I got this from Okayplayer.com which has people who actually agree with this article.

Let's discuss. Because I think this guy fell on his head.


http://arts.guardian.co.u...73,00.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

Don't take this as a flame, laura, but this is a retread article. Figure the topic died soon after it was posted.

The person that wrote that article is the biggest asshole I ever seen! Even someone like me, still a newbie fan of the funk genre, feels that that guy is only writting that stuff to be scandalous and to gain some notoriety

dumb.

the person that wrote that is nuts.

As previously posted :

PFunkjazz said:

...i thought we had a healthy discussion over it? no?

sosgemini said:

I think we can still have!

Can we consider the view of the writer, also the opinion of the people who are not familiar with the genre?

PFunkjazz said:

-----
I don't take it as a flame. I was just was surprised at the number of people who seemed to agree with the author on Okayplayer.com

Something that patently ridiculous isn't worth the time it took me to write this.

Actually, I agree.

Funk is right behind Disco as worst genre.

It's dated and old...and wish Prince would stop rehashing it.


(P.S. ...I"m not talking about music with a good beat ...sometimes people say such beats are "funky" Eww. Hate that word. But I'm talking specifically about funk as that lame ass genre detailed in the article)

"The woeful Ohio Players?????"

Man, f--k John Harris.

SynthiaRose said:

Prince is funk my friend...

And funk can do airthang

I'm talking bout good funk in general

There's good and bad in all types of music

What a load of bullshit

obviously that is the archetypical music critic. a former wanna-be musician who due to lack of drive and talent never made it big in the industry. and now out of anger, frustration and despair thanks to his own complete failure and his shattered dreams, he spits venom at others. a poor joke of a broken existance, we should feel sorry for a looser like that, no?


a "mod" band, puhhleeese


.
[Edited 2/19/07 3:47am]

SynthiaRose said:

Question to Synthia; Do u think "rock" is dated and is right behind disco as worst genre? And do u wish Prince would stop rehashing it?

blackguitaristz said:

-----
LOL Good ? Blackquitarist

blackguitaristz said:

That's right Black

He did pop tunes also

blackguitaristz said:

No. If you haven't noticed a persistent gripe of mine ...it's for Prince to do more Rock. He's inherently a rocker and should embrace his destiny ...especially at this age because ROCK is timeless and would make him so.


Rock, much like classical music and jazz, has the ability to transcend the ages in my opinion. There are many rock numbers (or simply rock-tinged) that sound completely fresh today, including many from Prince. It's not trying to be poppy or cool it just is what it is.

And that bald emotion, unaffected style and earnest, authentic musicianship is just classic.

Funk, like Disco, is brash, showy, and vulgar. Much like a woman in neon tights with too much eyeliner. One can only take it for so long ...

Funk tries toO hard. It's outmoded.

Surely ... you agree.



[Edited 2/19/07 8:44am]

SynthiaRose said:

Sounds like you're stuck on 80s hair-bands...
.

Funk is muscular and brazen: in your face!

funk is awesome. Funk is what made prince so edgy in the 70's and 80's

I'm a musical snob when it comes to "crunk" which is nothing but a rehash of funk and drum n bass/freestyle/electro pop in the 1980's but slowed down and disguised as r&b

PFunkjazz said:

Rock is way more than 80s hair bands...
There are plenty of contemporary rock artists.
How did you arrive at this perspective?


Edited to add: I THINK ROCK CAN BE WAY MORE IN YOUR FACE THAN "FUNK."
[Edited 2/19/07 10:24am]

alphastreet said:

I always felt Prince was edgy because of the rock influence to his music.

A black artist doing funk isn't edgy. A black artist experimenting with rock hybrids is.

As a young black girl growing up in the Chicago area, I marveled to hear stuff like "Little Red Corvette" on WGCI -- so different. I fell in love!


Edited to add: Interesting comment about crunk. I don't reall listen to that...but I like that it is freestyle...love freestyle music (which is my attraction to rock ...and free jazz, etc).
[Edited 2/19/07 10:28am]

uPtoWnNY said:

Notice that he didn't bother to explain why he thinks the Ohio Players are woeful. Woeful is what you hear on todays pop radio.

SynthiaRose said:

yeah that's what I meant, funk blended with rock, or should I say funk like how prince defines it

little red corvette is one of his best ever!!!

how is rock related to freestyle? I was talking about electro dance music in the 80's and how people rip that off today and claim it's something new hence crunk

I think the writer has a point.
However it's buried in an undeveloped, myopic presentation.


If you take the core component of any genre (Rock, Pop, Funk, etc) and use it as the basis for "songs" that do not include any skillfully constructed melodic/harmonic/rhythmic interest (include lyrics if the song has vocals), you end up with boring/dull and repetitive material.

Why this writer has a hard-on for Funk alone, I don't know.

tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431

I don't agree with the author at all. His jabs at all the great funkateers are lame and unsubstantiated.

But if his point would be to ask: where/what is funk today?

I would agree that it has melted away into the very empty "hiphop" and "R&B" we get today.