"I Feel for You" (Chaka Khan)

I remember when Chaka Khan's "I Feel for You" came out in 1984.  It was the weirdest sounding thing I'd ever heard: there was Melle Mel from Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five rapping/chanting Khan's name, a sample of "Fingertips, Pt. 2" by Little Stevie Wonder thrown in for good measure—not to mention a live Stevie Wonder, playing harmonica on the track, and then odd tape noises and random effects that kind of left you wondering if someone had leaned on the wrong button during the final mixing.  I listen to this song now and marvel that anyone had the guts to even attempt anything so bizarre (much less that mainstream radio programmers had the stones to play it).
Because Khan owns her performance so completely, a lot of people don't realize the song actually is a Prince composition.  It originally appeared on his 1979 self-titled album, albeit in a much leaner format.  In fact, compared to the late mega-producer Arif Mardin's everything-and-the-kitchen-sink production for Khan, Prince's original sounds almost like a demo.
In truth, Khan's cover of "I Feel for You" came about because her record company had expressed "concern" that she'd released several albums in a row without a definitive hit single.  (In record company speak, that means, "We're dropping you soon if you don't get a hit.")  So Mardin specifically set out to create something attention-grabbing that felt very futuristic, combining the Uptown vibe of hip-hop with the Downtown vibe of electro-pop and adding the element of soulful R&B.
Mardin recounted to NPR's Michele Norris in 2005 that the idea of using Khan's name as a rhythmic element came out of a conversation with Khan's brother, musician Mark Stevens.
"I said, 'You know, you have two sisters—one of them is called Taka Boom, and the other sister is Chaka Khan. Why can’t we use these two names like percussion? Taka Boom-Chaka Khan-Taka Boom-Chaka Khan'.”
Even though the initial experiment didn't quite work, it did establish the groove for the song, and the vocal percussion idea morphed into Melle Mel's rap.
Mardin also revealed that the famous Chaka-Chaka-Chaka-Chaka Khan "stutter" at the beginning of the song (a technique that hip-hop producers jumped on and ran into the ground in the years that followed) was a serendipitous error.
"As we were mounting the recording onto the main master, my hand slipped on the repeat machine.  And we said, 'let's keep that; that's very interesting'."