So I take it they don't like funk...

if the guardian were to have a funk card it would be in the need of getting revoked, chopped up, burned and stuck up all of their collective noses for that pox of an article.

Handclapsfingasnapz said:

The Guardian's funk card

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/story/0,,1982573,00.html

Funk did this

John Harris
Friday January 5, 2007

Guardian
Farewell then, James Brown: King Dancer, Godfather of Soul and a man so important that his passing was enough to make Michael Jackson speak in a slightly deeper voice. Not that anyone will truly miss the kind of performances he put in towards the end of his life - hired hands churning out the hits while Mr Brown issued the odd encouraging shriek. But fair play: in coming up with the essential formula for funk music, he surely made a contribution to human development that could never be adequately repaid.

Or then again, perhaps not. Before writing this, I was momentarily frozen by fear of speaking ill of the dead and blaming JB for something that might not have been his fault. The feeling, thankfully, didn't linger - so, by way of backhandedly honouring his memory, let's say it loud: funk is the worst musical genre ever invented, a big old stain on Brown's CV and the cause of at least four decades of grinding misery.

This, I will allow, is less a matter of such trailblazing proto-funk Brown pieces as Papa's Got a Brand New Bag, Sex Machine and I Got the Feelin', as the ongoing nightmare of chronic indulgence and musical slop they undoubtedly spawned. If you doubt this, listen to the supposed high points of the genre: anything by the likes of Tower of Power, pre-disco Kool and the Gang, Cameo before they discovered pop music, or the woeful Ohio Players. And before anyone mentions the peak-period work of George Clinton, I say only this: hats off for the UFO, onstage fancy dress and occasional pearling tune, but did everything have to be so long? (I have a friend who saw Funkadelic in Manchester in 1975 - a six-hour performance, he says, that amounted to an experiment involving the limits of human endurance.)

All that said, funk's acme of unbearability was only reached thanks to two developments: 1) its decisive hybridisation into jazz-funk, surely as awful an invention as, say, the thumbscrews; and 2) as with so many things, its wholesale appropriation by a certain kind of white person. On the latter count, I speak on the basis of experience: though the totemically funksome technique known as slap-bass was probably the invention of the sometime Sly & the Family Stone bass man Larry Graham, I will always associate it with a teenage acquaintance named Steve. He would occasionally drop in on my mod band and borrow our bassist's instrument, using his well-trained right hand to give it the old bink-bap-dip-dup, to nobody's great benefit.

Twenty-five years later, I saw decisive proof of funk's utter evil. On a trip to Clarksdale, Mississippi - one-time home of the blues, now home to a small blues industry - a friend and I were taken on a tour of a part of town that seemed to have been suddenly deserted in around 1975, leaving empty buildings and grass growing through the cracks in the road. Though I naively assumed this was probably down to the mechanisation of the cotton industry, our guide put us right: "Funk did this," he said (really, he did), claiming that, in killing the last traces of the blues, the nightmare genre had also done for his community. Just for a moment, my mind was filled with the image of a bass player dressed up like a BacoFoil model of a partridge, standing at the top of one of the town's taller buildings and blitzing all in front of him with every miserable thwack of his thumb.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

Fu#k the dumbshit. Check the extensive article on James Brown up at allmusic.com. It highlights his influence on jazz artists like Horace Silver, Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman.

http://allmusic.com/cg/am...l=61::71DP

"What James Brown was to music in terms of soul and hip-hop, rap, all of that, is what Bach was to classical music. This is a guy who literally changed the music industry. He put everybody on a different beat, a different style of music. He pioneered it." - The Rev. Al Sharpton, 12/25/2006
[Edited 1/7/07 12:54pm]

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/story/0,,1982573,00.html

Funk did this

John Harris
Friday January 5, 2007

Guardian
Farewell then, James Brown: King Dancer, Godfather of Soul and a man so important that his passing was enough to make Michael Jackson speak in a slightly deeper voice. Not that anyone will truly miss the kind of performances he put in towards the end of his life - hired hands churning out the hits while Mr Brown issued the odd encouraging shriek. But fair play: in coming up with the essential formula for funk music, he surely made a contribution to human development that could never be adequately repaid.

Or then again, perhaps not. Before writing this, I was momentarily frozen by fear of speaking ill of the dead and blaming JB for something that might not have been his fault. The feeling, thankfully, didn't linger - so, by way of backhandedly honouring his memory, let's say it loud: funk is the worst musical genre ever invented, a big old stain on Brown's CV and the cause of at least four decades of grinding misery.

This, I will allow, is less a matter of such trailblazing proto-funk Brown pieces as Papa's Got a Brand New Bag, Sex Machine and I Got the Feelin', as the ongoing nightmare of chronic indulgence and musical slop they undoubtedly spawned. If you doubt this, listen to the supposed high points of the genre: anything by the likes of Tower of Power, pre-disco Kool and the Gang, Cameo before they discovered pop music, or the woeful Ohio Players. And before anyone mentions the peak-period work of George Clinton, I say only this: hats off for the UFO, onstage fancy dress and occasional pearling tune, but did everything have to be so long? (I have a friend who saw Funkadelic in Manchester in 1975 - a six-hour performance, he says, that amounted to an experiment involving the limits of human endurance.)

All that said, funk's acme of unbearability was only reached thanks to two developments: 1) its decisive hybridisation into jazz-funk, surely as awful an invention as, say, the thumbscrews; and 2) as with so many things, its wholesale appropriation by a certain kind of white person. On the latter count, I speak on the basis of experience: though the totemically funksome technique known as slap-bass was probably the invention of the sometime Sly & the Family Stone bass man Larry Graham, I will always associate it with a teenage acquaintance named Steve. He would occasionally drop in on my mod band and borrow our bassist's instrument, using his well-trained right hand to give it the old bink-bap-dip-dup, to nobody's great benefit.

Twenty-five years later, I saw decisive proof of funk's utter evil. On a trip to Clarksdale, Mississippi - one-time home of the blues, now home to a small blues industry - a friend and I were taken on a tour of a part of town that seemed to have been suddenly deserted in around 1975, leaving empty buildings and grass growing through the cracks in the road. Though I naively assumed this was probably down to the mechanisation of the cotton industry, our guide put us right: "Funk did this," he said (really, he did), claiming that, in killing the last traces of the blues, the nightmare genre had also done for his community. Just for a moment, my mind was filled with the image of a bass player dressed up like a BacoFoil model of a partridge, standing at the top of one of the town's taller buildings and blitzing all in front of him with every miserable thwack of his thumb.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

Nothinbutjoy said:

i think it's obvious that they didn't have a funk card to begin with. to each their own, but damn, you cannot write off funk!

im not reading this as him dissing funk but him dissing the watered down crap that funk evolved into...

isn't he saying pretty much what vainandy says?

im not reading this as him dissing funk but him dissing the watered down crap that funk evolved into...

isn't he saying pretty much what vainandy says?

He would occasionally drop in on my mod band and borrow our bassist's instrument, using his well-trained right hand to give it the old bink-bap-dip-dup, to nobody's great benefit.