Kool & The Gang

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Essential Albums

  • Something Special
    Something Special
    Something Special

    Along with Earth, Wind & Fire, Kool & The Gang was arguably the only mainstream Black American band to successfully transition from the 1970s to the 1980s. But where Earth, Wind & Fire toyed with disco as part of a broader diet of R&B, jazz, and other Black idioms, Kool & The Gang embraced the sound consciously and head-on. Released in 1981, Something Special would become the band’s third platinum album in three years. It wasn’t all that functionally different from 1979’s Ladies’ Night or 1980’s Celebrate!: It’s polished, pop-friendly, and song-oriented—a sound that scanned as Black, but was easily embraced by mainstream America. But Something Special also found the group moving beyond disco, with its eight tracks including everything from modern updates on 1960s Motown (“Take My Heart (You Can Have It If You Want It)”) to dolphin-smooth funk (“Get Down On It”) to quiet storm ballads (“No Show”). In a way, it was as though the band members had discovered they were less unified by sound than by their persistent, family-friendly optimism, whether for the children (“Pass It On”), the ladies (“Be My Lady”), or humanity in general (“Stand Up and Sing”). Kool & The Gang worked hard to make you feel good. But they made it sound easy.

  • Celebrate!
    Celebrate!
    Celebrate!

    Kool & The Gang continued the winning streak begun on Ladies Night with Celebrate!, which perfects its predecessor’s subtle disco grooves. Like Ladies Night, the album is built around its sterling title song. “Celebration” is one of the most recognizable songs of all time and it was quickly adopted by the public — first by being used to welcome home the Iran hostages, and then as Walter Mondale’s campaign song. Group leader Ronald Bell was right when he predicted the song would be an “international anthem.” In the shadow of such a universal hit the rest of Celebrate! is bound to disappear, but a closer listen shows the album to be the band’s most consistent effort from this period. “Take It To the Top,” “Morning Star” and “Night People” display the disco formula in its most refined state — lush, smooth, with each layer of sound finely integrated into the one below it, like clockwork. “Just Friends” and “Love Affair” are vehicles for J.T. Taylor’s amiable vocals, and if “Celebration” wasn’t an once-in-a-lifetime single, it’s likely that “Love Festival” would have become the album’s standout hit.

  • Ladies' Night
    Ladies' Night
    Ladies' Night

    A few months before the members of Kool & The Gang started working on 1979’s Ladies’ Night, they played at a record store to promote their 1978 album, Everybody’s Dancin’. Nobody showed up, and the band was humiliated. Saxophone player and songwriter Ronald Bell remembers a teenage girl who happened to be in the store telling him something they all vaguely sensed, but didn’t want to acknowledge head-on: Yeah, they’d had some big songs—“Jungle Boogie,” “Hollywood Swinging,” “Higher Plane,” “Funky Stuff”—but now they were washed up. Bell took it as a wake-up call: The next time they headed into the studio, they were going to make something pop. Ladies’ Night smoothed out the band’s funk edges and integrated an overtly commercial approach to Kool & The Gang’s songwriting: While the members could still give their instruments a workout, there also had to be verses and choruses, as well as a vocalist—J.T. Taylor—to sing them (all of this was enforced by a new producer, Eumir Deodato, who kept an eye on the album’s creative bottom line). At the time, disco had already experienced its first cultural backlash, mostly by embittered rock fans who thought the music was trite, overproduced, and politically escapist. (The latter seems reasonable. Still, the fact that disco was also largely Black and embraced by the gay community may also have had something to do with the complaint.) But even with that resistance, the disco sound was still performing commercially, and—thanks to upstarts like Chic and established stars like Diana Ross and Michael Jackson—evolving artistically, too. Ladies’ Night struck a highly calculated balance: It was poppier and less hypnotic than Chic, but Blacker than the Bee Gees. Kool & The Gang managed to bend traditional R&B songwriting around the beat of disco (“Too Hot”), while retaining the communal vibe of its days as a funk band (“Hangin’ Out,” “Ladies’ Night”). Bell later said they tried to write their songs like nursery rhymes: You hear them once, but remember them forever.

  • Wild and Peaceful
    Wild and Peaceful
    Wild and Peaceful

    Kool & The Gang’s fourth studio album is a full-on funkfest, finding Robert “Kool” Bell and co. neck-deep in hard-grinding grooves. With its serpentine horn lines and down-and-dirty feel, “Jungle Boogie” is the band at its party-starting best, but the appropriately titled “Funky Stuff” and the hectic, heavy-grooving “This Is You, This Is Me” hit just as hard. The band take a couple of brief breaks from funking it up, too: Dreamy ballad “Heaven at Once” and the breezy, jazzy title track hint at their multifaceted musical makeup.

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About Kool & The Gang

Kool & The Gang’s punchy, riff-driven urban grooves cemented funk music as a versatile and radio-friendly force during the ’70s and ’80s. Robert “Kool” Bell and his brother Ronald formed the band in New Jersey in 1964 as an Afro-jazz outfit, using several names before settling on Kool & the Gang and signing to De-Lite Records in 1969. The band specialized in chant-like, horn-filled rhythms that toggled between jazz fusion and James Brown-inspired soul. Its breakthrough came in 1973 when it cracked the R&B charts with “Funky Stuff.” Its seminal album, Wild and Peaceful, yielded the Gang’s first crossover hits with proto-disco classics “Jungle Boogie” and “Hollywood Swinging,” paving the groundwork for its many dance-floor staples throughout the rest of the decade. But as funk cooled in disco’s wake, the band members traded their gutsy tricks for a slick cosmopolitan sound. The addition of James “J.T.” Taylor’s smooth, charismatic falsetto kept the Gang aflame with a parade of chart-dominating hits—from 1979’s “Ladies’ Night” to 1985’s “Cherish”—that have endured as pop culture anthems as equally as R&B mainstays.

ORIGIN
Jersey City, NJ, United States
FORMED
1964
GENRE
R&B/Soul

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