Free Chicken and Beer did a great piece on the funkiest jams of all time. Great article, and I don’t think I can dispute any of it, but I was struck that with the sole exception of Handsome Boy Modeling School the songs were all…old. Like, dozens of years old. Makes perfect sense, since the golden age of funk was the 70s, but it made me sad to think that funk as a style has passed on. Defunkt, if you will. When did that happen? I can’t think of any good, solid funk bands that have done recent work. Oh sure, there’s acts like Jamiroquai and Kenna, and yeah, I like them okay. But I don’t like them enough to go out of my way to defend them. I’m well aware they’re pretty uncool, and that’s the problem. We all love classic funk, and nobody’s ever going to top P-Funk or James Brown. All the imitators fall short, and they sound retro in a bad way. You could say the same for grunge.
Oh, you’ll find funk elements all over the place. And I love that shit. I’ve always responded the most to bass in my music, and to me a funky, driving bass makes the song. You also need a funky drummer to keep the beat going, and while your dancin’ shoes fall on the two and four you’ve got to hit it hard on the one-beat. And the funk is all about dancing, so give the people what they want with long, repetitive passages: if you’re doing it right nobody’s gonna get bored. Add some horns as a garnish and you’ve got yourself a full funk package. The grandmasters cooked with all these ingredients all the time, and the death of funk means that, mysteriously, you’re not going to find all four together very often in modern music. These are, though, the seeds of funk, and you’ll know them when you hear them.
You’ll find pieces of funk everywhere, even if funk per se is no more. There’s plenty of examples of The Funk in indie rock (meaning: white boys.) I’ve already talked about King Khan, who has the horns, the beats, and the balls, but not necessarily the groooove. For groove, I’d point out Fujiya & Miyagi, who flirt with The Funk all the time but seem a little reluctant to jump into it. Tiga’s got the beat down solid and if he laid down some horns he’d be a legit contender, but he’s a little techno and I know that doesn’t jive with traditional funk. The best white boy soul I’ve heard in awhile, though, comes from Mayer Hawthorne. I’m keeping my eye on this one, hoping that pretty soon he’ll take off his shirt and lay some stank on it.
The word count’s adding up so I’ll stop myself here. I’ll do a piece on funk in hip-hop pretty soon; there’s more to say about it than you’d think. Keep the funk alive.
Fujiya & Miyagi – “Collarbone”
Tiga – “Shoes”
Mayer Hawthorne – “The Ills”
