The Evolution of Music Part - XIX
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The Evolution of Music Part - XIX
Funk is a music genre that originated in the mid-late 1960s when African American musicians blended soul music, soul jazz and R&B into a rhythmic, danceable new form of music. Funk de-emphasizes melody and harmony and brings a strong rhythmic groove of electric bass and drums to the foreground. Funk songs are often based on an extended vamp on a single chord, distinguishing it from R&B and soul songs centered around chord progressions.
Funk creates an intense groove by using strong bass guitar riffs and bass lines. Like Motown recordings, funk songs used bass lines as the centerpiece of songs. Slap bass’ mixture of thumb-slapped low notes and finger ‘popped’ (or plucked) high notes allowed the bass to have a drum-like rhythmic role, which became a distinctive element of funk. Some of the best known and most skilful soloists in funk have jazz backgrounds. In the 1970s, jazz music drew upon funk to create a new subgenre of jazz-funk, which can be heard in recordings by Miles Davis (On The Corner) and Herbie Hancock (Head Hunters).
History
The distinctive characteristics of African-American musical expression are rooted in West African musical traditions, and find their earliest expression in spirituals, work chants/songs, praise shouts, gospel and blues. In more contemporary music, gospel, blues and blues extensions and jazz often flow together seamlessly. Funky music is an amalgam of soul music, soul jazz and R&B.
James Brown and others have credited Little Richard’s saxophone-studded, mid-1950s road band as being the first to put the funk in the rock ‘n’ roll beat. Following his temporary exit from secular music to become an evangelist, some of Little Richard’s band members joined Brown and the Famous Flames, beginning a long string of hits in 1958.
Background
By the mid-1960s, James Brown had developed his signature groove that pushed the funk music style further to the forefront. Brown’s music was overlaid with “catchy, anthemic vocals” based on “extensive vamps” in which he also used his voice as “a percussive instrument with frequent rhythmic grunts and with rhythm-section patterns ... [resembling] West African polyrhythms” - a tradition evident in African American work songs and chants. Throughout his career, Brown’s frenzied vocals, frequently punctuated with screams and grunts, channeled the “ecstatic ambiance of the black church” in a secular context.
Other musical groups picked up on the riffs, rhythms, and vocal style developed by James Brown and his band, and the style began to grow. Dyke & the Blazers based in Phoenix, Arizona, released “Funky Broadway” in 1967, perhaps the first record of the soul era to have “funky” in the title. Meanwhile, on the West Coast, Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band was releasing funk tracks beginning with its first album in 1967.
The Meters defined funk in New Orleans while another group who would define funk in the decade to come were The Isley Brothers who signaled a breakthrough in African-American music.
P-Funk and the 1970’s
In the 1970s and early 1980s, a new group of musicians further developed the “funk rock” approach innovated by George Clinton, with his main bands Parliament and, later, Funkadelic. Together, they produced a new kind of funk sound heavily influenced by jazz and psychedelic rock. The two groups had members in common and often are referred to collectively as “Parliament-Funkadelic.” The breakout popularity of Parliament-Funkadelic gave rise to the term “P-Funk”, which referred to the music by George Clinton’s bands, and defined a new subgenre.
The 1970s was probably the era of highest mainstream visibility for funk music. Funk music was exported to Africa in the late 1960s, and melded with African singing and rhythms to form Afrobeat. In the early 1970s, when funk was becoming more mainstreamed, artists like Parliament Funkadelic, Rufus & Chaka Khan, the Isley Brothers, Sly and the Family Stone, Ohio Players, Labelle, Confunkshun, among others, were successful and getting radio time.
1980s and stripped down funk
In the 1980s the lyrics of funk songs began to change to more graphic and sexually explicit content. Rick James was the first funk musician of the 1980s to assume the funk mantle dominated by P-Funk in the 1970s. Prince used a stripped-down instrumentation similar to Rick James, and went on to have as much of an impact on the sound of funk as any one artist since James Brown. Bands that began during the P-Funk era incorporated some of the uninhibited sexuality of Prince and state-of-the-art technological developments to continue to craft funk hits. However, but by the latter half of the 80s, funk had lost its commercial impact.
Recent developments
While funk was all but shouldered out from radio, its influence continued to spread. Rock bands began adding elements of funk to their sound, creating new combinations of ‘funk rock’ and ‘funk metal’. Extreme, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jane’s Addiction, Prince, Primus, Faith No More, Incubus and Rage Against the Machine spread the approach and styles garnered from funk pioneers to new audiences in the mid-to-late 1980s and the 1990s. These bands later inspired the underground mid-1990s funkcore movement and current funk-inspired artists like Outkast, Malina Moye, Van Hunt, and Gnarls Barkley.
Since the late 1980s hip hop artists have regularly sampled old funk tunes. James Brown is said to be the most sampled artist in the history of hip hop, while P-Funk is the second most sampled artist; samples of old Parliament and Funkadelic songs formed the basis of West Coast G Funk.
