holloway's sampled vocal slices and re-released the song, assuming that no one would know — or care — enough to notice. This is an 80's music CD with some great dance music from that decade. Modern rave music differs in that it focuses more on a hard techno beat to induce a trance-like mental state, whereas this music caters more to people who like to enjoy their music and dance to it too.
The whole album is upbeat, fun to dance to, and not quite timeless, but it still holds its own for rhythm and dance style music in the modern party scene. The music video for the song was directed by German director Marcus Nispel and featured dancers performing in front of a white back drop. Zelma Davis lip-syncs to the recorded vocals of Martha Wash. "Gonna Make You Sweat ." One of the biggest hits of one of the wildest eras in pop-music history, in dance-music history.
The future, for quite awhile, can sound uncomfortably like the past. Lotta dance music that 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 be both super-mainstream and super-super weird. This is not the first C&C Music Factory-related controversy over how its members are credited.
In 1991, Martha Wash, who sang the huge vocal hook in "Everybody Dance Now," sued the group after another C&C Music Factory vocalist, Zelma Davis, lip-synced her parts in the song's music video. Had this legislation been in place when Wash recorded her vocals for "Everybody Dance Now" she likely would have been properly credited in the video for her contribution to the song. "The record label, production company and management told me that it was OK to lip sync in the video as long as I sing live in public," Davis recalls. On the video set, I told members of the crew that it wasn't me singing this particular song. C and C Music Factory perform in the music video "Gonna Make You Sweat " from the album "Gonna Make You Sweat" recorded for Columbia Records.
Freedom Williams dances shirt while rapping in a white turtleneck and suit jacket. Zelma Davis lip-sync while surrounded with flowing fabric. Clivillés and David Cole met in the mid 80s, when Clivillés was DJing at New York City club Better Days.
Before they had their big break with "Everybody Dance Now," they worked behind-the-scenes, co-writing and producing songs for artists like Chaka Khan and Grace Jones, co-producing remixes, and acting as managers for various groups. Together, they wrote and produced four songs on Mariah Carey's 1991 album Emotions, including the smash hit title track. Even after all of Wash's personal lawsuits, though, the story was far from over. In November 1990, nine days after Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus admitted that they didn't sing on any songs by Milli Vanilli, multiple class-action consumer fraud suits were filed by those who bought Milli Vanilli and Black Box albums. In their legal defense, even RCA, the label behind Black Box, said they thought Quinol, not Wash, was the actual singer on the album.
As a result of the lawsuits, record labels were forced to assign proper vocal credit for all albums and music videos. As you dig into the lives of your hit list, though, you'll uncover new ways to manipulate them. This is the bulk of the game, and your progress is tracked and updated as each new lead is uncovered. Colt is one of only two people whose memory remains intact when the day loops, which means his targets' behaviour remains consistent, and thus repeatable. It's immensely satisfying as the pieces start falling into place—as you see the consequences of your actions, and start filling out your itinerary in preparation for that perfect day. After discovering that C+C Music Factory was using Davis in the video, Martha Wash unsuccessfully tried to negotiate with Robert Clivillés and David Cole for credits and royalties.
She later filed a lawsuit against Clivillés, Cole and Sony Music Entertainment for fraud, deceptive packaging and commercial appropriation. The case was eventually settled in 1994 and Sony asked MTV to credit Martha Wash for vocals and Zelma Davis for "visualization" in the music video. But shortly after this performance, Williams was gone. According to Clivillés, in 1992, Williams asked C&C to release him from their contract together so he could launch his own career. "We featured him on C&C Music Factory to establish him as an artist, so he could then take it solo," Clivillés said.
"The group blew up so fast that by the third single, he was like, 'Yo, I'm good. I'm out.'" Clivillés and Cole let him go, recording their sophomore LP, Anything Goes! The album generated a few successful singles, although nothing would match the massive success of "Gonna Make You Sweat." Then, in 1995, David Cole passed away from spinal meningitis at the age of 32. After releasing a final album, 1995's C+C Music Factory, Clivillés dissolved the group. "I was ahead of Beyoncé, Lady Gagaand Iggy Azalea," she says, laughing.
"I was totally mystified." Elsewhere, Wash takes on Aerosmith's 1973 classic "Dream On," with the lines "Live and learn from fools and from sages" and "Everybody's got their dues in life to pay" taking on added resonance for the singer. "I was told it was going to be a demo for another singer," Wash says of "Gonna Make You Sweat." It wasn't. In October 1990, the group released the song and subsequent video, featuring the band's other singer, Zelma Davis, lip-syncing Wash's vocals. At one point in 1991, Wash battled herself on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Songs, as "Gonna Make You Sweat" and Black Box's "I Don't Know Anybody Else"both bounced around the Top 5 for weeks on end. The album's first single, "Gonna Make You Sweat ," reached number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks in February 1991.
The song also reached number one on Billboard's Top R&B Singles, Hot Dance Music/Club Play and Hot Dance Music/Maxi-Singles Sales as well as number three on the Australian ARIA Singles chart and UK Singles Chart. The album's opening track is frequently played during indoor sporting events as a way of maintaining enthusiasm among the spectators. It is hard to do—it is legitimately a profound artistic achievement—to create a song whose first 10 seconds are immediately a punch line, almost without accompaniment. To craft a hook with that much personality, that much cultural weight. That's a joke they're in on, not to mention financially compensated for.
