Car Wash (song)

"Car Wash"
Song

"Car Wash"
Song

"Car Wash" is a 1976 number-one single by Rose Royce for Whitfield Records, the group's debut single and one of the most notable hits of the disco era. Written and produced by the band's main producer Norman Whitfield, "Car Wash", the theme of the 1976 Richard Pryor film Car Wash, was Rose Royce's most successful hit single. The song was later covered in 2004 by Christina Aguilera and Missy Elliott, who released their version as the single for the Shark Tale soundtrack.

Song information

Norman Whitfield, a former producer for Motown Records, had been commissioned to record the soundtrack album for Car Wash by director Michael Schultz. Although Whitfield did not want to take on the project, he did so because of both the money involved and the chance to give Rose Royce, a disco/funk band who left Motown with Whitfield in 1975, the exposure they needed to break into the mainstream. Unable to come up with a theme song for the film, inspiration finally struck Whitfield while playing a game of basketball, and he wrote his first draft of "Car Wash" on a bag of fried chicken he'd bought.

The resulting song set the mood and tone for the blaxploitation comedy film it was commissioned for. Rose Royce lead singer Rose Norwalt, with brief assistance from guitarist Kanji Brown, paints a picture of a fun and easy-going car washing business, where everything is "always cool/and the boss don't mind sometimes if you act a fool."

Car Wash's soundtrack, a double album, was Rose Royce's debut LP, and the title track was their debut single. "Car Wash" sold two million copies, and was a number one hit on both the Billboard pop and R&B charts in the United States and a top ten hit in the United Kingdom. The song held the number-one spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for one week, from January 22, 1977 to January 29, replacing "I Wish" by Stevie Wonder, and replaced by "Torn Between Two Lovers" by Mary MacGregor. The Car Wash soundtrack album, entirely recorded by Rose Royce and Whitfield, spawned two more hit singles: "I Wanna Get Next to You" and "I'm Going Down" (later covered in 1994 by Mary J. Blige).

Covers and other uses

In 2004, pop singer Christina Aguilera and rapper/singer Missy Elliott recorded a cover version of "Car Wash", giving the disco song a more modern pop feel and adding rapped verses from Elliott. "Car Wash" was the only single from the soundtrack to DreamWorks' computer animated film Shark Tale. Their version was supported with a music video, featuring Aguilera and Elliott as animated fish similar to those in the film. Aguilera and Elliott's cover of "Car Wash" missed the U.S. Billboard Top 40, peaking at number sixty-three, while becoming a top five hit in the United Kingdom.

The original Rose Royce version of "Car Wash" is one of the most sampled songs in history, not for its main instrumentation, but for its introductory section. The song opens with a series of hand claps, which have been sampled many times for both hip hop and R&B songs from the 1980s on.

Charts

Rose Royce

Chart (1977)	Position
Billboard Hot 100	1
Billboard Black Singles	1
UK Singles Chart	9

Christina Aguilera/Missy Elliott

Chart (2004)	Position
Billboard Hot 100	63
World Chart Show	3
UK Top 40 Singles	4
Brasil Top 100 Singles	4
Jam FM Charts	3
'Tokio Hot 100'	10
Australia Top 50 Singles	2
Dutch Top 40	2
Germany Top 100 Singles	6
Indonesia Chart	18
Switzerland Top 100 Singles	5
Ireland Top 50 Singles	5
Sweden Top 60 Singles	27
New Zealand Top 50 Singles	2
Mexican Top 100	15

See also

• Hot 100 No. 1 Hits of 1977 (USA)