CK kills it with a live mic rendition of "I Feel For You" by Prince.
An introduction by Melle Mel of Grandmasterflash and the Furious Five. Khan won the "Best R&B Vocal Performance Female" that night. She was hot and just before she record with Prince's Paisley Park label.
It was Prince, in fact, who sent a tape of his song to producer and mentor Arif Mardin, suggesting that Chaka Khan record the song. Other sources, meanwhile, claim that a representative at Prince’s publishing company sent a cassette of the track to Mardin, but we prefer to think that Prince was involved in encouraging Chaka Khan to record it.
The guitar, drum programming, bass guitar, keyboards and song arrangement were all done by Reggie Griffin, but the bass synthesizer and computer programming were done by the System’s David Frank, using an Oberheim DSX sequencer which he’d connected to his Minimoog synth. Also featured were Steve Ferrone (drums), Philippe Saisse (keyboards, synthesizer, programming) and Robbie Buchanan (keyboards, synthesizer, programming).
Khan recorded her vocals for the track in just a one evening recording session. Barry Manilow was among a handful of singers who sang backing vocals on the track. Prince was going to play guitar on the track but had to pull out of the session at the last minute; he was in the midst of recording tracks for Purple Rain and Mardin has said, simply, he “had schedule problems, couldn’t do it.”
Mardin like the way the track was sounding, but felt it needed something more, and so he asked Griffin to track down Melle Mel - who performed with Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five, and a year earlier had rapped on their hit “White Lines” - to improvise a rap section for the track. Melle Mel recorded his his rap, in eight short lines, at Sugarhill Studios.
Mardin having told Melle Mel he didn’t want him to rap hip-hop clichés like money and cars, he wanted the rap to be about “love,” and so Melle Mel kept repeating how much he loved Chaka Khan, saying her name over and over.
One of the lyrics he raps - “Let me take you in my arms, let me fill you with my charms” - was based on a lyric from the 1968 Delfonics song, “La-La Means I Love You,” which featured the same line. Mardin then got the idea to use Melle Mel’s repetition of her name as percussion.
Mardin originally had added Melle Mel’s rap in the middle of the track, which is where most raps still tend to show up in a song, but eventually he decided to start off the song with the rap at the beginning and then added it at the end, bookending the song with Melle Mel’s performance.
Mardin told NPR that the idea of repeating Chaka Khan’s name with a kind of stop-start stuttering staccato beat at the beginning of the track was one of those happy accidents that happen in the recording studio from time to time.
“As we were mounting the recording onto the main master, my hand slipped on the repeat machine. So it happened to be, ‘Chaka-Chaka-Chaka-Chaka-Chaka-Chaka Khan,’ and we said, Let’s keep that. That’s very interesting.’ And it was an accident.”
Chaka Khan didn’t like hearing her name repeated over and over in the song, but Mardin convinced her it would make the song a hit (years later Khan would talk in interviews about how annoying it was to have fans approach her and, in their imitation of the song, say her name over and over, stuttering).
Director Jane Simpson - who had graduated from UCLA’s film school and worked in animation before shifting over to work on commercials - was brought in as the director for what would be her first music video.
It also featured exciting and then-new dance moves by some of the hottest break dancers and pop-lockers around, including Michael “Boogaloo Shrimp” Chambers, Adolfo “Shabba Doo” Quiñones, Bruno “Pop N Taco” Falcon and Ana “Lollipop” Sánchez, all of whom had just appeared in a little movie called Breakin’.
If you’ll recall, Chambers was “Turbo,” and Quiñones was “Ozone,” in Breakin’, which had finished filming in February 1984 and was released in early May, beating its closest competitor Beat Street (1984) to the punch by a month.
Some of the other dancers in the Chaka Khan video were a dance troupe calling themselves the Unique Dominos, and all of the dancers were wearing fluorescent hip-hop clothing.
It reached its peak position of #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in November-December 1984 and remained on the Hot 100 for twenty-six weeks and became one of Billboard‘s five biggest pop songs of the year for 1985.
Prince, as a songwriter, won the 1985 Grammy Award for Best Rhythm and Blues Song, and he and Chaka Khan performed “I Feel For You” as a duet when they toured together in 1998 in support of her collaborative album, Come 2 My House.
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