Songfacts®:

• Black Box was a collective of three Italian producers - Daniele Davoli, Mirko Limoni, and Valerio Semplici - who wrote "Everybody Everybody." The were really good at making beats but their English was limited, as you can tell if you pay any attention to the lyrics, which most people didn't. Lines like "I walk around and see your night skyline" and "You feel all right, you never looked for me" are very random and don't form any real story, but they didn't have to. It sounds like the song is about a breakup, and there's cheating involved, but we don't know for sure. The "everybody everybody" part doesn't show up until the end of the song and seems to have no relation to the lyrics leading up to it.
• The singer on "Everybody Everybody" is Martha Wash, a powerhouse vocalist who had a hit with her group The Weather Girls with "It's Raining Men." But Wash wasn't credited on the album and didn't appear in the video. The producers in Black Box hired her for demo sessions and paid her a flat fee to sing various songs. But instead of just using them as demos for another artist to sing, they cobbled her vocals together to make the actual recordings of "Everybody Everybody" and five other songs on the album. The face of the group was a French model named Katrin Quinol, who lip-synched for live performances and in the music videos, and also appeared on the cover art for the albums and singles.
  
  Wash, understandably, was not pleased. She sued Black Box and a settlement was reached.
  
  Remarkably, the same thing happened to Wash just months later when C+C Music Factory used her demo vocals on "Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)" without crediting her and used a model to mime her vocals in the video. She sued them as well.
• The track is built on samples. The drums come from "Hot Pants," a 1987 song by Bobby Byrd that was produced by James Brown. The male voice that says "Owww" in various spots is the R&B singer Oran "Juice" Jones from his 1989 song "Shaniqua."
• The first Black Box hit was "Ride On Time," which used uncredited vocals by a different American singer: Loleatta Holloway. Her vocals came from a bootleg recording from her 1980 song "Love Sensation" - the Black Box producers said they had no idea who was singing on the bootleg and only later found out it was Holloway. "Ride On Time" was a #1 hit in the UK and prompted the group to record an entire album, Dreamland, which had another big Martha Wash-powered hit as well: "Strike It Up."
• The Family Guy writers found some humor in this song, using it in two different episodes, first in the 2008 episode "Play It Again, Brian" when we find out Cleveland is on tour with Black Box, then in the 2021 episode "Family Cat" when Meg performs it at a talent show with the cat doing the "owww" parts.
  
  The song also appears in these movies:
  
  Isn't It Romantic (2019)
  Let It Be Me (1995)
  Class Act (1992)