Do we like Lionel Richie?
Our score: 8 out of 10. A long, steady career with a record of public kindness and no harmful words or acts found, held back only by a thin charity record and a couple of minor stumbles.
Lionel Richie grew up across the road from Tuskegee University in Alabama, in a strict, religious household. His grandmother was a choir director who pushed him towards the piano, and an uncle handed him his first saxophone. He went to Tuskegee on a tennis scholarship and finished an economics degree in 1974.
At Tuskegee he joined the group that became the Commodores, and he turned out to be the one writing the love ballads. “Three Times a Lady” and “Still” topped the charts, and he wrote “Lady” for Kenny Rogers. He left the group in 1982 for a solo career that gave the world “Truly”, “Hello” and “All Night Long”.
The big mark on his career is the music, not a scandal. He won an Oscar for “Say You, Say Me”, co-wrote “We Are the World” with Michael Jackson, and picked up the Kennedy Center Honors in 2017 and the Gershwin Prize in 2022. The Librarian of Congress said his work showed that music can bring us together.
On the harm test he comes up clean. No remarks about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or public health turned up in our searches, and in October 2020 he joined other stars backing GLAAD's Spirit Day to show solidarity with LGBTQ youth. The search turned up no pattern of working with people who push harm, but it's fair to say the record on politics is thin.
The stains are small. In 2012 the IRS filed a tax lien against him, and his publicist said he had been made aware by his new team and it was being handled. Then there's the August 2026 Phoenix show, where he joked that Usher and Chris Brown were claiming a new idea and that his generation “didn't go to jail”.
That Phoenix line landed as a bit of old-timer needling. He also called himself and his peers “fine Christian men”, and Brown answered the clip on Instagram with laughing emojis and “damn unk. We love ya paw paw”. It reads as a ribbing between artists rather than anything nasty, though a joke about jail is the sort of thing you can fairly roll your eyes at.