100% Pure Love

Album: Storyteller (1994)
Charted: 15 11
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Songfacts®:

  • Like her first hit, "Gypsy Woman (She's Homeless)," Crystal Waters wrote the lyrics and melody to "100% Pure Love" with her production team The Basement Boys taking care of the track. At first, the song was called "The Beat Goes Boom," with lyrics addressing how rap songs often debased women. The Basement Boys hated her hook, so she came up with a new one and made the song more of a general affirmation.

    "You get what you put out there, so I wanted to do something more positive," she told Songfacts. "Plus, I was in love at the time."
  • Waters likes to provide a sense of time and place in the opening lines of her songs, which she does here:

    It's twelve past midnight
    Don't close your eyes


    "in the first two lines of a song a person should know what's going on - where they are and what they're doing," she says.
  • Like "Gypsy Woman," this was a #1 Dance hit that also crossed over to the pop chart. It pulled Waters stridently out of one-hit-wonder territory, establishing her as a top writer and performer in the genre. Her success continued into the EDM age, when DJs often asked her to sing and write the toplines on their tracks. In 2017, she appeared on the Dance #1 "Testify."
  • The video was directed by the artist/photographer Matthew Rolston, who made very fashionable videos, often surrounding female singers with accommodating male models - he also did "Whatta Man" for Salt-N-Pepa and "My Lovin' (You're Never Gonna Get It)" for En Vogue. Waters liked to stay fully clothed in her videos, and that's how she appears here. For a futuristic feel, various pieces of modern studio equipment show up, including an early digital workstation.

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