Shannon

Born Brenda Shannon Greene in 1958 in Washington, D.C., and raised in Brooklyn, Shannon made her mark in the early 1980s on New York’s dance scene with a repertoire at the crossroads of post-disco, electro, and R&B pop. Discovered while studying music and recording studio demos, Shannon recorded the 1983 single “Let the Music Play,” created with producers Chris Barbosa and Mark Liggett, whose synthetic textures and syncopated rhythms remain closely associated with the rise of the freestyle scene. The eponymous album Let the Music Play (1984), followed by Do You Wanna Get Away (1985) and Love Goes All the Way (1986), continued this focus on vocal-driven dance music built around electronic bass lines, drum machines, and melodic hooks. After stepping back from the music industry in the late 1980s, Shannon resurfaced periodically on the club circuit in the 1990s, notably through collaborations with European producers, before releasing The Best Is Yet to Come (2000), which revived her world at the intersection of contemporary R&B and the freestyle legacy. Since then, Shannon has mostly performed on nostalgia circuits devoted to 1980s dance music, where her repertoire is regularly revisited by DJs and vocalists from the electronic scene.