Kool & the Gang - Greatest Hits

This Greatest Hits collection arrives as Kool turns 75 and the band takes its place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a kool dozen spanning five decades.

Kool and the Gang started in Jersey City in the 1960s as a teenage jazz outfit built around Robert Kool Bell and his brother Ronald, which explains why their funk always carried more musicianship than the genre strictly required. Those horn charts were arranged, not jammed. It's also why three generations of hip hop producers have sampled them raw, and why so much of this material still sounds like it was cut last week.

The collection covers both bands they turned out to be. Jungle Boogie is the early one at its filthiest, all grunts and horn stabs, and Hollywood Swinging struts with a bassline that refuses to hurry. Then James J.T. Taylor arrived and turned them into a hit machine: Get Down On It is pure irresistible instruction, and Celebration became the most played party record in history, which is either an achievement or a curse depending on how many weddings you've attended.

An extensive historical essay sits inside the sleeve, but the twelve tracks make the argument on their own. Fifty years of making people move, no filler.