He first had to tackle the hilariously ... in fact, dance. Instead, he opted for “lots of little scenarios as if you’re turning a page in a magazine.” Even though the individual scenarios – which included Houston bopping along in a cloud of confetti and jamming out in front of a graffitied wall while decked out in a black leather biker jacket — had “nothing to do with the song,” Grant says, he “just wanted to shoot Whitney ...
He first had to tackle the hilariously ironic fact that his star could not, in fact, dance. Instead, he opted for “lots of little scenarios as if you’re turning a page in a magazine.” Even though the individual scenarios – which included Houston bopping along in a cloud of confetti and jamming out in front of a graffitied wall while decked out in a black leather biker jacket — had “nothing to do with the song,” Grant says, he “just wanted to shoot Whitney from lots of different ways, and give her lots of different looks and surround her with dancers who could do most of the dancing.”As for Merrill and Rubicam, they believe that the song has remained so magnetic because “everybody wants that feeling of connection,” citing events as disparate as New York City Pride parades and mid-lockdown Italian nights amid the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic as moments where they’ve seen the song give people the solace they’re searching for. The songwriting partners declined to specify how much they generate from “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” annually, but they do say that the song has helped sustain two separate households for two decades and counting.“Because I’m a Black cat, I know Whitney’s African-American, and we want our people to be down,” Walden says. “The demo was just too poppy and not grounded in the funk which it needed to be the smash for Whitney. Immediately, I’m listening to it and going, “Whatcha gon’ do, Narada, to Blacken this thing up and funk it up, so that the people in the ghetto and the nightclubs are jamming too?” · To ground his transformation of “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” Walden looked to lessons learned from his mentor Quincy Jones.“I wanted to be like, ‘OK, Michael Jackson; OK, Prince; OK, Aretha; OK, whoever’s hot — get back!” says “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” producer Narada Michael Walden.