Future Funk: Searching for the Lost Groove

Funk was born from the sludge, the grainy mud of the earth. It festered in the primordial soup until the spirit of life sucked itself into its own existence, and grew into form, and that form changed under the cycles of the sun and moon and stars. In the late 1960s, in the midst of the space race and race riots, the godfather of soul James Brown tapped into the essence of the funk — channeling its vital madness with wild guitar riffs and frantic horn blasts carried by a grooving percussive back-beat — and forever touched America and changed the world. Body and groove were united. The funk has since changed in shape and appearance, once nearly forgotten and then revived in the backbone of hip-hop, but now the possibility of a future funk is making itself clear.

Sly Stone picked up on the funk and took it higher, warping its incessant groove with a mind-altering consciousness; a smoky mirror giving a humid glimpse into our blood and guts. Then the funk went unhinged, as George Clinton invented the bass rumbling bounce and discovered the mothership connection, expanding the internalized global consciousness to the outer reaches of space. Bootsie Collins drenched the funk in the hot slime of sex. Prince, Rick James, and Cameo funneled that sexuality through the prism of an anti-gravity field. Zapp and Roger used machines to seduce: They synthesized melodies and degenerated the human voice into a entrancing robotic hiss. Cybotron and Afrikaa Bambaataa stripped the sound down to a bass-rattling pulse, one powered strictly by its day-glo electric momentum. But that was just the early 1980s, and it has somehow led to today’s search for a future funk. What happened then and now? Where did the funk go? Who done killed the funk?

A dynamic and pulsating style of music, so fertile for nearly two decades, fell into the all-so-unhappy cheese that plagued, nay strangled, so many other pop-culture movements of the post-war modern era. Cheese, corn, camp: a strange triple C group all too often spelled the demise of many a ripe aesthetic trajectory in form, sentiment, and purpose.

But what makes an aesthetic category cheesy? One sort of cheese is surely made out of naive, poorly executed concepts, emotions, and general structure, such as, oh, let’s say Celine Dion. But another sort of cheese, one far more interesting and complex, arises from those sentiments and styles which might seem rigid and old, no longer inspiring, dulled of their life force, adulterated, utterly generic because they’ve been played out.

The story of cheese is in fact a dramatic war waged between individuality and the modern social forces of normalization. To even begin to break down a theory of cheesiness — surprising that it seems no adventurous thinker, as far as I know, has touched it thus far — would first require a detailed account of both late capitalism and identity. Only then might we analyze in detail how the systems of meaning inherent to aesthetic innovation change in relation to the market system mass-producing and distributing a standardized copy of that very aesthetic innovation.

And so, what becomes of the funk, that fertile groove and cosmic reverberation, when the cancer of the spectacle washes it in a pale, phantasmagoric matrix? Well, on the one hand it becomes cheesy, just like anything else. On the other hand, the funk stays true and untouchably raw. The funk nimbly avoids the sterilizing effects of product packaging. You can’t fake the funk. Yes, the funk is in search of the fundamental core, and inspired fiction, of that all too tricky ideal: authenticity.

Still, we might lose the groove, and we did in the some of the that late-70s rhinestone disco, or that early 80s frightening R&B. There was corny funk, all too much of it, programmed with duplicitous formulas — repeated in mind numbing frequencies — of pre-set melodies and banal rhythms. Yet another cheese, that soft and rubbery yellow American brand, far removed from its funky ancestors, rubbed its bleached poison all over the name of funk. Not everyone could get down like Dextern Wansel on Mars, or Mandre on a solar flight, but they wanted to pretend. And so the concept was lost, and the name soiled, buried in the cavernous and cluttered annals of the modern mind.

Yet the funk never completely disappeared from the resources of ingenuity. In the late 80s, hip-hop producers began sampling funk break-beats dated from the the funky soul 1967 – 1975 heyday, and have continued to structure the percussive swing of hip-hop beats with the backbone of funk’s raw groove well to this day. The aesthetics of the hip-hop beat — one of recycled recorded sounds and reinvented roles for samples clips repeated on loop — spawned a whole new social practice of archiving. A new culture of crate diggers, both collectors and enthusiasts, grew obsessed with finding and archiving dusty, lost vinyl from a previous generation. It became quite rigorous too.

This sort of nostalgic, yet forward-thinking methodology was new in the realm of pop music innovation. Young producers used the genres from their parent’s generation — those that became formulated and yes, cheesy — to reconstruct new sounds, emotions, and concepts. Even the great music was reinvigorated. In “Talkin’ All That Jazz” Stetsasonic raps, “Tell the truth/ James Brown was old/ until Eric B. and Rakim/ came out with ‘I Got Soul.’”

