Funk: The Music, The People, and The Rhythm of The One

By Rickey Vincent and George Clinton

Funk: It's the only musical genre ever to have transformed the nation into a throbbing army of bell-bottomed, hoop-earringed, rainbow-Afro'd warriors on the dance floor. Its rhythms and lyrics turned bleak urban realties inside out with distinctive, danceable, downright irresistible music.

Funk hasn't received the critical attention that rock, jazz, and the blues have-until now. Colorful, intelligent, and in-you-face, Rickey Vincent's Funk celebrates the songs, the musicians, the philosophy, and the meaning of funk. The book spans from the early work of James Brown (the Godfather of Funk) through today, covering funky soul (Stevie Wonder, the Temptations), so-called "black rock" (Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone, the Isley Brothers), jazz-funk (Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock), monster funk (Parliament, Funkadelic, Bootsy's Rubber Band), naked funk (Rick James, Gap Band), disco-funk (Chic, K.C. and the Sunshine Band), funky pop (Kook & the Gang, Chaka Khan), P-Funk Hip Hop (Digital Underground, De La Soul), funk-sampling rap (Ice Cube, Dr. Dre), funk rock (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Primus), and more.

Funk tells a vital, vibrant history-the history of a uniquely American music born out of tradition and community, filled with energy, attitude, anger, hope, and an irrepressible spirit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Nov 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9781466884526

Rickey Vincent

Rickey Vincent has written about music for Vibe, Mondo 2000, and elsewhere. An instructor at San Francisco State University, he is known among Bay Area funkateers as the Uhuru Maggot, thanks to his all-funk radio show on KPFA. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and son.

Book preview

Preface: On The One

This book is here for anyone who has heard a kicking rap tune on the radio or in a club and realized that some hook, riff, noise, or chant was taken from some seventies’ funk cut, but you just couldn’t place it. This book is also for those who constantly hear samples of their old school favorites in new songs and realize that if you could, you would track down that original jam and play it for yourself.

This book is for those music lovers who were weaned on the ferocious and funky flavors of Godfather of Soul James Brown, Parliament/Funkadelic, Sly and the Family Stone, Kool & the Gang, Earth, Wind & Fire, and the Ohio Players in the 1970s and would like to know how these great bands went about making this memorable sound. Most of all, this book is for those who knew and loved the funk bands of the seventies and could never understand why they were not granted a place in history as a musical and social movement—until now.

This book is designed to once and for all fill in the blanks about a musical style and sound that spent decades in obscurity because it was considered a spinoff of soul music, yet has been sampled to death, has been tossed around as a silly pop notion, and has become perhaps the most influential sound in American culture today, without ever getting its righteous due.

Television jingles loop funky tracks like Atomic Dog (for the NBC sitcom Frasier) and For the Love of Money (for a popular credit card), while bands for late-night shows like Leno’s and Letterman’s live by the funk jam as they go to commercial breaks. Branford Marsalis, until recently the heir to The Tonight Show band’s staple of jazz and pop standards, was dragged kicking and screaming into the funk age, performing James Brown’s Funky Drummer and Kool & the Gang’s Jungle Boogie nearly every night. Paul Shaffer, bandleader of the number-one late-night talk show, is a cloned funkateer and worships George Clinton, while performing such funk standards as Funkadelic’s Knee Deep, the Average White Band’s Pick Up the Pieces, and Sly Stone’s Thank You (Falletin Me Be Mice Elf Agin). And the former late-night host Arsenio Hall further hyped this move toward The Funk by championing that nasty groove from his band every night.

Much of this new flavor has been spawned from the streetwise impulse of Hip Hop, the godchild of The Funk. With rap records selling in the millions despite a lack of radio airplay, the beats and funky tracks have asserted themselves into every facet of media and entertainment—as theme music, sports highlight reels, movie soundtracks, and, once again, commercials. Yet with the controversies surrounding sex and violence in rap music and the alleged criminal nature of rappers such as Flavor Flav, Tupac, and Snoop Doggy Dogg, hard-core rap carries a deadly stigma. What surfaces into the mainstream are the funky beat tracks, the haunting echo of an inner-city experience, jazzed up and packaged for middle America. Insulated from the grim urban source of the funk groove, Americans can’t get enough of The Funk.

