“A lot of people know the songs that I’ve sung — they just don’t know me,” dance music diva and singer Martha Wash told PGN.
Very true.
Chances are, no matter what your age, sometime in your life you have shaken your ass to a song Martha Wash has sung or, at the very least, lent her voice to by artists such as Sylvester, The Weather Girls, Luther Vandross, Black Box or C+C Music Factory, to name a few.
Wash also made history in the music business when she sued C+C Music Factory for credit and royalties for the No. 1 hit “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now),” after the group failed to list Wash as a lead vocalist on the song and instead had a more photogenic (read: thinner) singer lip-sync her parts in the music video. She won the suit and soon after it became mandatory for albums to list vocal credits.
But Wash’s longtime fans know that she has always been a fixture and an icon to gay audiences for, if nothing else, her international hit, “It’s Raining Men,” as part of the Weather Girls back in the early 1980s. That’s probably going to be one of the many hits she sings when she performs at the annual Miss’d America Pageant Jan. 21 in Atlantic City.
With over 30 years as a performer, Wash said the music industry today still operates like the machine she faced down in the early 1990s — putting image before talent.
“I would say that it’s still that image-driven thing,” she said. “It seems like the labels are still that way. But I would have to say with the record-buying — or the downloading — public, I think they understand that talent comes in all shapes and sizes and they can make up their own mind about who they like and whose music they want to purchase and I’m happy about that. Everybody talks about Adele. She was one of the highest-selling artists of last year and I was kind of surprised at that. I’m really happy for her. But I was surprised in that Lady Gaga came in second. I thought it would have been the other way around as much exposure that she’s gotten over the last year. I’m just hoping that it gets better as far as record companies are concerned and that they will find people with talent regardless of what they look like or what they think the public will accept.”
She added that she doubts Adele, who is a British artist, would have been the critical and global success she is today if her career had started in the U.S.
“How many large artists … female … sorry guys, but the males can get away with it easier,” Wash said. “How many large female artists are out there working? If you stop and think about it, can you count? I’m thinking her record label in the U.K., their partners in the U.S. said let’s break her here in the U.S. but I don’t think it would have happened if she was an American artist.”
Wash accredits the rather shortsightedness of the major labels as the impetus for her starting her own label, Purple Rose Records, which she launched in 2004.
“No record company was knocking on my door,” she said. “By that time, there were a whole lot of independent artists that were starting their own labels to keep their music out there for the public to hear. So I said to myself, Why not me? If you think about it, there are a gazillion artists in the world and only three big record labels. The numbers don’t match up. You have more artists than record labels, so you know they’re going to be picky about who they sign. Nowadays, if you don’t have a No. 1 hit off the bat, that’s your first and last record.”
Since then she has released her solo albums on the label and is currently working on an album of new material, which she said expands upon the types of music for which she’s famous.
“I’ve been working on my CD and I’m almost finished,” she said. “We’re going into mastering in about a month. I’m trying to go more into adult contemporary. Some of the songs on there are up-tempo but there are also ballads. I’ve always loved a good ballad but I’m kind of branching out more and more with not just straight-up dance music that everybody knows me for.”
The Greater Atlantic City GLBT Alliance presents the Miss’d America Pageant featuring a performance by Martha Wash and host Carson Kressley, 8 p.m. Jan. 21 at Boardwalk Hall, 2301 Boardwalk, Atlantic City, N.J. For more information on the event or tickets, visit www.acglbt.org/mainpages/missdamerica.asp.