Revenge of The Disco Babies

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.”

And how exactly do they do this? Well, they master recording-studio technology. (Cole: “It’s hard to reproduce a guitar sound without being able | to play a guitar, but you can do just about anything else with a keyboard and a computer.”) Then they hit the streets to find their stars. “We just go out and look,” Cole insists. “We look in churches, clubs, restaurants. You see somebody walking down the street humming to themselves. You walk closely so you see how they sound. Then you ask them. You see someone who has the right look. You stop them and ask them.” The C+C method is to use the vocalists to front its house productions, then develop solo projects for them if the hits keep coming. Clivilles and Cole play drums, percussion and keyboards, write the songs, and do all the arranging. The result is as slick as the Rockefeller Center ice rink in February, and just as chilly: plenty of fancy footwork, and a radical shortage of heart.

That is not to say that C+C lacks energy or an infectious sense of playfulness. A Groove of Love is a funny parody of macho music posturing, Ice- style (“Love to me means tight butt jeans/ Girls they only waste time with crushed dreams/ The mike is my bitch”). C+C’s dance-music dazzlements have attracted such heavy-duty commercial talent as Mariah Carey, for whom it is helping produce the follow-up to her 4 million-selling debut album; and funk mistress Lisa Lisa, whose new record it is producing while she and Clivilles strike up a romantic association to complement the professional one.

There is no love lost, however, between C+C and Martha Wash, who has been singing for it for three years and earlier this year slapped it with two lawsuits, for improperly crediting her on the album and for not including her in the video, allegedly because her big voice and waistline are of the same approximate size. The two Cs both admit to not paying Wash’s contributions sufficient attention but deny that this is yet another Milli Vanilli episode of the puppet masters being tangled in their own strings. “We’ve always been in Martha’s corner,” Cole maintains. “Her new gripe is that she wasn’t in the video. She sued us the day after she did the ((vocal)) session! If someone is trying to burn your house down, do you invite them for dinner?”

Fracases like this only underscore the fact that if dance music is the hottest commodity on the charts right now, it still lacks cachet. The wasp- waisted Zelma Williams handles the majority of female vocals on the record, yet it’s a struggle to fix her with any strong identity. She might as well be a digital sample dressed in an evening gown. If producers are the stars, then they better have star quality. Or develop it. Some things just can’t be made in a factory.