Commodores

Commodores evoke parties in the garage and ballads that stick to the radio. Their blend of funk and soul has a groove that beats in your bones: guitar riffs cut like knives over dragging basslines, while the vocals alternate between intimate whispers and collective shouts. It's not just dance music; it's the kind of sound that makes even the air move. In their most famous tracks, like Easy or Brick House, Milan Williams' bass and Walter "Clyde" Orange's drums are the engine that never fails, while Lionel Richie and Orange share the mic like kids playing tag in a schoolyard.

Everything started on the campus of Tuskegee University, where in 1968 a group of students —some from bands like the Mystics and the Jays— came together to play at fraternities and at the Black Forest Inn, a local spot where beer flowed faster than sweat. Benny Ashburn, their first manager, took them to festivals and even to the parking lot of a lodge in Martha’s Vineyard, testing their luck with audiences who didn’t always know what they were hearing. But in 1972, they signed with Motown, and everything changed: they went from a cover band to a phenomenon that opened for the Jackson 5. Their first major hit came with Machine Gun in 1974, an instrumental track that blared in stadiums and movies like Boogie Nights, though it only reached #22 on the Billboard Hot 100. The irony is that the same funk energy that defined them early on —like in I Feel Sanctified— later inspired other bands years down the line.