Martha Wash’s voice appears on those latter two songs - and there’s a reason I’m using the phrase “Wash’s voice appears on” instead of “Wash had a guest spot on.” Detractors like to refer to the (usually Black women) divas who sing dance record hooks as “anonymous,” but for Wash, that’s what actually happened to her - at least on paper.
Madonna and Janet Jackson were as big in clubland as they were on the Top 40, Latin freestyle had significantly shaped the contemporary sound of pop, and the dance charts that year were an embarrassment of riches: Lisa Stansfield’s “All Around The World,” Snap’s “The Power,” Beats International’s “Dub Be Good To Me,” Deee-Lite’s “Groove Is In The Heart,” C+C Music Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now),” and Black Box’s “Everybody Everybody” all hit #1 that year. It’s not an unfamiliar story, but it’s a revealing one.ĭance music’s recovery from the disco backlash was never really close to 100% by the time the ’80s played out the clock, but when it came to notching pop crossover hits, 1990 wasn’t too far away from 1977. And while the story of Martha Wash and the lawsuits she filed 20 years ago don’t neatly overlap every one of these categories, they do help point out just how complicated the subjects of attribution and creative input can be when so many people have a vested interest in keeping it all under wraps. This was the decade where capital-A Authenticity became one of pop’s biggest artistic crises, a long-simmering culmination of the arguments around the distorting tropes of MTV, the legal and artistic arguments around sampling, and the underground scenes battling over the price of selling out.
Beneath the platinum largesse, the ’90s were an ethical turning point for the pop music business.
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