Funk. The early sixties to the early seventies.

CONCEPT

I won't go into the "master plan" updates just yet... I'll be ready to do that in a week, and if I do so now not only will I be somewhat disorganized about it, but it would be a very long ramble. Suffice it to say that there are a number of kinds of music I want to familiarize myself with for artistic, political, and yes, personal reasons, and I finally realized if I wasn't systematic about it, I would miss out on a lot. So for the last month I've been listening to a lot of Funk.

At first I was going to write about each and every thing I listened to. But I ran up against three barriers:

1. While I get some thirty-odd hours of listening in each week at Facts-on-File, my concentration is patchy, and I lack the formal understanding necessary to make nuanced points.


2. It takes a long time to write about music in an intelligible way.


3. People do not seem particularly interested in these posts.

At the same time, a lot of effort has gone into this, and I feel like I have acquired a better understanding of some things; so I'm going to try to consider them as a group and talk about them here.

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Over the last month, I've listened to seven artists, five of whom were considered to be "founders" or Funk and two generally considered to be significant influences. I was looking almost exclusively at the trends that influenced the style, meaning that almost everything was from the early sixties through the early seventies (no P-Funk or Curtis Mayfield yet), and in many-cases, it was more along the lines of funk-inflected soul, that is, soul music with complex rhythmic variation and a heavy emphasis on bass, etc.

All that said, here's who and what I've listened to:

• James Brown:


1. 20 All-Time Greatest Hits


2. Live at the Apollo, 1963


3. Foundations of Funk: A Brand New Bag (2 disks)


4. Sex Machine


• Charles Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band:


1. Express Yourself: The Best of Charles Wright and the Watts


• Dyke and the Blazers:


1. Funky Broadway: The Best of Dyke and the Blazers


• The Meters:


1. Funkify Your Life: The Meters Anthology (2 disks)


• The Isley Brothers:


1. It's Your Thing: The Story of the Isley Brothers (3 disks)


• Sly and the Family Stone:


1. Sly and the Family Stone Greatest Hits


2. There's a Riot Goin' On


• Jimi Hendrix:


1. Are You Experienced?


2. Axis: Bold as Love


3. Electric Ladyland


4. Live at Woodstock

Clearly one month is not enough time to "master" even one of these very prolific musicians; by "master" I guess I mean a level of familiarity and comfort that would allow me to speak with confidence and without reservation, despite my limited musical vocabulary (say, as with the Pumpkins). Anyway, I spent a disproportionate amount of time on James Brown, which was probably necessary and worthwhile, and also Jimi Hendrix, which I regret... not because he isn't deserving of the attention, but because he's first-and-foremost a rock musician (with Blues roots), and if my goal is to learn about Funk, then I should have given this time to the others.

As such, I was kind of limited in my approach to the rest, and I feel like I really missed out in particular on the Isley Brothers and Dyke and the Blazers. Still, I listened to them all and caught a few common threads.

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1.

Formal descriptions of funk typically point out its somewhat anomalous, involuted, unconventional form... Its contributions were much longer lasting than its actual "moment," but there are few "hard and fast" rules one can apply to funk music. That said, what's described as a rhythmic vs. melodic emphasis, in most of these cases, seemed to break down to several technical variations on earlier soul. Most notably, the expression, the guitar was played like a bass and the bass was played like a guitar.

At first I didn't know what this meant. I now think it has to do with another quality, usually presented as distinct, which is an emphasis on ramps or riffs. That is, when the guitar is repeating a rhythmically complex riff, over and over, throughout a whole song, it has that string percussion thing going for it. This is basslike. It's lighter sounding than a bass, however, so the texture of the sound is different.

Similarly, while the bass is as constrained to a rhythmic effect as ever, because the rhythm itself is more complex and nuanced, it gives the bass a more varied and distinct place in the composition. This is guitarlike. It's heavier sounding than a guitar, however, so again, the texture of the sound is different.

2.

More, however, then the two instruments swapping their roles, however, I think an important effect of this is that it brings the instruments together.

And (as the Pomo discussion will presumably engage sometime later this summer) this may be a postmodern moment for music. That is, if the rhythm of a song comprises its "structure"; its theoretical and musical bounds, its peaks and crests, what is allowed to happen when and in succession to what, and if the melody of a song comprises its "content"; its atmospheric signature and its degrees of variation, then instrumental and compositional choices that bring the rhythm and the melody together have the effect of blurring form and content. It involves each in the production of the other, diminishes the importance and determinability of causality and distinctive elements in the music, and essentially gives rise to the same issues that postmodernist theory was uncovering in architecture, literature, and so on.

3.

This also has interesting implications as applies to Gothic Funk.
I've remarked to several people that I didn't think "Funk music" in the accepted sense -- a subgenre of soul that peaked in the seventies -- was actually the most applicable to "gothic funk." Funk in the latter case is intended to draw upon a three-hundred year history of the word, of which the music is one of the more recent interpretations. That said, the two do have a relationship, and it also comes to bear in another conversation in which I had mentioned that I thought popular music had turned the corner from postmodernism sooner and more effectively than other areas of the arts (this may be a great example of architecture leading the second wave, not the first).

In this sense: If funk enables through its collusion of rhythm and melody (in ways that other forms of music enabled through other means) a blurring of form and content, and a subsequent ambiguity; a haunting, problematic ambiguity that corresponded both explicitly and implicitly to social turmoil and political frustrations, and if the music that followed during the eighties and nineties drew upon funk's tradition in terms of hip hop (or drew upon punk, metal, and new wave in the form of grunge and "alternative") by extending the recombinative potentials of funk (punk/New Wave/metal) music... and if this was, furthermore, extended in the extreme recombinatory opportunities afforded by electronic music which, despite this, presents itself as an organic, non-disillusioned, undifferentiated whole, is not electronic music specifically suggestive of gothic funk?

This possibility is exciting to me, because it is the first time I have been able to chock up such statements to more than just an impression.

As such, I hope people will correct/amend/adjust/comment upon this.

On another notes...

I really loved this music. Some of it (the James Brown) I already had a familiarity with, and probably would've come to anyway. I can honestly say that There was a Time is maybe one of my new favorite songs ever.

But if I hadn't decided to approach early funk as a project and consulted books on the subject and decided how and where to apply my energies, I might have never heard Charles Wright and the Watts, Dyke and the Blazers, or the Meters. Sly Stone in Riot is a slippery, messy thing with all sorts of buried codes and catchphrases that I'll only begin to get in hook in with another year of listening. Stormy by the Meters is soothing and wonderful, like a carnival closing down for a sleepy night with rain. The Watts, also, while I still don't know the names of many of the songs, they all were catchy and resonant. And most frustratingly, while most of this is "thinking" music (as opposed to, say, most modern R&B I could name) most of it made we want to dance, which is one of the frustrating things about listening at a computer while at work.

I can't think of a single one of these albums I did not like or would not recommend.

I might write more on this. I might not. I guess it depends on the sort of response I get.

Next month: old-school hip hop.

END OF POST.