I Feel for You

Chaka Khan's big 80s hit

In Jackie R. ‘s post on Tell Me Something Good, she said she hadn’t heard anything else Chaka Khan did. Which surprised me because this huge song was my introduction to that powerful lady. This song is one of the first, if not the first song that used a rapper on an R&B track.

The song was written by Prince and showed up on his first album. Melle Mel from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five is the rapper and the harmonica you hear is Stevie Wonder. The song also uses samples of Wonder’s Fingertips. The iconic beginning of the repetition wasn’t planned, just some messing around in the studio but producer Arif Mardin liked it and it stayed.

There’s actually two videos for this song. The first was a standard singing in a club video but as rap and breakdancing were becoming more mainstream, this video was shot. Jane Simpson, who later went on to direct Little Witches, was tapped to bring on concepts she had already been developing for commercial work to direct her first, and still only, music video. From wiki:

Simpson and the production company who produced Chaka Khan’s video for the track had already been working on a video combining some of the early 1980s day-glo fashions with break dancing and rap. Simpson had already approached several designers who had rejected her concept before Norma Kamali agreed to let her clothing designs appear in the video, which was originally titled “Street Beat”, and shot in a studio mocked-up to look like the multi-racial hip hop club Radio-Tron in the MacArthur Park area in L.A. The choreographer was Joanne DiVito; break dancers appearing in the footage were Shabba Doo, Boogaloo Shrimp, Bruno "Pop N Taco" Falcon and Ana "Lollipop" Sánchez, all of whom also appeared in the movie Breakin'.^[21] To this pre-shot footage was added new footage of Chaka Khan and deejay Chris "The Glove" Taylor spinning a hot pink-colored 12-inch single with “Chaka” printed on the label, as well as Khan standing near a chain-link fence and other props, including graffiti-covered panels, on a studio soundstage.^[22]

Enjoy your song of the day!