A few months before the members of Kool & The Gang started working on 1979’s Ladies’ Night, they played at a record store to promote their 1978 album, Everybody’s Dancin’. Nobody showed up, and the band was humiliated. Saxophone player and songwriter Ronald Bell remembers a teenage girl who happened to be in the store telling him something they all vaguely sensed, but didn’t want to acknowledge head-on: Yeah, they’d had some big songs—“Jungle Boogie,” “Hollywood Swinging,” “Higher Plane,” “Funky Stuff”—but now they were washed up. Bell took it as a wake-up call: The next time they headed into the studio, they were going to make something pop. Ladies’ Night smoothed out the band’s funk edges and integrated an overtly commercial approach to Kool & The Gang’s songwriting: While the members could still give their instruments a workout, there also had to be verses and choruses, as well as a vocalist—J.T. Taylor—to sing them (all of this was enforced by a new producer, Eumir Deodato, who kept an eye on the album’s creative bottom line). At the time, disco had already experienced its first cultural backlash, mostly by embittered rock fans who thought the music was trite, overproduced, and politically escapist. (The latter seems reasonable. Still, the fact that disco was also largely Black and embraced by the gay community may also have had something to do with the complaint.) But even with that resistance, the disco sound was still performing commercially, and—thanks to upstarts like Chic and established stars like Diana Ross and Michael Jackson—evolving artistically, too. Ladies’ Night struck a highly calculated balance: It was poppier and less hypnotic than Chic, but Blacker than the Bee Gees. Kool & The Gang managed to bend traditional R&B songwriting around the beat of disco (“Too Hot”), while retaining the communal vibe of its days as a funk band (“Hangin’ Out,” “Ladies’ Night”). Bell later said they tried to write their songs like nursery rhymes: You hear them once, but remember them forever.