Cult of Personality
by Living Colour
- 92
- BPM
- C major
- Key
- 8B
- Camelot
- 51
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
The song began in a Brooklyn loft in 1987, while Living Colour rehearsed. Singer Corey Glover was humming some notes, and guitarist Vernon Reid opened a small notebook where he saved quotes and phrases. He turned to a page on which he had scribbled, "Look in my eyes, what do you see? The cult of personality." The title came from Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 anti-Stalin report on the cult of personality.
The riff turned up at that same rehearsal. Reid tried to repeat Glover's notes on guitar and heard something of Led Zeppelin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra in it. With the music in place, he said, the song quickly took on a life of its own, and by the end of the session the band had written what became its best known song.
"Cult of Personality" opened Vivid, the band's 1988 debut album, and was its second single. It reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 and won the Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance. Recordings of speeches run through it: Malcolm X at the start, John F. Kennedy during a rest in the music, and Franklin D. Roosevelt at the end. Reid said Adolf Hitler was in the lyrics at first and was pulled out of fear the reference would be misread.
Cult of Personality runs at 92 BPM, the tempo of hip-hop, R&B and reggaeton. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.61 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 652 ms. It is in C major, Camelot 8B, which shares its notes with A minor and mixes cleanly with F major and G major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.