How Living Colour Created ‘Cult of Personality’ in Two Hours: Exclusive Interview

Living Colour's "Cult of Personality" made a big impression when it arrived at rock radio and MTV midway through the summer of 1988.

To this day, the Brooklyn-bred band still performs the song with an intensity that easily carries music fans back to the moment they first heard it. "Cult of Personality" was the second single from the group's debut album, Vivid, which had been released that May.

It gave the band their first Top 40 hit, rising all of the way to No. 13. "Cult" also snared a Grammy Award for the Best Hard Rock Performance and the music video for the track picked up two Moonman trophies at the MTV Video Music Awards for Best Group Video and also, Best New Artist.

How 'Cult of Personality' Was Born

Frontman Corey Glover says now that it was apparent very early on they had landed on something special with "Cult of Personality."

"We had a rehearsal space in Brooklyn that we frequented four to five days a week for five or six hours," he tells UCR. "This groove came up and then the riff came up. Vernon [Reid] had these lyrics and in the space of, I'd like to say, about two hours, we came up with what essentially is the song."

"We had a gig at CBGBs that weekend [and] we played it that weekend [for the first time]," he remembers. "We got a really good response out of it. It was like, 'Yeah, I think we got something here. I think we caught something here.' You know, there was nothing like walking out of rehearsal, trying to catch the bus back home and you're humming this tune to yourself, like you caught something."

Music was something that the members of Living Colour took very seriously early on and that translated also to the tone of the songs they were writing.

"For me, music is not just something I do just to pay the bills. It’s something I live," Glover confirmed during a 2015 interview with this author. "You know, I write about the things that I live and how I live."

"We all write about the things we observe and not in a therapeutic way, but in a way to give voice to something that would not normally get that kind of treatment," he explained. "You don’t hear about the plight of gentrification very often in songs, you know, unless you’re doing a protest song. And we don’t write protest songs -- we write songs about the lives we’ve lived and the places we see and the people that we know."

Watch Living Colour Perform 'Cult of Personality' With Steve Vai at Rock in Rio

What is Living Colour Doing Now?

They're continuing to play live and work on music together. An eventual follow-up album to 2017's Shade is in the planning stages. The band will also perform at this year's Rocklahoma in September as the festival celebrates its 20th anniversary. They'll subsequently appear at Shinedown's inaugural Lunatic Ball Beach Weekend in October.

Reid released a new solo album, Hoodoo Telemetry in October 2025 and Glover himself has been quite busy as well.

The singer put out an album with Sonic Universe, his all-star collaboration that also features Mike Orlando of Adrenaline Mob. It Is What It Is was released in May 2024 and there are rumblings that they might work on further music together.

Glover toured earlier this year with Soul Asylum, performing a mix of covers by the Beatles, Bill Withers, Prince and others. He's also been indulging his love for soul and R&B music, with Corey Glover's Soul Experience, a potent ensemble that replicates the music from different eras with ease, delivering a diverse set of material.

"There's so much music out there, you know? My idea about the Soul Experience was basically based on, you know, road trips with my folks and listening to the AM radio," he explains. "What kind of music were you gonna hear rolling through Dover or what were you gonna hear in Detroit that you weren't gonna hear when you got to Ohio? A lot of stuff from the Soul Experience, in particular, are those kind of songs."

"It's all that stuff that was on the radio [when it was] me sitting between my brother and my sister in the back seat, listening to my father's 8-track of a Bill Withers album. Just hearing all the stuff running through my head, it sort of informed all the stuff that I do. I figured I'd try to pay some homage to that as best I could."

Watch Corey Glover Perform With the Soul Experience

Listen to Corey Glover's New Black Sabbath Cover With One Tribe Nation

Something else that the vocalist has been really enthused about is the work he's been doing with One Tribe Nation, a Southern California collective led by guitarist and musical director Michael Sanders.

Glover joined forces with the band, who performed an incendiary version of "The Wizard" by Black Sabbath earlier this year at a special tribute to the late Ozzy Osbourne, which happened at JAMM Night at the annual NAMM convention.

"I'm a massive Tony Iommi fan --  and Black Sabbath, obviously," Sanders tells UCR. "But as a guitar player, Tony is my favorite guitar player. "The Wizard" [which comes off of the band's 1970 self-titled debut] was the first Black Sabbath song I had ever heard. When I heard it. I was like eight years old. I think it's kind of like the gateway drug to everything else. I just knew that I loved it and I'd never heard anything quite like it, and I've never heard a harmonica sound so sinister."

READ MORE: Black Sabbath's Debut: A Track-by-Track Guide to Metal's Birth

"This is something I've loved all my life. You know that's what it feels like," Glover adds. "You hear this song on the radio. You hear the song [and later], it comes up on shuffle or whatever and it's like, 'Oh yeah, I like that song.' One time I was in New Orleans, I had a chance to do it, and I screwed it up. So this was my chance to really sort of redeem myself."

Watch Corey Glover and One Tribe Nation Perform 'The Wizard'

Watching the above performance, it's safe to say that Glover was able to redeem himself with One Tribe Nation's performance of "The Wizard" at NAMM -- and he's got a lot of appreciation for the charismatic personality that Osbourne brought into his vocals.

"Ozzy s a very interesting vocalist because he speaks the way he sings and you have to think about that when you're doing the song," he explains. "Often it's a conversation he's having about something he's seen or heard or whatever and you have to approach it like that."

One Tribe Nation and Glover are planning to release an album later this year tentatively titled Estado Dorado. They hope to also be on the road and doing shows. "We're just in the works of trying to get it all planned out right now," Sanders says. "We'll keep you posted."

Corey Glover and One Tribe Nation