KC and the Sunshine Band

There are songs that are happiness in a bottle, and in the seventies nobody manufactured them like KC and the Sunshine Band. "That's the Way (I Like It)", "Get Down Tonight", "Shake Your Booty", "Boogie Shoes": just let any of those play and a dance floor fills up by itself, whatever the age or the decade. They are songs with no aim beyond making you move, and in that apparent simplicity there is an enormous art. Manufacturing pure joy, in series, joy that still works fifty years later, is far harder than it looks. They did it better than almost anyone.

The Miami sound

The heart of the band was Harry Wayne Casey, "KC", a young man who started out working at a Miami record label and ended up defining the sound of a whole city. That hot groove, with horns, with Latin rhythm and funk mixed together, with the southern sun inside it, was the Miami sound turned into dance pop. KC and his partner Richard Finch wrote and produced those rhythm machines with a watchmaker's precision disguised as a party.

And they strung together a run of number ones that few bands of their era matched: hit after hit after hit, all at the top of the charts, all made for the same thing, dancing. At the height of the disco boom, KC and the Sunshine Band were not following the fashion: to a large extent, they were inventing it.

What people were dancing without noticing

And there is something that usually goes unnoticed and that makes them bigger. In the American South of the seventies, with the wounds of racism still open and raw, KC and the Sunshine Band were an interracial band: black and white musicians playing together, on a stage, getting a country dancing that in many places still resisted mixing.

They did not preach it with speeches; they did it with music. Every time a mixed audience filled a floor to dance to "Get Down Tonight", that band was erasing, in practice, a line that still existed outside. Joy, when it is genuinely for everyone, has something of a political act about it without meaning to. They got people dancing together whom the world outside preferred kept apart.

What to remember

KC and the Sunshine Band were one of the most effective joy machines in the history of pop: a run of number ones made for one thing only, making people dance, with the hot sound of Miami inside them. They were also an interracial band in a South that still resisted being one, uniting dance floors that the world wanted divided.

Remember it this way: manufacturing happiness that still works half a century later is neither easy nor minor. Every time "That's the Way (I Like It)" plays and everyone gets up to dance without thinking about it, there is the proof. That was their greatness: joy, made so well that it never expires.

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Sources

KC and the Sunshine Band, American disco and funk band formed in Miami, Florida, in 1973, led by Harry Wayne "KC" Casey alongside Richard Finch, in the orbit of the TK Records label. They were one of the most successful bands of the disco era, with several number ones on the American Billboard Hot 100, among them "Get Down Tonight", "That's the Way (I Like It)", "(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty" and "I'm Your Boogie Man", as well as other hits such as "Boogie Shoes" and "Keep It Comin' Love". The band, interracial in its line-up, was one of the representatives of the so-called "Miami sound". It has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Profile compiled for Rebobinados with fact-checking; interpretations of the meaning of the work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia, SoulTracks, Encyclopedia.com, Hollywood Walk of Fame and other coverage.