The American mainstream is now comfortable with pop notions of a funky sound that was scoffed at, ridiculed, and even feared a generation ago. The down and dirty sounds of bands like P-Funk, Slave, Bootsy’s Rubber Band, Cameo, and the Bar-Kays were avoided like the plague in the late 1970s, in favor of a more color-blind sound that everyone could dance to. The preposterous hype-dog known as disco music was invented in the 1970s to bring the hot, freaky elements of funk to the well-washed masses in sterilized form. Yet today disco is still a joke, and The Funk has become the musical backdrop to America’s modern moods: aggressive, jazzy, fresh, and delectably nastay.

THOSE FUNKY SEVENTIES

Today, a new generation of music fans looks to the seventies as a Golden Age, in which dance music was played by live performers using real drums, horns were blown by real people, and vocalists impressed audiences with their time-tested soulful inflections, rather than their new body parts. Can it be that there was indeed something essential about the 1970s—that decade after the sixties, the decade of no protests of no leaders, and of integration?

The timing of the seventies’ decade bears close resemblance to other creative periods of black American history. If we look at other epochs that followed radical movements, we find that the storied Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was preceded by a profound black power movement inspired by Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association. A similar surge followed World War II among blacks in America, as the color line was broken in the military, public schools, and sports, and was reflected (and interpreted) by the jazz set, and writers such as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, prompting claims of a Black Renaissance in the 1950s. Could it be possible that in between the 1967 Newark riots (a high point of equal opportunity for blacks) and the Bakke decision in 1977 (a low point) there was actually another cultural renaissance in black America?

What’s clear is that there was something special, something essential about the music of that period, whether it was the attitude, the rhythm, the cadence, the color, or the instruments, it can best be identified as The Funk, and that is what will be explored in this book.

ORIGINS OF THIS BOOK

This book is a result of many years of broadcasting a radio show called The History of Funk on a local college station in Berkeley, California. Long before the onslaught of Hip Hoppers’ sampling of funk oldies, The Uhuru Maggot was pumping an old-school retrospective that asserted the grand intellectual aspects and furious jam factors of The Funk. Through a combination of academic study and interaction with my East Bay funk audience, a clear focus emerged: that The Funk was more than merely a groovy musical flavor, but instead was and is a viable musical movement that has altered the lives of millions of people around the world.

The History of Funk began on radio as an oral history that reflected what seemed like all the homeboys already knew, but was nowhere to be seen in print. As the history of each band was reiterated in special retrospectives and theme shows like the Tenth Anniversary of the Landing of the Mothership and the James Brown Payback Marathon, it became clear that the memory banks of the soul brothas and sistas were intact and that the community became the ultimate authority of the music. This book is a retelling of many Tales of the Funky that occurred over years of radio jamming, interviewing, and vibing with listeners, performers, and guests.

To back up this oral history, I developed the idea into a semi-scholarly treatise for Professor Roy Thomas at UC Berkeley in 1987. He returned my enthusiasm for the project and pushed me ever forward. Yet I found few academic outlets for such a ridiculous proposition. What professor in their right mind would agree that George Clinton, the Ohio Players, and Kool & the Gang deserved scholarly attention in Afro-American Studies? After my undergraduate years at Cal, I moved on to the Master’s program in Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. There, on my first day, I spoke of uniting politics with culture through the history of funk in a black studies class, and the instructor, Oba T’Shaka, understood and directed my vision from that first day. His vision of black essence was mine at that point and the book was then all but written. Within two years, the Master’s thesis The History of Funk: Funk as a Paradigm of Black Consciousness was submitted and approved, and it served as the basis for Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of The One.

PROPS

This book required the help of many people from far walks of life. First and foremost, the musicians and artists who produced the music deserve their props, and hopefully this book does them justice. As constant inspiration were the many funkateers that I have associated with over the years, beginning with my brother, Teo Barry Vincent, who brought home a 45 of Parliament’s Up for the Down Stroke in 1974, and changed my life forever. Also, all of the Berkeley Funk Fans who knew The Bomb when they heard it, and didn’t waste their time with pop notions.

My KALX radio work has served as a beacon for all those twisted enough to step through and provide their own particular flavor to this funk mission: Marlon Dr. Illinstine Kemp, Anthony Dave-Id K-OS Bryant, Ashem The Funky Man Neru-Mesit, Greg Shock G Jacobs, Jimi Chopmaster J Dright, David The Cosmic Rooster Organ, Yvonne The L.A. Playgirl Smith, Anca Princess P Bujes, Darryl Liquid McCane, Gary The G Spot Baca, Billy Billy Jam Kiernan, and William Last Will Smith. Props must also go to those occasional contributors whom I know only by their funk handles: Neon Leon, Sir Noise, Puppy Breath, Poochie, Daddy Dog, Dr. Watt, Big Dave DDP (Double Dose of P), Satellite, Zoot-Zilla, The Subliminal Seducer, and Sam The Conceptual Nuisance Cooper. Other funkateers who gave their wizened maggot-brained advice include Sir Lleb of Funkadelia himself, Pedro Bell, Joe Keyes, Mark Mr. P Stewart, Jon Carvallo, Calvin Lincoln, and Tim Kinley.

