The Funk AestheticWhen I was forced to think about Funk as a freestanding aesthetic -- not just the stylistic counterpart to the music, I didn’t exactly draw a blank, I just knew there had to be more to it than big afros and platform shoes – some central idea or set of ideas that comes together in that long particularly fertile decade of Black pop music (1968-1979), an idea that anchors and structures the music and extends beyond the music to give ground to the many attitudes and behaviors that qualify as funky. And it had to be an idea set that was open to multiple interpretations as there as many different definitions of Funk as there are funksters.
Since the term and its meaning first come together under the music, that’s not a bad place to look for clues. Without question James Brown is the sine qua non of Funk music. Sometime around the 1968 single “Cold Sweat” Brown began perfecting a style of interlocking complementary parts that blurred the distinction between rhythm and melody. Small snippets of melody were used to propel the rhythm of the music. Figures played by bass, drums, and rhythm guitar dominated the melodic contour of this radical post-soul music. Even Brown’s approach to lyrics fused rhythm and melody – his songs cannot be sung correctly without including the screams, shouts, and grunts that punctuated the words and brought them into alignment with the busy complexity of the music.
After Brown’s death in 2006, bassist Bootsy Collins is left standing as perhaps the funkiest man alive. Following a brief apprenticeship with the Godfather, Bootsy became one of the founding musical architects of Parliament-Funkadelic – the quintessential Funk band of the era. Bootsy’s contribution to the music is less compositional than timbral. Like Brown, his revolution was effectively a reversal of figure and ground. Bootsy reconstructed the electric bass guitar as a lead instrument and augmented the sound of his star-shaped bass with a novel battery of effects and processors. Thus the familiar thuddy syncopated bottom of the four-stringed bass in traditional r&b or rock was transformed into the wet, throaty, frothy, erotic slur of what Collins significantly called his “space bass”.
Brown’s stamp on pop music on both sides of both oceans is beyond quantification. He’s the most sampled musician of all time and damn near anything you hear with a beat in it can be traced back to him. Collins was also influential, but apparently beyond reach instrumentally. While today you can go into your local musician’s shop and buy an envelope filter that will give your bass a little of that Bootsy feel, there has been no one since Mr. William Collins who has opened up the interior of this instrument in the way that he did. In other words, if Bootsy were Jimi Hendrix, we would still be waiting for his Stevie Ray Vaughn. Dig?
So what have we got? What lessons can be drawn from Bootsy and Brown about the criteria for a Funk Aesthetic? Both of these artists exemplified a clear break from the pack, an extraordinary reach towards self-definition and self-determination. So let’s prioritize autonomy and originality. The reversal of figure and ground is another key characteristic. The insistence that we communicate with information that we’ve been conditioned to relegate to a supporting role is another key ingredient of the glue that holds Funk together. Just as it is important to count Bootsy’s “space bass” as an expression of Afrofuturism, it must be remembered that the center of Brown’s radical music never really moved far from the tarpaper shack in rural Barnwell county, S.C. where he was born or the brothel in Augusta, Ga. run by his Aunt Honey where he grew up. There is in Funk an accommodation between the cosmopolitan and country experiences of African-Americans, a sense in which being funky is simultaneously bama and urbane. Funk coalesced as an aesthetic in the wake of a deferred Black Revolution and the concession that the only thing within our power to overthrow was the conventionality of Black style that had taken us from reconstruction right through the civil rights era, had driven the Temptations into their psychedelic shack, and had united those of us who were of age into One Funky Nation Under a Groove. Today Funk’s aesthetic has been appropriated by the hip hop generation with their own additions and interpretations. One thing is certain, in the words of George Clinton: “Funk is forever coming, it ain’t going nowhere.”
Suggested Reading:
The Funktionary
Dr. Various P. Blynd. Full Court Press, 2003.
George Clinton and P-Funk: An Oral History
David Mills, Larry Alexander, Thomas Stanley with Aris Wilson, edited by Dave Marsh. Avon Books, 1998.
Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience
Greg Tate. Lawrence Hill Books, 2003.
Rip it Up: The Black Experience in Rock N Roll
Kandia Crazy Horse. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Funk: The Music, The People, and The Rhythm of The One
Ricky Vincent with George Clinton. St. Martin's Griffin, 1996.