Commodores' William King: ‘Hip-Hop Wasn't Music-It Was Just Loud'
William King has a blunt verdict on hip-hop’s arrival: “It wasn’t music… It was just loud.” The problem, for a generation of musicians who had spent years honing their craft, was simple: it lacked musicianship. “I think every band felt that way,” the Commodores co-founder told producer Mark Joseph in a new interview. “What were these guys doing?”
The arrival of hip-hop in the early 1980s opened a genuine fault line in American music. Established R&B, funk and soul acts, built on live instrumentation and vocal craft, suddenly found themselves displaced by drum machines, samplers and turntables.
Where a band like the Commodores had built their sound on years of playing together-horns, guitars, keyboards, live vocals-hip-hop’s pioneers built theirs on breakbeats and the spoken word. It was a radical departure, and for a generation of working musicians, an unsettling one.
King was candid, though, about what critics of the genre missed. “I think what we all didn’t understand was it was something that was coming from these guys truly how they felt, because they were coming from a very desolate and poor area of town, from the streets. Everybody could feel it. It was taken over. And it wasn’t a fad.”
King says the band eventually tried to adapt. “We had the thought of intermingling [hip-hop] in our music a little bit,” he said. “But in the end, we tried to write a couple of things, if I remember correctly, but none of us was satisfied with it.”
‘Brick House’ Almost Didn't Make the Album
One of Motown's biggest-selling acts, the Commodores have shifted more than 70 million albums and scored seven No. 1 hits. The band came together almost by accident-King, Lionel Richie and Thomas McClary meeting in a rec room at Tuskegee Institute, Alabama, in 1968. Even the name was random. Tasked with picking it from a dictionary, King put his finger down blind. “It was Commodore. And everybody said, ‘Commodore? What the hell is a Commodore?'” They stuck with it, adding an “s.”
King also revealed that “Brick House,” one of the most recognizable songs in American music, almost didn’t make the album at all. “That song almost didn’t come out-it was the last song we put on the album. We needed one more song, so we just rushed and did that track.”
Drummer Walter “Clyde” Orange recorded the vocal alone in the studio while the rest of the band was working in another room. “When we came out of that session, he said, ‘Come here, I want y’all to hear something.’ As soon as we heard it, we said, ‘Yeah, we’re going with that song. Wow.'”
Why Lionel Richie Left the Commodores
The band's biggest internal turning point came at the start of the next decade. Lionel Richie's 1982 departure, King says, was orchestrated by Motown. “It's undoubtedly Motown that was pushing him in that direction…They know they can make more money because now they've got the group making money for them, and they've got a solo artist out of it.”
The band survived it, scoring a Grammy with 1985’s “Night Shift.”
King, now working on a new Commodores album, says the group’s concerts are drawing a new generation of fans. “We’re getting a lot of young people down at our concerts now…and, you know, I am so happy about that,” he said.
“The number one theme behind it all is, ‘My mom, or my dad, plays your music in the house all the time. So I got to learn certain songs.' It is absolutely amazing….We’re working on generation after generation.”
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This story was originally published June 19, 2026 at 3:31 AM.