Jungle Fever

You'll need to put the earmuffs on the kids when this one comes on. "Jungle Fever" is a tribal groove with nine breakdowns where a woman moans very suggestively in Spanish. The moaning continues over the music as the song comes to a close, but this time it's accompanied by some grunts from a guy. There's not much doubt what's going on here, but despite the R-rated material, the song was still a pretty big hit, going to #8 in the US, where it got a lot of airplay on R&B radio and went Gold, selling over 500,000 copies of the single. The writer of the song is listed as William Albimoor, sometimes under the name Bill Ador.

The Chakachas were a studio group comprised of six middle-aged white guys from Belgium - we'll probably never know who the woman was doing the vocals. The song was released in Belgium and some other countries in Europe on the Polydor label, which concocted a backstory about the group, claiming they were led by a guy named Gaston who painted chickens, and the woman was a congo-playing actress named Kary. This ruse was fine until the song was released in the United States, where Polydor needed real people to perform and promote it. That problem was solved by making an arrangement with a New York City group called Bario to become The Chakachas. Bario played Latin rock and had a female singer to perform the grunts and groans in the song, so they were able to pull it off. Bario also had their own catalog, so when they did concerts they could play "Jungle Fever" along with the other Chakachas single - a song called "Stories" - and augment it with their own songs. After "Jungle Fever" abated, Bario planned to revert back to their original name and move on, but they ended up releasing more material as The Chakachas.

The Spanish moaning is mostly just exclamations of passion, but there are a few we can translate: Ay, ay qué fiebre (Oh, oh what a fever) Dime, dale, dime (Tell me, come on, tell me) Suave, suave, suave, suave (Soft, soft, soft, soft)