Many other friends and allies within radio gave their time and love when it was needed: Jeff DJ Zen Chang, Dave Davey D Cook, Clay Ordona, Michael Too Dread Finnie, Jonathan Wafer, Michael Berry, Heather Parish, Tamu Du Ewa, Carol Baker; and, from KPFA, Bari Scott, Walter Turner, Peja Peja, Chuy Varela, Jim Bennett, and Michelle Flannery. A special thanks to all of the other creative radio personalities at KALX who shared their insights, information, energies, and attitudes with me over the years. A special no-thanks to the White Noise Supremacists who tried their best to squelch all of the African-Rooted Music at KALX. Have a Nice Day. You will be judged by a Higher Order.

Nothing would have happened with this project without the conceptual support from my well-grounded homies, Chris Williams, Kevin Foster, De Angelo D Mo Chill Stearnes, Doug Briscoe, Jonathan Seale, Lawrence Komo, Skay Davidson, Stefi Barna, Margot Pepper, and the indubitable Patrick Sledhicket Norwood.

Props to the editorial staff at Berkeley’s Daily Californian from 1986 to 1991, which supported and tolerated my fonkey attitude; as well as Danyel Smith and Ann Powers for taking my writing seriously at the SF Weekly; the editors at Mondo 2000 for laying out my articles with exotic flare, and Ben Mapp at Vibe for taking in my whole rap; Todd and Jeff at URB for giving me the juice when I needed it; and David McLees at Rhino Records for everything. Thanks to David Mills and Uncut Funk for doing what was needed for The Funk.

Industry professionals and associates that have given generous advice and expertise include Harry Weinger, Sharon Davis, Charles Blass, Tony Greene, Sarath Fernando, Jr., David Henderson, Jason Chervokas, Pete Weatherbee, Brian Cross, Cleveland Brown, Tom Vickers, Robert Middleman, Greg Tate, David Kapralik, John Morthland, Sarah Brown, Arnie Passman, Ethan Byxbe, Jimmy Douglass, Bill Murphy at Axiom, Aris The Air Child Wilson, Jack Jack The Rapper Gibson, Alan Leeds, Lee Hildebrand, and Ishmael Reed.

An extra special thanks to the musicians Fred Wesley, Bootsy Collins, George Clinton, James Brown, Roger Troutman, Jerome Brailey, Billy Nelson, Curtis Mayfield, Marshall Jones, James Diamond Williams, Nathan Leftenant, Larry Dotson, James Alexander, Stevie Washington, Alan Gorrie, Greg Errico, Benny Latimore, Rudy Ray Moore, Gary Mudd Bone Cooper, George Porter, Greg Shock G Jacobs, Afrikka Bambaataa, Claude Paradise Gray, Chuck D, and Dewayne Wiggins for the extra time they spent on the phone with me. Special props to Gary The G-Spot Baca of KPFA for access to his vast interview archives of old-school musicians.

Academic support has been in my corner since 1978 from Professor Roy Thomas of UC Berkeley, the only person I have ever seen teach soul in a classroom. He was the first to open my eyes to the possibility of this project. Thanks to Music Professor Olly Wilson, who always kept me to rigorous task, for all the right reasons. Also, thanks to Oba T’Shaka, chair of Black Studies at San Francisco State University, a man with the most all-encompassing and undiluted vision for his people that I have ever seen. Thanks also to Professor Jose Dr. Loco Cuellar, Chair of La Raza Studies, and the entire Ethnic Studies Department at San Francisco State University. You got it goin’ on.

To the many good friends and family that gave me the lane and passed the ball when I was open for this shot, thanks for believing.

Thanks to my mother, Toni, for your wisdom, clarity, love, and support for me and this project. To my father, Ted Vincent; our many far-reaching conversations and detailed editing have developed into so many articles, columns, and now music books for both of us.

Thanks to my editor, Marian Lizzi; and special thanks to Archie Ivy, and Stephanie and George Clinton, who came through with the intro, like the cavalry coming over the hump.

Extra special thanks to my wife, secretary, editor, life, and love, Tess, and our little one, Frederick Marcus.

