“Measuring Kool & the Gang’s influence is like asking what the influence of the Beatles was over pop music.” Mark Ronson remembers the group's following the death of co-founder Ronald 'Khalis' Bell
started discovering Kool & the Gang. It’s some of my favorite instrumental music ever, that and the Meters. That rawness came from them being on an indie [label, De-Lite Records]. They weren’t some super huge band — they didn’t have that Earth, Wind & Fire polish.
They had the same musical sophistication, but with East Coast grit. And thenWhen I started DJing, there’s not a Kool & the Gang record from that early era that I didn’t play at some point. Of course I would play “Hollywood Swinging” — that’s one of the greatest dance tunes of all time. People talk about “Celebration” being one of the biggest wedding tunes, and it kind of is, but “Hollywood Swinging,” you hear that horn-line, and it’s, “everybody get to the dance floor” It’s opened some of the biggest party records of all time as well: Mase with Puffy, “Feel So Good,” DJ Kool’s “Let Me Clear My Throat.” Even if you think about the horn lines in “Jungle Boogie” [starts singing], they’re really minimal, but they do so much. And then obviously “Too Hot” was a big R&B record, so you could definitely play that later on in the DJ sets as an R&B classic. The more commercial stuff was more like you would play at weddings. But “Ladies Night” is one of the greatest sounding disco records as well. They were another band when they came back with [singer] J.T. Taylor [who made his presence felt on 1979’s]. A few bands have done that — Duran Duran went away and then came back. But it’s so rare. To do it and reinvent your style completely? To do an about-face and change your whole style is kind of what the Kanyes and Radioheads and Bowies do. There’s nothing better than a comeback story, especially when it’s such good shit at the same time. Measuring Kool & Gang’s influence is like asking what the influence of the Beatles was over pop music, or Shakespeare over writing. It’s impossible to pull it apart — anybody who has played in a funk band or DJ’d has had Kool & the Gang in their DNA for so long. Think about what we call the Golden Era of hip-hop, the way Just Blaze reinvented Kool & the Gang on steroids for “Pump It Up,” the horn lines from “N.T.” that propel Nas’ “It Ain’t Hard to Tell.” Kool & the Gang are in that realm of James Brown and Bob James, where they’re just part of the fabric of Golden Era hip-hop. Their music is one of the first things that informed my knowledge of arrangements, beats, how to make people dance. I’m sure there have been a couple songs where I’ve listened to “Hollywood Swinging” beforehand, or sat in a room with Bruno [Mars] going, “why does this work? Why does this get people so fired up?” For “Uptown Funk,” we were trying to make a song that doesn’t have a chorus, because once it has a chorus, it’s not a funk song anymore, it’s an R&B song or a disco song. Kool & the Gang helped show you could make a hook out of a horn line. I never got to meet them. If I had, I would have chewed their ear off: How did you do this, and this, and this? That’s how I always get when I’m around people who are so legendary.
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