Videology

AMG Review of Videology

William Ruhlmann
All Music Guide

This extended video hits collection examines the popular heyday of Kool & the Gang from 1973 to 1987, when the band scored 25 Top Ten hits on the Billboard R&B singles chart. Not all of those hits are represented among the 24 music videos that run in chronological order for over an hour and three-quarters because, it seems, some hits simply didn't have accompanying videos ("Funky Stuff," "Higher Plane," "Rhyme Tyme People," "Caribbean Festival," "Love and Understanding (Come Together)," "Too Hot," "Holiday"); for the most part, they come from early on. There are also videos for songs that were not chart singles ("Love Festival," "No Show," "Hi De Hi, Hi De Ho," "As One"), and for singles that missed the Top Ten ("Jones vs. Jones," "Steppin' Out"). But most of Kool & the Gang's best-remembered hits, including "Hollywood Swinging," "Jungle Boogie," "Celebration," "Joanna," and "Cherish," are visualized here. The successive clips serve as both a history of the group over the period and a history of the evolution of music video. In a sense, the most impressive material comes right up front, as Kool & the Gang, a funk band just evolved out of a jazz band, makes a series of appearances on the late-night TV series Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, turning in lengthy live performances of their early hits, starting with a seven-and-a-half-minute treatment of "Hollywood Swinging." The size and personnel of the band sometimes seem to change at least slightly from one clip to the next. For example, a gruff-voiced vocalist who was not part of "Hollywood Swinging" turns up on the next song, "Jungle Boogie," to sing lead. (It turns out he's Donal Boyce, the group's lighting technician!) On "Open Sesame," a performance video that finds the band decked out in silver capes and dancing knee-deep in dry ice, there are 13 performers, including three female backup singers. Thereafter, the band seems to number about ten. An important addition, of course, is new lead singer James "J.T." Taylor, who makes his entrance on the fifth clip, "Ladies Night," and changes the musical focus to more of a pop approach. Clearly, Kool & the Gang were listening carefully to trends in R&B and the wider world of pop music. On "Steppin' Out," for example, Taylor adopts a Michael Jackson-like near-falsetto for a song that could have been on Jackson's Off the Wall. Later, "Tonight," particularly in the AOR mix heard here, comes off as a cross between Jackson's "Beat It" and the Dazz Band's "Whip It." Like their contemporaries, Kool & the Gang moved from "promotional clips," usually showing the band in performance for use on TV variety shows, to "music videos" with the rise of MTV in the early '80s. Their first "conceptual video" is "No Show," in which none of the group members is shown playing an instrument. Soon, they are seen dancing and mugging for the camera on a Brooklyn street ("Let's Go Dancing (Ooh, La, La, La)"), at an amusement park ("Big Fun"), on a subway platform ("Hi De Hi, Hi De Ho"), and in front of the Unisphere at World's Fair Park in Queens, NY ("As One"). From there, it's only a short step to the colorful, actor-filled MTV-style videos for "Joanna," "Tonight," and "Fresh," culminating in "Misled," actually shot as a short film in the manner of Jackson's "Thriller," then condensed into a music video. (The nine-minute full-length version, a sort of jumbled retelling of an Indiana Jones lost-treasure story, is one of the DVD's extras.) "Stone Love," the last video the group made before Taylor left for a solo career and the hits stopped coming, features the sort of moving camera shots and switches between black-and-white and color photography typical of mid- to late-'80s clips like Steve Winwood's "Higher Love." Throughout, Kool & the Gang keep the beat going, often repeating the optimistic sentiments of their signature hit "Celebration." It may be difficult tracing the individual bandmembers through personnel changes and fashion trends, but the group's warm, sunny, dancing attitude continues to come through. (Another DVD extra is a "trivia" version of the videos similar to Pop Up Video, with interesting bits of information printed on the screen while the clips are playing. That's how you can find out that Donal Boyce was the lighting technician, among other tidbits.)