Sound bites | Music
Cold War on the Dancefloor

At the end of the Cold War, two Frankfurt music producers wrote and arranged the smash hit The Power in a week – accidentally inventing the Eurodance genre with the formation of their band project Snap!
 

By Sonja Eismann

At the end of the 1980s, US jazz singer and multi-instrumentalist Penny Ford moved to London with her famous colleague Chaka Khan to get off drugs. Instead of rehab, they opted to self-detox and barely left their apartment. One day, in the middle of this self-isolation, they got an unexpected call from two German music producers. Michael Münzing and Luca Anzilotti wanted Chaka to rap for a new pop project. But Chaka insisted she wasn’t a rapper. “You could use the money, you do it,” she told her friend. Penny had toured with Parliament-Funkadelic as a 14-year-old and wasn’t interested in rapping either. But she did need the money. So off she went to the Offenbach studio of the duo’s newly founded micro-label Logic Records to record the music, equipped with just a mic, a packet of cigarettes and a huge ashtray. “I sang the worst stuff thing I’ve ever sung. And I thought I’d never hear it again,” she recalls in an interview. “Just send me the cheque if it sells.” She wanted nothing more to do with it.

But things turned out differently. Released as the debut single of the band named Snap! in late 1989, The Power quickly shot to global fame. It remained in the charts for many weeks, reaching number two in Germany and the US and number one in the UK. And that wasn’t all. Under the illustrious-sounding pseudonyms of Benito Benites (Münzing) and John Virgo Garrett III (Anzilotti) on the accompanying album World Power, the two producers went down in history with this track as the inventors of Eurodance, a genre criticised by some as brash, soulless “funfair music”, but celebrated by others as a uniquely European take on African diasporic styles like house, hip hop, but also Italo disco. To this day, no other music genre characterises the sound of the 1990s like Eurodance.

But the origins of the song are complex and multi-layered – as was the waning Cold War era, which is evoked in the bizarre intro to The Power’s video clip in which a man extols the virtues of an American personal computer for the blind in Russian. In an interview for Süddeutsche Zeitung, Münzing and Anzilotti reported first performing the song in East Berlin live on 7 November 1989. By the time they returned to the West, the border had opened, as if by magic. But not everything about the hit was magical, nor was it a magical time for other “producer bands” like Milli Vanilli, the controversial duo who were forced to admit at almost the same time that they had sung none of the vocals on their albums themselves. Münzing and Anzilotti, former DJs at the legendary Frankfurt airport club Dorian Gray and producers of Sven Väth and Moses P., arranged the dancefloor hit on a computer in just one week, shamelessly sampling electro band Mantronix and rapper Chill Rob G, and lifting the emphatic “I’ve got the power” from a piece by singer Jocelyn Brown. Twenty years later, Brown sued the two German producers for £10 million (half of the revenue generated by the song at the time) – and lost. Unbeknownst to Brown, the producer of her song had given permission for her voice to be sampled. Chill Rob G was replaced on a hastily re-recorded version by Durron Maurice Butler, a GI previously stationed in Friedberg and later known as rapper Turbo B. The singer in the video is not Penny Ford either, but a lip-syncing US Air Force soldier called Jackie Harris, who was also recruited at the army base. Ford, who was responsible for most of the vocal parts, recalls meeting the rapper for the first time weeks after their joint song had entered the charts.
Although Ford initially hated the music she recorded for Snap!, she soon recognised the significance of The Power. The single was popular all over the world and people frequently approached her to tell her how its empowering message had helped them get through difficult times, like a prison sentence or even war. Indeed, the hit tells us a lot about the transitional period at the end of the Cold War, about perhaps the last carefree, hedonistic decade on European dancefloors and, above all, about the influence American GIs had on German – and especially Frankfurt – club culture. And, of course, it also tells us who benefited from pop – and who didn’t. The people behind the samples, raps and vocals, the faces of The Power – all of them African Americans – had to fight for their piece of the pie. For the two white producers, things took off big time after the hit dropped from the charts. The Power featured in countless Hollywood blockbusters like Bruce Almighty and Coyote Ugly and is still one of the most frequently licensed songs for international commercials today. In an interview with Süddeutsche Zeitung, Münzing and Anzilotti gleefully report that royalties from adverts for jeans, coke, mouthwash and countless other products could probably even feed their great-grandchildren’s families.