Safire

Despite achieving fewer pop crossovers than acts such as Exposé or the Cover Girls, Safire established herself among Latin freestyle’s leading female artists through a series of late-’80s club successes. Born Wilma Cosme in San Juan, Puerto Rico, she spent the bulk of her childhood in East Harlem and entered the music industry as a session vocalist. An audition for the Cutting Records label secured her the chance to cut the already-prepared single “Don’t Break My Heart,” which surfaced in 1986 and immediately became a freestyle classic; the early-1987 follow-up “Let Me Be the One,” co-written by Safire herself, repeated that success. Those two tracks earned her a Mercury contract and a self-titled debut album. Issued in 1988, Sa-Fire collected the earlier hits along with “Boy I’ve Been Told,” written by Marc Anthony, which gained substantial traction on urban radio and in clubs across the United States and Europe. The co-written ballad “Thinking of You” delivered her strongest pop breakthrough in early 1989, climbing to number 12 with extensive radio exposure. Mercury promoted the dance-oriented follow-up “Love Is on Her Mind” less forcefully, stalling her mainstream progress while she continued to thrive inside the freestyle community.

Her second album, I Wasn't Born Yesterday, arrived in 1990 as freestyle’s foothold on the pop charts was already eroding and mainstream dance-pop and house music absorbed much of its audience. Despite the house-influenced single “Taste the Bass,” the release failed to match the commercial reach of its predecessor. With the freestyle scene in decline, Safire stepped away for several years. She resurfaced in 1996 on Sony—now billed without the hyphen—with Atrevida, a Latin dance album that merged salsa and hip-hop rhythms. In 2001 she issued Bringing Back the Groove, which paired new songs with remixes of earlier material. Both “Don’t Break My Heart 2002” and the new ballad duet “Can You Stand the Rain,” originally recorded by New Edition and featuring longtime friend Cynthia, received airplay on urban and Latin stations.