Lionel Richie doesn’t care if you think his music is cheesy, said Ed Potton in the London Times. “I’m not hip,” he says with a shrug. “I discovered what hip represents: It means now. If you had the No. 1 record in 1975, in 1978 they didn’t know you anymore.” So why are his schmaltzy ballads, like 1984’s “Hello,” still popular? “I’ve found the corniest subject that’ll never go out of style,” says Richie, 62. “The corniest words on the planet: ‘I love you, I want you, I need you.’ I don’t care whether you’re Al Capone or the Wall Street Killer, sooner or later you’re gonna fix your mouth and say, ‘I love you’ to somebody.” That one-size-fits-all sentiment has made Richie a global superstar—he’s famously huge in the Middle East—and won him some powerful fans. When Nelson Mandela traveled to the U.S. soon after his release from a South African jail in 1990, he hired Richie as his wardrobe adviser. “I got a call from one of Mandela’s people saying, ‘We need 10 of these, five of these,’” he says. “Afterwards, Mandela came over and said, ‘Young man, I want to thank you, your songs got me through many years of jail.’ I just cried. I’m crying now just thinking about it.”
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