Living Colour, ‘Vivid’ (1988)

By King Kenney

Released in 1988, Vivid arrived as a declaration. On a purely musical level, the album is restless and exacting, combustible in its execution. Hard rock, metal, funk, punk, and jazz converge here out of necessity. What Living Colour achieves is the continuation of groundwork laid decades earlier by artists who were rarely afforded the same institutional visibility. The lineage of Funkadelic looms large, particularly the guitar language Eddie Hazel helped define, where gospel, psychedelia, blues, and distortion collapsed into something both cosmic and confrontational. That vocabulary, once treated as an outlier, finds renewed articulation in Vernon Reid’s work on Vivid.

Reid’s guitar operates with discipline and abandon, informed by theory yet resistant to containment. His playing acknowledges Hazel’s emotional maximalism and extends it through jazz fusion’s angularity and the severity of metal, shaped further by the intellectual rigor of downtown New York improvisation.

This does not read as homage. It reads as inheritance, sharpened by context.

Corey Glover’s vocals move from melody into invocation and then press outward, recalling the church and the street without performance or excess. The rhythm section remains elastic and forceful, grounding the record while leaving room for volatility. The album’s technical achievements are unmistakable, but they never become ornamental. Sound remains in service of expression.

Virtuosity alone does not account for the album’s endurance.

The conditions into which Vivid emerged were already settled in contradiction. Rock music carried Black origins while increasingly presenting itself through narrow institutional and visual codes. Certain genres welcomed Black musicians readily, while others demanded negotiation. Living Colour did not soften their presence to meet those expectations. The album proceeds with an assumption of belonging. Lineage and authorship register through confidence rather than appeal.

That confidence shapes the album’s lyrical terrain. “Cult of Personality,” often reduced to its riff and commercial afterlife, unfolds as a tightly constructed meditation on charisma, power, and political mythmaking. The song implicates the listener without simplification. “Open Letter (To a Landlord)” abandons abstraction altogether, confronting housing injustice with a directness that still unsettles. “Funny Vibe” renders racial stereotyping through lived encounter, refusing allegory or detachment. Across the record, critique is sustained rather than signaled.

Time has done little to soften the album’s relevance. Vivid now feels unresolved rather than preserved. Its questions around representation, authority, and American identity remain active, perhaps more so than when first posed. The record understands music as a space where embodiment and thought coexist, where sound carries argument without collapsing into instruction.

Over time, Vivid reveals itself less as a document of a moment than as a text that continues to operate. Its concerns surface through force rather than declaration. Issues of visibility, narrative control, and authority circulate throughout the album, carried by music that remains physical and immediate. Feeling and rigor are not set against one another here. They function together.

More than three decades on, I am still listening.