Major Letdowns: Kool & The Gang, "Sweat"

Very few musicians manage to make it big enough to sign a recording deal with a major label — and fewer still are lucky enough to spend their entire career at that level. Major Letdowns takes a look at studio albums that ended up banishing the artists who recorded them from the major-label ranks, never to return.

I've written a lot of words over the years about the ways in which various pop and rock acts dealt with the changing tides of musical trends during the '80s, and the hows and whys behind the (often ruinous) impacts those decisions ended up having on the artists' long-term credibility with fans. This isn't a conversation we often have about R&B acts, partly because "sound" has historically been a more flexible aspect of the overall experience where Black artists are concerned — but there's always that exception that proves the rule, and we've got a big one with Kool & the Gang's 18th studio album.

Released in the summer of 1989, Sweat found the band in a serious state of flux. Longtime lead singer James "J.T." Taylor, whose 1979 arrival coincided with a massive spike in popularity, left the lineup following the release of 1986's Forever LP, and he wasn't alone: Khalis Bayyan, a founding member who played sax and keys while heavily contributing to their songwriting, took a hike, along with trumpeter Robert "Spike" Mickens, who was also a Kool co-founder. While the band dealt with internal turmoil, external factors conspired against them as well — chief among them the advent of new jack swing, whose sleek production and angular machine-driven rhythms had the unfortunate effect of making recent Kool & the Gang hits like "Joanna" and "Cherish" sound quaintly corny.

To try and mitigate all this, the band replaced Taylor with three — three! — lead singers. Sennie "Skip" Martin (nicknames are a big deal in this band) played trumpet and percussion in addition to stepping up behind the mic, while Odeen Mays did double duty on keyboards. Gary Brown stuck to singing, which might lead a person to assume he handled the bulk of the lead vocals on Sweat, but I'm not so sure that was the case; at any rate, the liner notes aren't particularly helpful, and doing the math on its Wikipedia page suggests that Martin and Mays were the only lead singers on the record.

All of this highlights a key issue with Kool & the Gang following Taylor's departure, which is that the lead vocals became far less of a focus, at least in terms of the singing needing to be the slightest bit distinctive. This is understandable — it's easy to imagine the rest of the group wanting to avoid becoming overly dependent on a single superstar singer — but Bayyan's departure compounded the problem by opening a songwriting vacuum, forcing the band to rely on a lot of (mostly uninspired) outside material. The net effect was a revamp that left Kool & the Gang sounding like just another new jack swing act, but it didn't happen overnight. First, they debuted the overhauled lineup with a pair of new songs that were tacked onto the 1988 best-of set Everything's Kool & the Gang (Greatest Hits and More), starting with "Rags to Riches," which found them pretending to be Cameo for three minutes and 46 seconds:

"Rags to Riches" failed to crack the Hot 100 and barely limped into the Top 40 at R&B. Undeterred, Mercury followed it with another new track, "Strong," which does feature Gary Brown on lead vocals... and might as well have been recorded by Chicago:

The new Gang clearly wasn't connecting with its audience, but that wasn't necessarily a big deal; after all, it isn't exactly common for greatest hits records to spin off big hits of their own, especially when they have to do the heavy lifting of introducing new band members. (Just ask the guys in Toto.) Still, I suppose it must have seemed clear to the group and its label that they needed to refine their plan of attack if they wanted to extend a streak of gold and platinum albums that stretched back to 1979's Ladies' Night, which is likely how they ended up in the studio with a battalion of producers and a pile of songs handed in by outside writers.

One of those producers was Chuckii Booker, who would soon become a very big deal in the new jack swingosphere, but at this point was still just Gerald Albright's godson. Chuckii's debut LP ended up hitting shelves a few weeks before Sweat, and the uncharitable assumption here is that he wasn't exactly giving Kool & the Gang his best material — an assumption handily underscored by Sweat's Booker-penned and produced first single, "Raindrops":

This song is Sweat in a nutshell, which is to say it attempts to lean into the production-forward aesthetic of prevailing R&B trends while resolutely neglecting to add any personal character on behalf of the band. Never mind the video, which the guys in After 7 would have laughed at; just listen to the song. Does it sound like Kool & the Gang to you? Or does it sound like someone desperately wishing they were Keith Sweat?

It bears pausing here to stress that, although Sweat collects an extremely undistinguished set of songs, it isn't a bad album. It's a bad Kool & the Gang album, much the same way Megadeth's Risk is a horrible Megadeth record — which is to say that if another artist had latched onto these tracks, it wouldn't have been anything worth talking about. The end results are fine, really; it's only when you listen to the record in the context of everything these guys did before that the experience starts to curdle into disgust. There isn't anything inherently wrong with changing your sound to suit the times, but to go from "Jungle Boogie" and "Get Down on It" and "Celebration" to this shit? Offensive. To the people who heard it, anyway — in a grim display of just how fickle audiences can be, Sweat failed to chart on the overall albums tally, and only hit No. 52 at R&B. Just three years after going gold and peaking at No. 25 with Forever, the band was abruptly disowned by the pop market.

That's cold, but on the other hand, I don't know how much you can really blame the pop market when they were being handed goop like "Never Give Up" as the second (and blessedly final) single:

And here's the hard part. Kool & the Gang celebrated their 20th anniversary as a recording act in 1989 — a milestone that included all the hits I previously mentioned as well as plenty of others, not to mention a frequently innovative and often trailblazing collection of records that brilliantly melded pop, rock, and R&B with jazz touches. They were an incredible band, a band who'd had their share of ups and downs, a band who'd gambled by altering their sound in the past and won every time... until Sweat. In a just world, label execs would have put their heads together and said "You know what? This one's on us. Let's try again, but with a record that amplifies your strengths rather than trying to make you something you aren't." This, however, is not a just world; instead, it's a world where all it took was a single flop to cost Kool & the Gang their record deal.

The immediate aftermath of that fuckery is rather sad, as it often is. The late '80s and early '90s were actually not a terrible time to be ejected by a major label, because there was a sudden surge in splashy indies — but while some of those imprints ended up going on to huge success (Giant, SBK), most of them flamed out embarrassingly quickly. Kool & the Gang chose poorly, signing with the extremely short-lived JRS, spearheaded by industry lifer Artie Mogull; their next release, 1992's Unite, was dead in the water long before it arrived in whichever stores bothered to stock it.

Since suffering through that low point, Kool & the Gang have rebounded a bit, by which I mean to say they've run down a post-relevancy checklist that includes briefly reuniting with their former singer, re-recording past hits with trendy guest performers, releasing a Christmas album, and being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. They still tour like crazy, they're still recording, and although Kool is the last remaining original member of the lineup, that probably doesn't matter a hell of a lot to most of the people who show up to watch them perform on any given night. All told, it's a satisfying and well-deserved coda for a band that more than deserves it — but I'd be willing to bet that they haven't played a single track from Sweat during any of their concerts over the last 30 years.