TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042991/0429440.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.6 KB | 125 lines

                                                                                MUSIC, Page 77

Revenge of the Disco Babies


C+C Music Factory fine-tunes the dance-music assembly line

By JAY COCKS -- Reported by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York


    Attention, strollers: Have you noticed those guys in the
fancy jackets and shades, walking close behind you, listening
as you hum to yourself, checking out your look? Don't worry
about it. They don't want your wallet. They want to make you a
star.

    "We are very close to the street," says David Cole, 28,
one half of C+C Music Factory, one of the hottest producing
duos in dance music, a fad-mad, producer-reliant subspecies
that has jumped out of the clubs and cornered the pop charts.
"We were born in dance music. We are disco babies."

    The C+C Music Factory debut album, Gonna Make You Sweat,
has hit No. 2 on the Billboard pop-album chart. Its first
single, the title track, reached No. 1; its second, Here We Go,
is also heading for a high perch. "They tried to kill disco, and
it's back," adds the other C, Robert Clivilles, 26. "They just
call it dance music now. It's a big deal. It's the people's
choice."

    Cole calls dance tunes "the rock music of the '90s," and
it's not necessary to have the vision of Nostradamus to see how
dance music is dominating the sound and sales of contemporary
pop. M.C. Hammer, Madonna, even the rightly reviled Vanilla Ice
have taken dance, with some rap overlay, and spiffed it up for
the mainstream. "It started as a minority situation," says
Clivilles, a deejay in a New York City club when he met Cole
five years ago. "But now it is moving into major markets."

    In fact, dance is its own major market, and the key
players are not performers but producers. "That's the guy who
puts it together," says Clivilles. Producers who take a strong
hand in shaping the sound and image of a group are a staple of
rock history at least as far back as the early '60s and the
grand studio excursions of Phil Spector. But never before have
producers been so out front with their creative sound twisting
and image mongering. As for C+C's masterminds, "I think we're
more a part of the group than other producers are," says Cole.
Even so, while C+C Music Factory uses vocalists Zelma Davis,
Freedom Williams and the scantly credited Martha Wash, their
names appear only in the production notes and liner material.
It's C+C that -- as they say in the movie biz -- puts its name
above the title. The attractive Davis and Williams appear on the
album cover, but, to the uninitiated, they could very well be
C+C. "I don't really want to be a star," Cole insists. "I just
want to be successful. Robert and I would both like to create
-- or help create -- superstars, the Madonnas, the Michael
Jacksons, James Browns."

    And how exactly do they do this? Well, they master
recording-studio technology. (Cole: "It's hard to reproduce a
guitar sound without being able to play a guitar, but you can
do just about anything else with a keyboard and a computer.")
Then they hit the streets to find their stars. "We just go out
and look," Cole insists. "We look in churches, clubs,
restaurants. You see somebody walking down the street humming
to themselves. You walk closely so you see how they sound. Then
you ask them. You see someone who has the right look. You stop
them and ask them." The C+C method is to use the vocalists to
front its house productions, then develop solo projects for them
if the hits keep coming. Clivilles and Cole play drums,
percussion and keyboards, write the songs, and do all the
arranging. The result is as slick as the Rockefeller Center ice
rink in February, and just as chilly: plenty of fancy footwork,
and a radical shortage of heart.

    That is not to say that C+C lacks energy or an infectious
sense of playfulness. A Groove of Love is a funny parody of
macho music posturing, Ice-style ("Love to me means tight butt
jeans/ Girls they only waste time with crushed dreams/ The mike
is my bitch''). C+C's dance-music dazzlements have attracted
such heavy-duty commercial talent as Mariah Carey, for whom it
is helping produce the follow-up to her 4 million-selling debut
album; and funk mistress Lisa Lisa, whose new record it is
producing while she and Clivilles strike up a romantic
association to complement the professional one.

    There is no love lost, however, between C+C and Martha
Wash, who has been singing for it for three years and earlier
this year slapped it with two lawsuits, for improperly
crediting her on the album and for not including her in the
video, allegedly because her big voice and waistline are of the
same approximate size. The two Cs both admit to not paying
Wash's contributions sufficient attention but deny that this is
yet another Milli Vanilli episode of the puppet masters being
tangled in their own strings. "We've always been in Martha's
corner," Cole maintains. "Her new gripe is that she wasn't in
the video. She sued us the day after she did the ((vocal))
session! If someone is trying to burn your house down, do you
invite them for dinner?"

    Fracases like this only underscore the fact that if dance
music is the hottest commodity on the charts right now, it still
lacks cachet. The wasp-waisted Zelma Williams handles the
majority of female vocals on the record, yet it's a struggle to
fix her with any strong identity. She might as well be a digital
sample dressed in an evening gown. If producers are the stars,
then they better have star quality. Or develop it. Some things
just can't be made in a factory.