Attention, strollers: Have you noticed those guys in the fancy jackets and shades, walking close behind you, listening as you hum to yourself, checking out your look? Don't worry about it. They don't want your wallet. They want to make you a star.
"We are very close to the street," says David Cole, 28, one half of C+C Music Factory, one of the hottest producing duos in dance music, a fad-mad, producer-reliant subspecies that has jumped out of the clubs and cornered the pop charts. "We were born in dance music. We are disco babies."
The C+C Music Factory debut album, Gonna Make You Sweat, has hit No. 2 on the Billboard pop-album chart. Its first single, the title track, reached No. 1; its second, Here We Go, is also heading for a high perch. "They tried to kill disco, and it's back," adds the other C, Robert Clivilles, 26. "They just call it dance music now. It's a big deal. It's the people's choice."
Cole calls dance tunes "the rock music of the '90s," and it's not necessary to have the vision of Nostradamus to see how dance music is dominating the sound and sales of contemporary pop. M.C. Hammer, Madonna, even the rightly reviled Vanilla Ice have taken dance, with some rap overlay, and spiffed it up for the mainstream. "It started as a minority situation," says Clivilles, a deejay in a New York City club when he met Cole five years ago. "But now it is moving into major markets."
In fact, dance is its own major market, and the key players are not performers but producers. "That's the guy who puts it together," says Clivilles. Producers who take a strong hand in shaping the sound and image of a group are a staple of rock history at least as far back as the early '60s and the grand studio excursions of Phil Spector. But never before have producers been so out front with their creative sound twisting and image mongering. As for C+C's masterminds, "I think we're more a part of the group than other producers are," says Cole. Even so, while C+C Music Factory uses vocalists Zelma Davis, Freedom Williams and the scantly credited Martha Wash, their names appear only in the production notes and liner material. It's C+C that -- as they say in the movie biz -- puts its name above the title. The attractive Davis and Williams appear on the album cover, but, to the uninitiated, they could very well be C+C. "I don't really want to be a star," Cole insists. "I just want to be successful. Robert and I would both like to create -- or help create -- superstars, the Madonnas, the Michael Jacksons, James Browns."