It’s almost as if these producers began, nearly 20 years later, where the previous musicians had left off. Those funk sounds, once dulled down by over-saturated commercial mediation, became fresh again and pregnant with a wave of creative potential. The early hip-hop generation didn’t grow up during the golden age of the funk era, but they listened and absorbed at home as children. They grew familiar with the sounds without enduring the same forces of marketing as their parents. Maybe that opened up enough free space for them to imagine the music differently. I would bet that much of the retro-talk today in pop culture is a similar phenomenon — one far more interesting than we care to admit.

We often lament that subcultures do not have enough time to evolve in our media-saturated social world. The nascent creative movements get exploited and cut off during their inchoate stages of development, before they have the chance to mature as art forms. But in a way, hip-hoppers discovered a roundabout method to overturn the pervasive sterilizing forces of the media machine, and reinvigorate soiled aesthetic categories for a new generation. So, it was the rebirth of the funk.

But I’m getting a bit carried away on speculative theories of cheese and ruminations on the spatio-temporal trajectories which might shape today’s pop culture: This article was supposed to be about the future of funk (I hope the purists will allow me such an indulgence).

Los Angeles multi-instrumentalist and singer Dam-Funk is a good point of orientation. His solo debut, last year’s 5-LP Toachizown, is a hypnotic throw-back to the sweat of Prince and the bounce of Zapp. But it’s also the sort of funk record that couldn’t have happened without the entrancing psychedelia of house or the trunk rattling bass of hip-hop (Dam-Funk in fact played keys on some G-Funk tracks of the early 90s).

It’s a new wave of funk (click on that one). And while Dam-Funk might be attracted to vintage drum machines and analog synth keyboards, or even keytars, some other producers around the globe are funkifying with a powerful digital machine that is transforming the music of today: the computer.

French producer and dusty-crate digger Onra dropped an excellent full-length Long Distance, earlier this summer. It’s a beat-driven excursion into easy glide boogie bounce and liquidic spaceship grooves — sophisticated and lustful.  There’s also this alien-like creature voicing his desire to hear future funk on “My Comet” at the beginning of the record; I must be onto something, right?

Oh, and that other French producer, Debruit is skittering funk on some jittery acid-trip electric wavelengths. I’m quite thankful for his EP, Let’s Post-Funk, to give a bit more credence to my speculations on the future of funk.

There’s also those producers dubbed under the category of Wonky or Purple, or whatever, in the UK; cats like Joker, Mike Slott, and Zomby, who are bringing gurgled synth sounds to new levels of intoxication. Not to mention that they design some sub-bass fit to knock the ribcage out of the place.

Still, plenty musicians forgo digital focus and tamper with the craft of analog equipment. B.Bravo and Nite Jewel are saturating the funk with both the passion and must that it oh so craves. Some musicians use all the tools available: Big Boi of Outkast and Janelle Monae just released respective excellent full-lengths thoroughly covered in the florescent grit of digitally fused synth-blasted funk. A bit of Sun-Ra channeled through their twisted Atlien minds for sure. What about the Gorillaz in this year’s phenomenal Plastic Beach? Oh, there’s too much, I didn’t even mention how UK producer Floating Points has concocted a decidedly electronic approach to galactic boogie-down grooves. Lanquidity all forever.

I might mention how James Brown inspired Fela Kuti to create the world-town fusion sound of Afrobeat in Lagos, Nigeria throughout the 1970s. And these days Afrobeat has spawned programmed poly-percussive offspring rhythms throughout Africa, and into Europe (UK Funky anyone?), reflecting in direct parallel how reggae set the foundation for dub in Jamaica. Some of the most exciting electronic music tends to come from amateurs who don’t quite know what sounds the technology is supposed to make. Eventually a song like L-Vis 1990′s “United Groove” drops, and then suddenly the light changes over the zigzag musical networks across time and space and people and genre, and all the connections make sense. I’m still calling it funk.

And maybe, we’ll pick up on the pieces of futuristic funk already left behind. Kraftwerk and Model 500 discovered years ago the feeling capacities and powers of machine-generated music. Maybe Daft Punk had something to do with today’s access to that distant psycho-physical territory. And as more of our emotions and daily practices are mediated by computers, we’ll need sounds, patterns, and stylized forms produced from them to both articulate newly shaped desires and draw the electric framework of our dreams. Maybe we’ll even carve out a future for ourselves. Looking back, we’re long overdue to write an alternative history of machines with soul. Machines so raw and earthy that they reel with the stench of the funk. I can hear the faint rumbling of the mothership overhead. We’ve waited for its return all too long.

[Addendum: More Sounds from Future Funk]