You ignore the impact of "Gonna Make You Sweat" at your own peril. I couldn't say how many people first heard a rapper on the radio thanks to "Gonna 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 emcees alive, but he got the job done. The job was to sound sexy and cool, primarily to people who didn't much give a shit about actually being sexy and cool. Which is to say that everyone and everything got a propulsive dance beat for a while, whether they asked for one or not. An 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.
"Wonderwall." The music of the '90s was as exciting as it was diverse. But what does it say about the era—and why does it still matter? On our new show, 60 Songs That Explain the '90s, Ringer music writer and '90s survivor Rob Harvilla embarks on a quest to answer those questions, one track at a time. Below is an excerpt from Episode 14, which explores the history of the C&C Music Factory, their biggest hit, and a strange time for pop music with the help of writer Craig Seymour.
Williams' 1993 solo album, Freedom, had stalled on the charts, with its lead single—the synthesizer-laden "Voice of Freedom"—peaking at number 74 on the Billboard Hot 100. Williams also tried acting, performing in a 1996 episode of the Showtime erotic drama The Red Shoe Diaries before eventually vanishing into obscurity. In a 2014 video interview, he talks about making income as a construction worker.
"Everybody Dance Now" skyrocketed the members of C&C Music Factory to fame, with the song getting major play on MTV and earning the group a number of accolades, including the aforementioned Billboard Award. According to Clivillés, who spoke to THUMP on the phone from his home in New York this past August, he originally wrote "Everybody Dance Now" for Trilogy, a New York-based freestyle act he and Cole also managed. After Trilogy passed on it, Clivillés and Cole decided to use the track to launch their own collaborative project, C&C Music Factory. Clivillés said that when he presented the instrumental version of the track with Wash's vocals to Sony/Columbia execs Tommy Mottola and Donnie Ienner in 1990, they "immediately" signed the duo to a five-album deal. "Everybody Dance Now" would be the lead single from their 1990 debut LP, Gonna Make You Sweat. But 25 years before,Wash was just a middle school kid who sang well enough to join the choir at a San Francisco high school.
Her music teacher had raised enough money for the group to travel to Europe and record albums. By the time she graduated high school, Wash's choir had released four albums and the fledgling singer had settled on her career path. Originally the female vocals were credited to Zelma Davis (and Davis appeared in the song's music video), but it was later revealed that former Weather Girls singer Martha Wash was hired as a session musician and performed on the track. Wash later filed lawsuits for not getting credit on this song, plus Black Box "Everybody Everybody" and Seduction "You're My One And Only True Love". The song and video were parodied in the 1994 hip-hop mockumentary Fear of a Black Hat as "Come and Pet the P.U.S.S.Y." — a solo single for rapper Ice Cold — as well as being included on the film's soundtrack album.
Gonna Make You Sweat is the debut studio album by American musical production group C+C Music Factory, released in the US on December 18, 1991. Following on the success of contemporaries Black Box and Technotronic, Gonna Make You Sweat was a worldwide smash, reaching number two on the US Billboard 200. When it comes time for Riley and Maurissa to have their last-chance chat, he amps up the drama by hedging when Maurissa says she's ready to go to the Fantasy Suite.
Tiktok user @gabbybender expanded on this, bringing to light some interesting easter eggs that might just prove the theory to be true. Sour is a very short album, just surpassing 30 minutes in length, making fans wonder if there's more stories to tell. Additionally, Olivia collaborated with Sour Patch Kids for the album release, and what is printed on every box? And lastly, a look at Olivia's Genius page shows a plethora of unreleased songs, many of which discuss love and romance. According to a series of TikToks posted over the past week, fans believe that Olivia might soon drop a follow-up album called Sweet that will be the flip-side of Sour.
The theory caught traction when user @codyjohnathan explained that because Olivia has teased so many love songs over the past year — and with Sour being all about heartbreak — there might be another whole album (a love-struck one) waiting to be dropped. "Everybody wants to be famous, but nobody wants to do the work. I live by that. You grind hard so you can play hard. At the end of the day, you put all the work in, and eventually it'll pay off. It could be in a year, it could be in 30 years. Eventually, your hard work will pay off." For the first few hours of Deathloop, I was more interested in it as Arkane's response to Dishonored—a series that I love.
I was enjoying myself, and looking forward to uncovering the mysteries of the island, but was more intrigued by what Arkane was saying about the genre as a whole, and about the way people played its previous games. It wasn't until another player invaded my game that it all clicked together, and I started enjoying Deathloop on its own terms. Gregorian chants from a German choir recorded in the '70s got a propulsive dance beat, courtesy of the German group Enigma, and suddenly "Sadness ," or "Sadeness ," is a top-five hit stateside that did even better in Europe and beyond.
In June of this year, Williams performed "Everybody Dance Now" on longstanding Brazilian variety program Domingão do Faustão. In Portuguese, the show's host asks Williams about the history of the song. Williams replies that he wrote the song for a group he produced for back in the day—when it was actually Clivillés who wrote and produced the instrumental track and laid down Wash's vocals for Trilogy—and that he was homeless at the time of the song's creation.
"He's really talking about me, which is weird," said Ramos, who himself was intermittently homeless between 1987 and 1990. "You've gotta be a little nuts to position yourself that way." Still, Ramos thinks Clivillés is ultimately in the right.