This book is in memory of my grandmother, Eugenia Goff Hickman (1901–1995), who was always wise enough to judge, and loving enough not to pass judgment; and Charles Natty Prep Douglass. A great man who did much more than just give me my first break on radio. He was the embodiment of beliefs turned into action. He elevated us all.

PART 1

Introduction to Funk: The Bomb

ONE

Introduction to Funk: The Bomb

"If you got funk, you got class,

you’re out on the floor movin’ your ass."

Funkadelic

WHAT IS FUNK?

Funk is a many splendored thing. Funk is a nasty vibe, and a sweet sexy feeling; Funk is funkiness, a natural release of the essence within. Funk is a high, but it is also down at the bottom, the low-down earthy essence, the bass elements. Funk is at the extremes of everything. Funk is hot, but funk can be cool. Funk is primitive, yet funk can be sophisticated. Funk is a way out, and a way in. Funk is all over the place. Funk is a means of release that cannot be denied.… Village Voice writer Barry Walters explained The Funk as well as anyone could: "Trying to put that thang called funk into words is like trying to write down your orgasm. Both thrive in that gap in time when words fall away, leaving nothing but sensation."

Funk is impossible to completely describe in words, yet we know the funk vibe when we see it. Funk is that low-down dirty dog feeling that pops up when a baad funk jam gets to the heated part, and you forget about that contrived dance you were trying, and you get off your ass and jam. Funk is that geeked feeling that comes over you when a superstar steps into the room—or onto the stage—and everyone is hyped; The Funk hits you in competition, when that last shot you made was your best, yet you still dig down for that extra level for the overdrive that you didn’t know was there; you know The Funk when you’re on a date and it’s time to make your move—The Funk is a rush that comes all over your body. Scientists have yet to discover that particular funk gland, but rest assured there are plenty of bodily excretions associated with it.

Funk is that nitty-gritty thang that affects people when things get heavy. Funk can be out of control, like the chaos of a rebellion, or instinctively elegant, like that extended round of lovemaking that hits overdrive. Funk is what you say when nothing else will do. When you’ve done all you can and there’s nothing else: Funk it! George Dr. Funkenstein Clinton, the most heralded authority of funk philosophy, reduced The Funk to its barest essence: Funk is whatever it needs to be, at the time that it is.

Someone funky-looking is generally thought of as someone colorful and amusing, yet unkempt, undisciplined, somewhere between exotic and ridiculous. Whether or not funky is in style, there are funky-looking people everywhere. Quite often, these funky people are self-styled, creative, and in touch with themselves. Funkiness, then, is an earthy sense of self that is free of inhibitions and capable of tapping instincts and celebrating the human condition in all its forms. Funkiness is a way of life.

Funkiness in a person’s behavior or attitudes can mean anything from an ego trip, to a protest, to escapism. Funkiness is much more than a style, it is a means to a style. While baggy pants, nose rings, and a Hip Hop swagger are often little more than fashion statements, the combination of far out and all in, the juxtaposition of what is in and what is not yet in, that original ensemble that is the postmodern person (particularly the postmodern African-American) is how people use funkiness as a guide to their uniqueness.

Funkiness for our purposes is an aesthetic of deliberate confusion, of uninhibited, soulful behavior that remains viable because of a faith in instinct, a joy of self, and a joy of life, particularly unassimilated black American life. The black popular music of the early 1970s was a consistent reminder of this new affirming, colorful, ethnic aesthetic, and the Hip Hop culture of the 1990s has spawned a return to this less formalized foundation of life.

WHY A BOOK ABOUT FUNK?

There are many aspects of The Funk that are intimately tied to an African value system that has been propagated through black culture since the Middle Passage. Funk is deeply rooted in African cosmology—the idea that people are created in harmony with the rhythms of nature and that free expression is tantamount to spiritual and mental health. If we were to look into this African philosophy, the African roots of rhythm, spiritual oneness with the cosmos, and a comfort zone with sex and aspects of the body, we would find that funkiness is an ancient and worthy aspect of life. Thus, funk in its modern sense is a deliberate reaction to—and a rejection of—the traditional Western world’s predilection for formality, pretense, and self-repression.

In traditional Western society, the maintenance of rationality, civility, and pomp, with deliberate disregard and disdain for the natural urges of the body and soul, has become a goal unto itself. The influx of technology has in many ways provided a further impetus for most Westerners to obsess with the aesthetics of curbing their instincts. One of Toni Morrison’s characters in The Bluest Eye looks at the situation facing upstanding white Americans:

They learn … how to behave. The careful development of thrift, patience, high morals, and good manners. In short, how to get rid of the funkiness. The dreadful funkiness of passion, the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotion. Wherever it erupts, this funk, they wipe it away; where it crests, they dissolve it, wherever it drips, flowers or clings, they find it and fight it until it dies. They fight this battle all the way to the grave.

