Celebrate! is the 12th studio album by American band Kool & the Gang. Released on September 29, 1980, the album reached #1 on the US R&B chart and #10 on the Billboard 200. The album produced perhaps Kool & the Gang’s most recognizable hit song, the #1 chart-topper, “Celebration“, which still receives heavy play today over four decades later.
Dennis Hunt of the Los Angeles Times called Celebration “the band’s mostly excellent new album”. Robert Christgau of the Village Voice gave a C- grade saying “It says something for these funk pioneers that unlike James Brown, George Clinton, and the Ohio Players they’ve adapted painlessly, nay profitably, to disco: a #1 single leads their Deodato-produced album into the top 10. What it says is that their funk was as bland as you suspected.” With a 3 out of 5 stars review Amy Hanson of Allmusic found that “Celebrate itself marked the end of an era for Kool & the Gang, as the band would slip even farther from their funk roots and adopted dance grooves into the realms of smooth soul. But what a way to go!”
