Songfacts®:

• One of the later hits for Kool & the Gang, "Misled" is a lot spookier than the typical "girl did me wrong" song. This girl has a real power over the guy, but she herself might not be real. The music video leans into this interpretation. Shot like a horror movie, it finds Kool & the Gang lead singer J.T. Taylor bewitched by a mysterious, ghostly woman who is really good at ballet. His mind plays tricks on him, and he's not sure what's real and what isn't. In the end, his bandmates show up to pull him out of bed and bring him to the show, but there's a twist: they're also ghosts.
• Kool & the Gang shared songwriting credits because they worked up their songs together, but most of them started with concepts or riff their multi-instrumentalist music director Ronald Bell came up with (his brother, Robert "Kool" Bell, is the bass player in the group and their namesake). The music for "Misled" came to him after listening to the Rockwell hit "Somebody's Watching Me," which features vocals from Michael Jackson. Ronald borrowed musical elements from that song, and kept the paranoid, disoriented vibe in the lyrics.
• Kool & the Gang were musical chameleons by this point, cranking out songs in different styles. "Misled" is a rock tune, driven by the guitar. The other big hits from the Emergency album were very different: the smooth R&B number "Fresh" and the soft ballad "Cherish."
  
  The group wasn't always so versatile musically. They started off as a funk band and landed their first hit with the tribal "Jungle Boogie." They didn't have a true lead singer until J.T. Taylor joined in 1979. Their songs stayed funky but got more melodic - we're talking "Ladies Night" and "Celebration." But with "Joanna" in 1983, they opened up to ballads and started covering more of the musical map. It served them well until 1988 when Taylor left the group to go solo. The hits dried up, but Kool & the Gang had such an impressive discography that in 2024 they were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame.