Why is The Very Best of Kool & The Gang on my best 1,000 albums ever list?
Get down, get DOWN.
Some stats & info about The Very Best of Kool & The Gang
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? Funk, Soul, R&B
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – not ranked!
- All Music’s rating – 4.5 out of 5 stars
- When was The Very Best of Kool & The Gang released? 1999
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #682 out of 1,000
The Very Best of Kool & The Gang on Spotify
What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective review of what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.
What does The Very Best of Kool & The Gang mean to me? What does it make me feel? Why is it exciting or compelling?
On the basis of “Celebration” alone, Kool & The Gang , formed a part of the soundtrack of my childhood. We’re talking every wedding, every bar and bat mitzvah party (and a young me attended a gargantuan tonnage of those in the 1980s), probably just about every visit to the local roller skating and ice rink, and on and on. The crazy thing is that it still holds up and I still dig it in some fashion. I mean, “Celebrate good times, come on!” How can you not be about that?
And I’m not at all ashamed to say that like for so many no doubt, it was Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction that introduced me to not only another side of Kool & The Gang, but a side of Kool & The Gang that could funk you out to the outer planets of the solar system (and beyond that, too, I’d venture).
I’m talking, of course, about “Jungle Boogie,” an earth (galaxy?) shaking track that time travels forward from the 1970s to the 1990s, thanks to Quentin, and opened up a new generation to the incredible funk powers that this band possesses. I also must note that “Jungle Boogie” has one of my favorite horn parts of any popular song I can think of*.
* There are a number of songs by The Mighty Mighty Boss Tones that would easily be in the running for best ever.
Especially if you’re of a certain age, there are a bunch of songs on The Very Best of Kool & The Gang that make you recall, “Oh yeah, they did this one too!” “Fresh” is a great example, and also a reminder that Kool & The Gang are really strong pop song craftsmen on top of ably spanning between funk, soul, R&B, and pop stylings.