This vengeance against nature is also manifest in the obsessively cruel and sexually violent treatment of blacks by whites throughout American history. The thousands of public lynchings, castrations, whippings, burnings, and Klan terrorism are grounded in the planet’s most hysterical legacy of race hate. This has, of course, perpetuated the social repression of blacks and their self-expressive virtues, among them jazz, the Caribbean Carnival, be-bop, and The Funk. It is The Funk which has provided the modern musical backdrop and forum for explicit confrontations of the vicious racial legacy in America.

In addition, the implicit nature of The Funk, its inherent nastayness, which cannot help but drive people closer to their funky soul, peels off the veneer of pretense and exposes the unpackaged self for all to see. Just as rock and roll began the sexual liberation of America in the 1950s, it is The Funk that drives the soundtrack for the American sexuality of the 1990s. Part of the affirmation of the human condition in America is the acceptance of The Funk as a music, as a lifestyle, and as a grassroots philosophy of self-development.

Aspects of black folks’ funkiness are ultimately what has fueled mainstream American culture and made it distinct from the culture in any other Western nation. One might even claim that it is the funky nature of black Americans that is the salvation of this nation. The psychologists Alfred Pasteur and Ivory L. Toldston thusly position The Funk in its proper place:

Thus we could say that funk rests at the root and stem of popular culture in America. From beneath the arms, the crotch, a sensuously fragrant, musky perfume has arisen, activating an affective force that provides for life, enjoyment, enrichment and regeneration. It is the most natural force in the universe.

WHO HAS THE FUNK?

Funk exists on an instinctive level that none of us can control, though some may try. With every new dance on a sweaty dance floor, with every extra dose of cheap cologne, with every swoop of loud lipstick on thick red lips, funk exists. With every new 360 dunk, beaded braids, and African fashion statement, with every swaggering pimp-strut and hood ornament on a pink Cadillac, with every black child’s natty hairdo, with every country-fried remnant of black folk life seeping into integrated American culture, funk is the channel for this creative flow. Funk is the means by which black folks confirm identity through rhythm, dance, bodily fluids, and attitude. But every booty is funky.

Things first got funky in the late 1960s. The militant surge of black America ripped open the existing formulation of community—as whites could no longer determine or control the priorities of black America. No longer marginalized, no longer entering through the rear door, entertaining onstage, and cleaning up afterward, black folks could go anywhere (almost) in America by 1970, and in doing so, would transform that once stale environment into one that is rhythmic, spontaneous, sensual, and stylish. From raucous, revival-style local elections to a bum-rush of blacks into state-mandated jobs, the wild rides on enforced school busing, the rush of blacks moving into white neighborhoods, a tripling of the interracial marriage rate, and a black entertainment overload, the presence of African-Americans turned the social fabric upside down. As a result, the fundamental essence of community—of nation—was all of a sudden mutated by the earthy ways of black folk.

The idea and the importance of funk comes from the depths of black American life, particularly that aspect of black America which never got around to integrating. Funk and funkiness was a part of the lifestyle of those whom Malcolm X described as the Field Negroes, those black Americans who toiled in the fields as sharecroppers and slaves and to this day struggle in the urban centers to eke out an existence. This is the population that lived in the ghettos in the 1960s and now lives in the inner city. This is the population that torched Watts in 1965, Newark and Detroit in 1967, South-Central Los Angeles in 1992, and is still just as pissed off today. These are the young black Americans whom the poet Etheridge Knight refers to as the wild guys, like me.

When Malcolm X died in 1965, there were no members of the civil rights movement who could speak to the dispossessed black masses in the meaningful ways that Malcolm had. There emerged Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey P. Newton, Angela Davis, and a host of black revolutionaries ready to continue the struggle, but the one person who captured and personified the attitudes and aspirations of the wild guys was the Godfather of Soul, James Brown. James Brown spoke to that group and identified their world. He understood and mastered that special process needed to inspire the dispossessed. He came up from the poorest of the poor, and while his politics were not of the militant variety, his manhood was. It was James who captured the rage of black America after the death of Malcolm with a New Bag, and helped to contain the rage after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. It was James who articulated the grim yet determined response to Marvin Gaye’s question, What’s Goin’ On. It was James and his band who provided the musical backdrop for the authentic musical reflection of black America in the 1970s, in all its hope, despair, charm, style, and nasty, unforgiving