#343) "I Feel for You" by Chaka Khan - I've talked frequently here about my first experience(s) with rap music growing up in what could be called the "great white north" for reasons other than long winters. My embrace of rap and hip hop was centered primarily around Run-DMC at the time, and the fact that my brother went away to college in New York City and took to sending me recorded tapes of New York radio, notably Kiss FM (I'm pretty sure a box of those cassettes are still floating around somewhere...I'll have to dig them out someday...then find a way to play them); there was also, as I've mentioned, LL Cool J, and various soundtracks like Beat Street, and Breakin', which I got heavily into, mostly by thrashing about like a short-circuiting robot on a buddy's front lawn and thinking that I, too, was "breakin'".
But my first exposure to rapping that totally blew me away, for its precision, its flawlessly excitable flow, for being something completely new and out of the box, enough so to prompt me to take on the very tall order of emulation, was the first thirty seconds of Chaka Khan's "I Feel for You", a rap performed by Melle Mel, that prologues this Prince cover. It was released in 1984, and turned my FM / MTV world, which at the time was a lot of "Sister Christian", "Like a Virgin" and "I Can't Fight this Feeling", on its ear, and I was hooked.
I can still do the rap, my flow's still pretty tight (er….right? 😎 ), although now I'm not just conspicuously white, but also almost 50, so I don't trot this out of mothballs much anymore (and haven't since Reagan was president). I love the song, though. It's Prince, after all, and that fact coupled with Chaka Khan's smooth vocals and Stevie Wonder's matching ultra-slick harmonica, makes "I Feel for You" impossible not to feel.
"I feel for you / I think I love you..."
#344) "Nasty" by Janet Jackson - Janet Jackson's "Nasty" was much more pop-oriented, more mainstream and less "street" (such as that phrase was, or could ever be, in my 13-year-old eyes) than Chaka Khan, but it was nevertheless something new that I was being introduced to, something important. On account of "Nasty", and each successive single from the Control album for that matter, Janet Jackson was my first inter-racial crush, my inaugural departure from the brick house blondes - the Farrah Fawcetts, Heather Locklears and Victoria Principals (okay, blondes and redheads...) that populated my pre-pubescent fantasies. This might seem silly, but it really wasn't at the time - it was actually a pivotal moment in my youth when a racial and cultural bridge was crossed.
And almost forty years later (is...that...possible...??), "Nasty" is still a nasty jam.
"No my first name ain't baby, it's Janet / Miss Jackson is you're nasty..."
