Power Jam feat Chill Rob G - The Power (12" Vocal Mix)

Chill Rob G - The Power (Vocal Mix) / 12 Inch Extended Remix (HQ Audio)

This track has been part of a pretty crazy journey.

Chill Rob G (Robert Frazier) was a member of the Flavor Unit collective, led by producer The 45 King (Mark James), which included Black Sheep, Naughty By Nature, and Queen Latifah, among others. Their first major release as a collective was The 45 King Presents The Flavor Unit in 1990. Several members of the collective later enjoyed individual success as well.

Chill Rob G was one of the first members to rap over beats Flavor Unit was producing. His debut album, Ride The Rhythm, was released in 1989 through Wild Pitch Records. It was recorded by The 45 King at Air Wave Sound in New York.

The album was well received, and Wild Pitch released accompanying 12" singles for DJs, featuring dub and acapella versions of some of Chill Rob G's tracks, including the popular Let The Words Flow.

Soon after, Chill Rob G took a phone call from his friend Afrika Baby Bam of the Jungle Brothers, who had been touring in Germany. Bam told him, "Some dude is out here on stage doing your records! They switched it up, like it's a brand new record here and this dude is here performing it."

The "dudes" in question were German producers Michael Münzing and Luca Anzilotti, along with American rapper Turbo B, who had just left the U.S. Army after being stationed in Germany. They would later become known as Snap!

Rob G set up a meeting with Wild Pitch founder Stu Fine to find out what was going on, only to discover that Wild Pitch already had a copy of the record. It featured Rob G's vocals over samples of Mantronix's King Of The Beats and Jocelyn Brown's "I got the power" from her 1985 single Love's Gonna Get You.

Wild Pitch explained to Rob that the record had really taken off in Europe and had even made the German charts. However, the Mantronix and Jocelyn Brown samples had not been cleared, preventing major labels from distributing the track more widely.

Fine told Rob that Wild Pitch wanted to release a version in the U.S. That record, credited to Power Jam featuring Chill Rob G, is featured here, with a vocal version on side A and instrumental and acapella versions on side B. This release also contained the uncleared samples, but Wild Pitch owned the rights to Chill Rob G's vocals.

Meanwhile, Arista wanted to rush-release a version of the record and was already in the process of creating a new version with re-recorded vocals, including a new rap by Turbo B.

This version still contained many of Rob G's original lyrics.

Wild Pitch couldn't afford to sue Arista, nor could they compete with their distribution network. As a result, the Arista version credited to Snap! became a worldwide hit, while Chill Rob G's version saw much smaller success.

The episode caused Chill Rob G to lose faith in Wild Pitch. He found it difficult to understand how someone else could simply release his work without Wild Pitch being able to stop them. He had also signed what he felt was a poor contract when he was young, giving Wild Pitch control over how his music was released.

"When it came to record the next record, I'd lost faith in these people. How can they let somebody else come in and take my record? I said I'm a rapper, I make up all my own stuff. There was no amount of money that would make me be bothered with that kind of thing again."

Despite the esteem in which Rob G's rhymes were held on his debut album, and despite the success of the Flavor Unit collective as a whole, he took a hiatus from recording for most of the 1990s.

His lyrics are still heard around the world every day on both versions of The Power, and he's grown to become a widely respected lyricist and rapper, having played a key role in a pivotal moment in hip-hop history.

Year: 1990 Label: Wild Pitch Cat no: WP 1018