A brief history of Chaka Khan’s relationship with “I Feel for You”
June 08, 2026
An ad in an October 1984 issue of the British pop magazine Smash Hits stated its case in plain type. “Single of the week: Take a song by Prince. Add a little rap by Grandmaster Melle Mel. A touch of Stevie Wonder’s harmonica. Mix it all together with a production by Arif Mardin. And you get the amazing new single ‘I Feel for You’ by Chaka Khan.”
Obviously, musical all-star gatherings aren’t, unto themselves, a guarantor of quality. But simply listing the record’s ingredients was exactly the right approach to take here. “I Feel for You” is that rare instance where an all-star recording worked in perfect balance, every part of the record — every collaborative partner — would enhance the others.
In fact, Chaka Khan’s “I Feel for You” has engendered a very real consensus. It’s not as beloved by her cult audience as her ’70s hits like “Sweet Thing” and “I’m Every Woman,” and fair enough. But “I Feel for You” was a major hit — No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100, Khan’s first appearance in the pop top 20 in eight years — and helped the album it came from, also titled I Feel for You, to platinum status. And the album also helped buoy Warner Bros., which had its biggest year to date in 1984: sales over 35% above the label’s ‘83 numbers, and 10% higher than in 1978, Warner’s previous high-water year.
Black music led the charge. “Never has the music of [Black] musicians so dominated popular American culture as in 1984,” Cash Box wrote at the end of the year. Khan’s “I Feel for You” was a real flash point, and not just musically. “The promo clip is adapted from a Norma Kamali runway video (her line is very fashion-forward in embracing hip-hop style) that includes breakin’ by Shabba-Doo and Boogaloo Shrimp,” wrote Nelson George in Post-Soul Nation. “The record and video’s melding of R&B, fashion, and rap is revolutionary.”
There was a clear dividing line emerging: R&B was growing more traditionalist and crossover-minded; the new sound coming up did the opposite. “Hip-hop and rap spawned a whole new breed of poets-cum-dancers-cum-DJs-cum-mixers who in some cases were long on message and short on music,” Cash Box went on. “But as always, the cream rises” — and one of the examples the trade mag cited was Melle Mel, who helped “Chaka Khan to make the most out of the form’s repetitive nuances and use them to ultimate effect on the Prince tune.”
Khan and Prince had known each other long before she recorded his song. They’d first met in the late ’70s in New York, when Prince pulled a prank on her, as Khan recalled: “Somehow he got my hotel number ... and he mimicked Sly [Stone] on the phone.” She went to Electric Lady Studios, intending to see her friend, and instead “found this short little guy in this one studio with a guitar ... He was just everyday about it. I wanted to strangle him ... He never let me forget it for a long time. He thought it was one of the funniest things that ever happened to him.”
Years later, when they made Khan’s 1998 album Come 2 My House together, Chaka noted in the same interview that Prince “had a big plastic water bottle, and every time someone cursed they had to put a dollar in the bottle. And I said, ‘I’ll be f****d if I’m gonna put any money in your bottle in your studio ‘cause I’m cussing.’” When they went out on the road together after House, Chaka and Prince would duet on “I Feel for You.”
The song reaped dividends. In February of 1985, nearly six years after it had appeared on Prince’s self-titled second album, “I Feel for You” won a Grammy for Best Rhythm & Blues Song (awarded to the songwriter). The same month, Chaka’s single finished ninth in the Village Voice’s annual critics poll. Decades later, Rolling Stone put it third on its list of 1984’s 100 best hit singles.
So yes: Everybody loved, and continues to love, Chaka Khan’s “I Feel for You.” Everybody, it seems, but one person: Chaka Khan.
Khan didn’t quite go as far as, say, De La Soul performing “Me, Myself & I” in concert while yelling “We hate this song!” all over it. But she minimized it from day one. In fact, Khan disdained the record upon its release, telling Smash Hits: “You know, for five years I have been going into the studio really working at creating masterpieces, mixing jazz and rock and funk. So now I do this song and put rapping on it to boot, which is really the pits. The lowest thing you can do from an artist’s standpoint.”
Khan found the fact that “I Feel for You” had leapt into the top five to be both amazing and dismaying. Warner Bros., of course, had been after a hit: “They said, ‘You’re not listening to the pulse of America and the industry,’” Khan told Billboard. They threatened to separate her from her producer, Mardin. The solution: Mardin farmed most of the songs out to a different writer and producer, acting as executive producer.
On the one hand, a biz onlooker of the era might have seen this approach as a last gasp, an admission that Khan and Mardin were low on ideas. On the other, it saved time and, in this case, money — the label had given Chaka and Arif a half-million-dollar budget and they’d turned in a finished LP for half of that. Whatever the impetus, it would be a defining act of ’80s pop. Along with another platinum-awarded 1984 album — Tina Turner’s Private Dancer — Khan’s I Feel for You helped make the multi-producer-writer album an entrenched feature of the record biz. Both LPs showed that Thriller-style tentpole blockbusters — albums that spun off long strings of hit singles and videos, often generating world tours — could be made even more expeditiously when you spread the work around.
