*Chaka Khan’s fearless approach to music led her to turn down a song suggestion from Stevie Wonder, prompting her to ask him, “What else you got?”
As Face2Face Africa reports, this bold move paid off, as Wonder ultimately offered her the hit “Tell Me Something Good.”
In an interview with The Independent, she recounted when her funk band Rufus was working on its second album and Wonder offered his unrecorded track “Come and Get This Stuff.” Chaka claims she wasn’t feeling the song and gave Wonder honest feedback.
“I don’t think he ever heard that at all,” she told the outlet. “But I wasn’t thinking about that. I just tell the truth all the time, and I can’t help it.”
She continued: “It upsets people sometimes. But hell, if the truth upsets you I can’t really help that.”
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According to the music icon, “Stevie said, ‘What’s your birth sign?’ Aries. ‘Oh, I got the song for you…’ And then he started playing that ‘wakka-wakka’ on the keyboard, and – bam! – there it was,” Khan recalled.
The song Wonder provided ultimately became Rufus’ hit single “Tell Me Something Good.”
“The record company renamed us ‘Rufus and Chaka Khan’,” Chaka said. “That caused a huge rift in how the band felt about me. I was totally against it, and made that very clear.”
She added: “But the label said, ‘Go along with it, or forget it.’ Of course, I had to ride the pony, for everybody’s sake. But it broke my heart, for them to feel… secondary to me,” Khan explained.
“We’d all been equals. But something beautiful died during that second album, Rags to Rufus, and people are still recovering from what happened. I love those guys. But we can’t talk straight like we used to any more,” she shared.
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