Songoftheday 4/7/17 - Like the crack of the whip I snap attack, front to back in this thing called rap...
from the album World Power (1990)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #2 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 16
The song of the day to end the work week comes from German-American dance music act Snap!, who were put together by German producers Luca Anzilotti and Michael Münzing in the late 1980s. Because of the stigma behind that country's acts caused by Frank Farian's Milli Vanilli debacle, the pair gave themselves new names (Benito Benites and John Virgo Garrett). Their first single, "The Power", was a cribbed hip-hop track that took from underground rapper Chill Rob G's "Let The Words Flow", coupled with a sampled line from Jocelyn Brown's #1 dance club hit from 1985, "Love's Gonna Get You". Here's the original Chill Rob G rap...
And then the Jocelyn Brown jam, which provides the "I've Got The Power" hook (and also formed the base of Bizarre Inc's 1993 hit "I'm Gonna Get Ya"...
The resulting single, "The Power", turned from being a club hit to a bona fide hit in Europe, Anzilotti and Münzing recruited American rapper Durron Butler (Turbo B) and singer Penny Ford (who had worked with the Gap Band and Chaka Khan) who had a top-40 R&B hit in 1985 with "Change Your Wicked Ways". A second single of hers, "Dangerous" from that same year, went to #24 on the American dance chart and almost reached the top-40 in the UK (#42). Rewriting most of the rap (though keeping some lines like "it's gettin' kinda hectic") in there, the new "The Power" was ready to be released worldwide, and was one of the first underground club hits to become a big success on the American pop chart, melding the hip-hop lyrics on the house music/industrial-inspired production. In fact, the success came as such a surprise that Penny's not to be found on the video, with Jackie Harris lipsynching for her life for this one video...
Snap!'s "The Power" climbed all the way to the runner-up spot on the American pop chart in August of 1990. The single also went to #4 on Billboard's R&B chart, while the 12" remixes spent a week at #1 on their Dance Club Play list. Internationally, the track was a worldwide phenomenon, hitting #1 in the UK (2 weeks), the Netherlands (4 weeks), Switzerland (4 weeks), and Spain (one week), and reaching the top ten in Germany (#2), Belgium (#3), Austria (#3), Sweden (#3), Norway (#3), Finland (#3), Italy (#4), Ireland (#5), and New Zealand (#6).
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Here's the "Switch Mix" on the 12" record that topped the dance charts....
As well as the house music treatment on the "Jungle Fever mix"...
After the success of the Snap! record, Chill Rob G re-recorded his "Let The Words Flow" as "The Power", which at that time I preferred (still have my cassingle of it)...
The act performed at Rock in Rio in 1991 and Run-DMC guested on the rap part of the song...
In 1996, Snap! re-released the song with new mixes and replacing Turbo B's rap with reggae 'toasting' from Einstein, and the result just missed the British top-40 at #42, though reaching that level in Finland (#12) and Sweden (#40)...
German pop-punk band H-Blockx teamed up with Turbo B for a hard rock cover of the record, which went to #34 in Australia, and was a minor hit in Germany (#48) and Austria (#51) in 2002. (I have to confess I really like this...)
A year later, Snap! came back again with an Indian-infused version called "The Power (Of Bhangra)" remixed by hi-NRG act Motivo, with Turbo B back on board and vocals from Joshilay. It climbed to #34 in the UK, #21 in Germany, and #36 in Austria...
Finally, here's the act live in Russia in 2009...
Up tomrorow: Japanese-American singer doesn't want to be ignored.
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