But Khan, like many of her ‘70s-bred peers, found this way of doing things disorienting. “Every time I went to record, I went to a different studio where there was a different producer and all I had to do was sing the song,” she told Billboard. “There was no watching a song grow. It was like I hadn’t really taken part in the project.”
The assembly-line approach of the ’80s was anathema to someone like Khan. “They want entertainment. But I’m a singer rather than a personality,” she told Sepia magazine in 1980. She wanted to be considered an artist, not a sex symbol, she told Sepia: “I am no gyrating nymphomaniac. You dig?”
And she was determined to show it in 1984. At a rapturously received Radio City Music Hall show that fall, Khan was, said Variety, “classier than ever. Gone are the raunchy antics and random meandering.” But when she opened the second half of the show with “I Feel for You,” its bright anthemic quality got the audience on their feet. “Khan showed that even without the special effects of the recorded version there’s still a beefy song and vocal remaining,” Billboard reported. “But because she sang it so soon, the rest of the show was a bit of a letdown.”
In fact, “I Feel for You” wasn’t supposed to be the album’s title track or its first single. That was going to be a ballad called “Stronger Than Before.” Instead, “I Feel For You” ran away with the album, to Khan’s visible dismay. “It’s ironic that a parody of something that’s as [Black] as breaking and rapping would do so well pop,” she said.
That word again: parody. No one else who’s ever listened to “I Feel for You” would have pegged it for that. It’s pure, frightened justification, a blatant attempt at a failsafe. Khan, like so many musicians who’d come of age prior to hip-hop, simply couldn’t hear it as music. Surely it was going to bite the dust someday, and render her mud for having sullied herself with it.
It didn’t help, either, that MC Melle Mel’s brief bars were enhanced by a studio accident on Arif Mardin’s part. In an NPR interview, Mardin attributed the stutter to a manual accident in which “my hand slipped on the repeat machine: ‘Ch-ch-ch-ch-Chaka Khan.’” The singer has very likely probably gotten as sick, or sicker, of hearing “Ch-ch-ch-ch-Chaka Khan” as Christopher Walken became of hearing “I need more cowbell!”
For his part, Melle Mel took Khan’s snide comments in stride. “Yeah, I heard she’s been saying that,” he told Melody Maker that December. “But I think it's a good record and I don’t think the fact that she’s got rapping on it can do her anything but good. It's showing that she’s aware of the new music, and it’s bringing her to the attention of people who might not otherwise get to hear her. I mean, if rap gets any bigger and becomes more of a part of the mainstream, it will mean that Chaka has an advantage over all the other female vocalists. People are gonna hear and remember that she was there first.”
I saw Khan perform “I Feel for You” in two very different settings, almost equidistant on either side of Prince’s death. In the summer of 2015, I attended her performance at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. It was a fairly energetic hour, and the setting certainly brought out everyone’s best. But it was very telling indeed when it came time for “I Feel for You,” late in the set, and she kept it to a single verse and chorus, before veering into another song. A performer learns to minimize the ones that just won’t go away by making medleys out of them.
Then, in October of 2016, Khan appeared deep into the very long and disorganized Official Prince Tribute concert, at what is now Grand Casino Arena in St. Paul. There she kicked off with “Betcha I,” from the 1998, Prince-produced Come 2 My House, then veered into her own “Sweet Thing” before Stevie Wonder joined her to reprise his own harmonica part from “I Feel for You.” This time, she actually sang the entire song — and tore into none other than “1999” alongside Stevie. (He took the low-baritone lines that had gone to Dez Dickerson in the original.) It was a nice surprise in an evening short of them.
Would that the same could be said of Khan’s appearance at First Avenue on the night of Wednesday, June 3, during the kickoff of Celebration 2016. Inside, things were convivial — lots of friendships being rekindled; when DJ Lenka Paris dropped “Girls and Boys” around 8:30, the big sing-along line was: “Maybe we can stay in touch.” But a more somber air was also detectable: times are tough and people are feeling it, plus there were murmurs about Morris Day’s recent pull-out of the Great American State Fair. (Hands up if you, too, first misread that name as the Minnesota State Fair — you know, the Great Minnesota Get-Together.)
Finally, at about 10:10 p.m., Khan went onstage with three backing singers and a man with a laptop containing the music. There’s no point in being mean, but there isn’t any in sugarcoating it, either: It was not her best performance. During set of a few hits, the microphone was pointed to the audience as much or more than toward herself. It cratered when Khan transitioned to endless clips from an apparently finished new album with Sia — like a product demo. The audience was not pleased; on the sidewalk afterward, one showgoer quietly but vividly conveyed his fury at having spent $100 on it.
But Khan opened her performance with “I Feel for You” — and, shockingly, she did interesting things with it. She didn’t redefine it or make it shockingly new the way she and Mardin and their all-star cast did in 1984. But her wailing, riffing, and extemporizing made it come alive in surprising ways.
Khan’s vocal embellishments were genuinely impressive, jazzy and piquant, adding a new level and layer to the song. That said, what was missing was notable. This version of “I Feel for You” was still shorter than the record, even if Khan didn’t stuff it into a medley. And for all the vocal extensions at work, the one had that defined the record — Melle Mel’s “Ch-ch-ch-ch-Chaka Khan”—had been excised, as well. She seemed to be happy not to hear that part.
