Kool & The Gang as One

Rhino has assembled a good collection of commercially popular disco tunes, but the real reason for disco's popularity - the extended mixes that created the backbone of club culture and enabled people to dance for hours - has eluded them. All the tracks featured in this collection are radio edits. Consequently, the listener is faced with a collection of dated ditties rather than hearing the tunes as they were meant to be heard: dancefloor epics that sweep you up.

As soul music moved into the early '70s, it became dominated by smoother sounds and polished productions, picking up its cues from Motown, Chicago soul, and uptown soul. By the beginning of the decade, soul was fracturing in a manner similar to pop/rock, as pop-soul, funk, vocal groups, string-laden Philly soul, and sexy Memphis soul became just a few of the many different subgenres to surface. Often, the productions on these records were much more polished than '60s productions, boasting sound effects, synthesizers, electric keyboards, echoes, horn sections, acoustic guitars, and strings.

Every so often, a piece of music comes along that defines a moment in popular culture history: Johann Strauss' operetta Die Fledermaus did this in Vienna in the 1870s; Jerome Kern's Show Boat did it for Broadway musicals of the 1920s; and the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album served this purpose for the era of psychedelic music in the 1960s. Saturday Night Fever, although hardly as prodigious an artistic achievement as those precursors, was precisely that kind of musical phenomenon for the second half of the '70s – ironically, at the time before its release, the disco boom had seemingly run its course, primarily in Europe, and was confined mostly to black culture and the gay underground in America…

For those looking to find a crash course in "the funk" – a quick introduction to the fusion of R&B, soul, jazz, blues, good old rock & roll, and all-out outrageousness that creates the ultimate good groove – you can't do much better than the Funk Essentials compilations. Funky Stuff: The Best of Funk Essentials is the perfect portrait. With its contents drawn from the single-band Funk Essentials compilation albums, this clean, clear set provides incredible diversity while keeping the vibe connected. In other words, Funky Stuff is not only an introduction to the heaviest of hitters, but also a nifty, smooth ride for the already initiated.

Every so often, a piece of music comes along that defines a moment in popular culture history: Johann Strauss' operetta Die Fledermaus did this in Vienna in the 1870s; Jerome Kern's Show Boat did it for Broadway musicals of the 1920s; and the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album served this purpose for the era of psychedelic music in the 1960s…