A Deeper Love/Pride In The Name Of Love

A Deeper Love / Pride In The Name Of Love: Clivilles and Cole Beyond the C+C Brand

In the early 1990s, few production teams in American dance music had accumulated a track record as impressive as that of Robert Clivilles and David Cole, the partnership known professionally as C+C Music Factory. Their debut single under that name, "Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)," had reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in January 1991 and remained one of the most immediately recognizable records of the decade's opening years. The accompanying album sold millions of copies worldwide and established C+C Music Factory as the preeminent commercial house act in the United States, capable of translating the energy of New York club culture into radio-friendly packages without sacrificing the visceral impact that made that music compelling in its original environment.

Having established the C+C Music Factory identity as a vehicle for big, crowd-focused dance records, Clivilles and Cole made an interesting strategic and artistic choice with their double-A side release of "A Deeper Love / Pride In The Name Of Love" in early 1992. Rather than issuing the record under the C+C Music Factory banner, they released it under their own names as Clivilles and Cole, a designation that signaled a different kind of project: something more personal, more musically ambitious, and more willing to engage with gospel and spiritual music traditions than the club-oriented C+C records had been.

The release debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on January 11, 1992, entering at position 81. Its climb was gradual and sustained: by January 25 it had reached 69, and it continued ascending through February before peaking at number 44 during the week of March 7, 1992, spending seventeen weeks on the chart in total. That trajectory, extended and measured rather than explosive, suggested that the record was finding its audience through means beyond the pure club play that had driven the C+C Music Factory hits: gospel radio, R&B stations, and the crossover format that was accommodating a wider range of Black popular music in the early 1990s.

The "A Deeper Love" side of the release drew on gospel music traditions in ways that were unusual for artists primarily associated with house and dance music. Clivilles and Cole had both grown up with gospel music, and their New York upbringings had given them access to some of the most vibrant gospel communities in the country. The record's incorporation of gospel vocal techniques, spiritual lyrical content, and the emotional uplift associated with the African American church tradition gave it a character distinct from anything else in the C+C catalog. A version of "A Deeper Love" would later be recorded by Aretha Franklin for the soundtrack of the film "Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit," a testament to the song's gospel credentials and its adaptability to contexts far removed from the dance floor.

The "Pride (In the Name of Love)" side of the release was a cover of the U2 song originally released in 1984, a song explicitly about the life and assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Cole and Clivilles's production transformed the original's earnest rock sincerity into a gospel-inflected dance track, shifting the emotional register while preserving the tribute at the song's center. The decision to pair a gospel-influenced original composition with a cover that honored a central figure of the Civil Rights Movement gave the release a coherent thematic identity: both sides were, in different ways, about spiritual strength and the commitment to love as a transformative force in the face of opposition.

David Cole's musical background was particularly relevant to the gospel dimensions of the project. Cole had worked as a keyboardist and musical director in church settings before his partnership with Clivilles led them into dance music production, and the technical and emotional understanding of gospel music he had developed in those settings informed every aspect of how the vocals and arrangements on "A Deeper Love" were constructed. The combination of Cole's gospel fluency and Clivilles's expertise in dance music production gave the record an authority in both domains that a less experienced team could not have achieved.

The release appeared during a period when the boundaries between dance music, R&B, and gospel were being actively renegotiated on the charts and on radio. New Jack Swing had already demonstrated that production techniques drawn from electronic dance music could be successfully grafted onto R&B vocal traditions, and the gospel-dance synthesis that Clivilles and Cole pursued on this release represented a parallel development, one that would prove influential on subsequent recordings that sought to bring the emotional power of gospel into secular dance contexts.

Tragically, David Cole died in January 1995 at the age of thirty-two, cutting short a partnership and a creative trajectory that had shown remarkable range and ambition. "A Deeper Love / Pride In The Name Of Love" stands as evidence of the directions that partnership might have continued to explore: more personal, more spiritually engaged, and more interested in the deep roots of African American music than the commercial pressures of the dance market typically encouraged.