C+C Music Factory

Better Days, and the two Cs

The group's name is a set of initials, and that detail is now the subject of litigation. Robert Clivillés and David Cole met in 1985 at Better Days, the Manhattan club where Clivillés worked as a DJ and Cole played live keyboards, and they turned the pairing into a production and songwriting partnership rather than a performing act.

Before the hits they recorded as 2 Puerto Ricans, a Blackman and a Dominican, a short-lived house project that also took in David Morales and Chep Nuñez, releasing "Do It Properly" in 1987 and "So Many Ways (Do It Properly Part II)" in 1988. C+C Music Factory followed in New York in 1989 — Clivillés's August 2026 complaint dates the founding to 1990 — and was built on the studio model the pair already used: they wrote and produced, and the voices and faces were brought in. Freedom Williams rapped, Martha Wash sang, Zelma Davis fronted the visuals.

That division of labour produced an enormous record and, almost immediately, two decades of argument about credit.

The record

"Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)" reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and remains one of the most durable dance records of the period: Wash's hook, Williams's verses, Clivillés and Cole's production. The album of the same name arrived in December 1990, peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and was certified five times platinum.

The follow-ups did the same job on the club charts. "Here We Go (Let's Rock & Roll)", "Things That Make You Go Hmmm...", "Just a Touch of Love" and "Keep It Comin' (Dance Till You Can't Dance No More)" all topped the US dance chart. The group collected around 35 industry awards, among them five Billboard Music Awards and five American Music Awards, and in December 2016 Billboard placed them 44th in its ranking of the most successful dance acts.

Two further albums, Anything Goes! in 1994 and a self-titled record in 1995, sold progressively less. Recording stopped in 1996.

Martha Wash and the credit

Wash sang the line everybody knows and was not credited for it. She discovered the position when she saw Davis miming her vocal in the video, and sued in December 1991. The case settled in 1994, with MTV adding credits that separated Wash's vocal performance from Davis's appearance on screen.

The suit reached much further than the one record. It became the reference point for session singers seeking their names on sleeves and screens, and fed directly into the push for mandatory vocal credits in the United States. Three and a half decades on, the Wash case is the part of the group's history most often written about, which is itself a comment on how the project was built.

Cole's death, and two claims on one name

David Cole died of spinal meningitis on 24 January 1995, aged 32. Clivillés has held the name since, pointing in court to an agreement dated 4 October 1996 under which Cole's estate granted him sole authorised use. He reassembled the group in 2010 with the house producer Eric Kupper in Cole's chair.

Williams, who had left in 1992, took a different route. He began billing himself under the group's name in the late 1990s — Clivillés's complaint puts the start at around 1996, after Williams's solo career stalled — and secured federal trademark registrations, reported as 2005 and 2015. By 2016 Clivillés was estimating that Williams earned between $5,000 and $10,000 per booking with at least eleven shows that year, and on 2 July 2016 he published an open letter asking why Williams must "profit/steal and distort from our hard worked & earned history". Williams, approached at the time, did not engage beyond a cryptic Instagram post about arguing with people who make no sense.

For roughly a decade, that was the shape of it: two parties, one trademark, no court date, and a booking circuit that largely did not care which one it hired.

May to August 2026

What broke the stalemate was Washington. In May 2026 Williams was announced as a performer at the Great American State Fair, part of the Donald Trump-linked Freedom 250 programme marking the United States' 250th anniversary, and the lineup began shedding acts. Morris Day & The Time and Young MC both withdrew on 28 May 2026.

Williams did not. The same day he posted a seven-minute video, filmed in a bathroom, to the C+C Music Factory Instagram account, saying he would play regardless and that the day he let his critics tell him what to do was the day he died. He described his audiences as about 90 per cent white and reckoned 70 per cent of them probably voted Republican, and argued that the people objecting online had no bearing on his career. Clivillés publicly distanced himself from the remarks. Attendee records log a C+C Music Factory set on the National Mall on 26 June 2026.

On 14 August 2026 Clivillés filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, representing himself, with nine counts covering trademark infringement, fraud, defamation, unfair competition and breach of contract. He seeks at least $10m in compensatory damages, trebled to $30m under the Lanham Act, plus punitive damages, cancellation of Williams's trademark registration No. 4775972 and a permanent injunction. The complaint also objects to a release titled "Into the Future", put out in June 2026 without his permission. It is not a dispute about royalties on the 1990 record; it is an attempt to stop one man selling tickets under two other men's initials.

The 2026 circuit

Throughout the litigation the bookings have continued, and they follow a settled pattern: casinos, fairgrounds, radio-station bills and the I Love the 90s package. Documented 2026 dates run from the Arena at Innovation Mile in Noblesville, Indiana on 10 January, through the Seven Seas Food Festival in Orlando on 8 March, Willow Island at Madison's Alliant Energy Center on 24 May, Hard Rock Casino Rockford on 10 July, KTU's Beatstock at the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, New Jersey on 15 August, the Mountain Winery in Saratoga, California on 29 August and the Xcite Center at Parx Casino in Bensalem, Pennsylvania on 26 September.

One date is currently on sale: Dance Now Atlantic City at Hard Rock Live at Etess Arena on Saturday 17 October 2026, an 8pm start, with Jenny Berggren of Ace of Base among the acts on the bill. Songkick lists it as the last show of the run, which makes it the final scheduled appearance under the name before the New York case moves forward.