The 2024 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony invaded the Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse in Cleveland on October 19.
Par for the course, the annual ceremony brought out some of the biggest names in music, including this year’s inductees Kool & the Gang, Cher, A Tribe Called Quest, Peter Frampton, Ozzy Osbourne, Dave Matthews Band, Foreigner and Mary J. Blige, and a slew of notable presenters.
Backstage in the press room, Method Man, Chuck D, The Who’s Roger Daltrey, Keith Urban, Cher, Blige, Jennifer Hudson, Dua Lipa and Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello were some of the many who agreed to be grilled by hungry reporters. AllHipHop had a chance to not only meet Kool & the Gang’s namesake, Robert “Kool” Bell, and fellow member J.T. Taylor but also got to ask them about sampling.
Starting in 1972 with The Jimmy Castor Bunch single “It’s Just Begun,” Kool & the Gang’s music has been sampled by numerous Hip-Hop artists—from DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince (“Summertime”) and N.W.A (“Real N*ggaz”) to Eric B. & Rakim (“Don’t Sweat the Technique”) and EPMD (“You Gots to Chill”).
“When they were sampling our music, a lot of things we didn’t know,” Bell admitted. Taylor jumped in with, “We just heard it like, ‘Wait a minute.’ That was ‘Jungle Boogie, that was this.”
Bell continued, “I put somebody on sample patrol to catch our licks, catch that drumbeat [laughs].”
Still, Kool & the Gang appreciated that Hip-Hop music was exposing their catalog to a whole new audience. As Taylor explained, they also realized just how many lawsuits were piling up as sampling became the norm.
“I remember in the beginning people were getting sued all over the place, big money suing, so the labels I think they told the artists, ‘Listen you have to let us know. You have to get the license for this stuff,’” he said. “We still got our credit and royalties and everything like that. It’s a testament to just how popular these songs were.
“To me, the Hip-Hop genre gets a lot of flack. When you try to take a little sample, a little audio file and splice it up to a way you can make a brand new thing, that’s creative too. It wasn’t the original thing, but they make something original from it. So it’s like give and take, is it a copy? Is it not? It’s humbling at the same time. When you have the original piece, you gotta pay up guys. I think they do now.”
Bell used DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince classic “Summertime” as an example. The 1991 cut, taken from the duo’s fourth studio album, Homebase, relied heavily on Kool & the Gang’s 1974 smash “Summer Madness.”
“We did ‘Summer Madness ‘ and Will Smith called it ‘Summertime,’” he said. “He didn’t do too much sampling, he just rapped over the whole song. We got paid though. The No. 1 record, double platinum and he went on to becomes a movie star.”
The celebration continued with a joint Kool & the Gang-A Tribe Called Quest afterparty at the Cleveland House of Blues. Kool DJ Red Alert manned the decks as Blige, Method Man, Chuck D, Q-Tip, Jarobi and many others flooded the venue.
Kool & the Gang was formed in 1964 by Bell and his brother Ronald Bell. The band rose to fame in the 1970s and 1980s with hits that became anthems of the disco and funk eras. Some of their most iconic songs include “Celebration,” “Get Down On It,” “Jungle Boogie,” “Ladies’ Night” and “Cherish.”
Initially a jazz band, Kool & the Gang evolved over the years, incorporating funk and R&B influences that led to massive commercial success. The group has won multiple Grammy Awards and is also a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, although several of the original members are no longer here. Co-founder/drummer George “Funky” Brown died of lung cancer in November 2023, Ronald Bell passed in 2020 and saxophonist Dennis “D.T.” Thomas died the following year.
All photos by Kyle Eustice
