Living Colour was a powerful, uncompromising rock band formed in New York in 1983 by guitar virtuoso Vernon Reid (a co-founder of New York City's Black Rock Coalition and former guitarist for Ronald Shannon Jackson's Decoding Society). Their first demo, "Glamour Boys" and "Which Way To America," was funded and produced by Mick Jagger who came upon them one night at CBGB's.

Not unlike Led Zeppelin, Living Colour seemed to live to break down and reassemble the conventional structures of rock and roll, incorporating all that had come before in the rock idiom, mixing it up with both funk and jazz, and welding it into a metallic and widely energetic stew of harmonically complex music, often delivered with an equally intelligent and powerful political message.