paligap said:

It's funny you brought that up.
I've tuned in a few times to check out some of these bands and ended up...

vainandy said:

ugh! Do not insult some of my favorite songs by wrongly calling them funk. Those are ROCK hybrids .

thank you very much.

theAudience said:

Hey, I'm scratchin' with both hands, Y'know? ...but there again, different strokes.... somebody's buying it...




...

novabrkr said:

Whoa! My bullshit detector just went crazy!

Those songs are definately funk and they are much more funk than they are rock. You are thinking that all funk is similar to James Brown, Parliament, and others from the 1970s with the horns. That's just earlier funk. Funk evolved and changed with the times in the 1980s just like everything else does. For instance, funk like Midnight Star is far from the horns and jazz also but it's certainly not rock.

FuNkeNsteiN said:

Oneday you will understand.

blackguitaristz said:

If you asked someone to name quintessential funk, no one would name the Prince songs I've mentioned in this thread.
I've already admitted I have no idea who or what Funkadelic is.

And what ever happened to discussion for the thrill and passion of differing views? Someone feels with passionate divergence and suddenly they are a baiter?? Even though they didn't start the thread and aren't in the early responses?

I've been on this board since the purple and black days. I don't bait anyone. This is ridiculous and clearly my last attempt at a fun discussion in this thread.

Music didn't become fucked up and boring until it got as far away from funk and disco as possible.

funkpill said:

SoulAlive said:

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

I wonder if Cynthia Rose saw "Soul Train" last weekend when they played "Lady Cab Driver. If that was rock, they sure as hell wouldn't be playing it on that show.

I only have one thing to add...SynthiaRose please stop because with every post you are illustrating how little you know about the genre. To say that funk is not thinking man's music like jazz, classical etc. illustrates that you don't know much about the genre at all. I'm a Jazz head, LOVE jazz and I love them equally. Funk is the culmination of music; rock/psychedelic rock, r&b, soul, gospel and jazz. The concepts that JB, and P-Funk introduced--two examples that were discredited by the writer in the article--are hitting on so many levels its insane...forget it why am I even bothering?

I just hate when people openly admit they don't know much about a topic and then go on to discuss what they don't like about it--then again thats all the rage in society right now.

I only have one thing to add...SynthiaRose please stop because with every post you are illustrating how little you know about the genre. ...I just hate when people openly admit they don't know much about a topic and then go on to discuss what they don't like about it--then again thats all the rage in society right now.

vainandy said:

And you know this!!!

American Bandstand would've never played it either....

Dayummm..Did they ever played some funk on that show??

That's another thread

ugh! Do not insult some of my favorite songs by wrongly calling them funk. Those are ROCK hybrids .

AlexdeParis said:

I don't know anything about Funkadelic. )

SynthiaRose said:

-----
If you think Erotic City is a rock song. I think we now realize you don't know your musical genres and to say it is not thinking's man music tells me you realy don't respect the musician's and are lost on the culture.

vainandy said:

ugh! Do not insult some of my favorite songs by wrongly calling them funk. Those are ROCK hybrids .

thank you very much.

SynthiaRose said:

All of those songs mentioned are nothing but pure funk,With Prince you can not say all of his his songs are rock hybrid, cuz they are not, if they were they(except for Erotic City) would have gotten airplay on top 40 stations back in the day. With Prince you get songs that are more rock then others or you will get songs that is more r&b/funk then others, but to say they are hybrids is wrong. let's compare 1999 and purple rain together. You will say that both are rock hybrids, but 1999 is more funk/r&b based then Purple Rain. Yes 1999 had Little red corvette and delirous,and free. but after that, nothing but pure r&b and funk, while Purple rain is more of a rock/pop album then 1999. But if you still think that songs like head, erotic city, lady cabdriver, let's work are hybrids. Give me a reason as to why you think these songs are hybrids

blackguitaristz said:

Hi Blackguitaristz,

I'm glad you can discuss this from a musician's point of view. I'm not a musician ...I can only discuss what I like.

When you talk about hybrids ... I have no problem with rock hybrids that borrow from other than rock, as I've stated ... but the overriding sound has to be "rockish" for me to like it (like with Controversy and 1999 which you say in a subsequent post is funk. I would NEVER call that funk. A mere influence-- which I don't hear thankfully-- doesn't define those albums as funk) . If the hybrid is skewed to be more "funk" like say Clinton, I don't like it.

I don't like George Clinton. At all. Remember Atomic Dog? Hated it. Remember him messing up Graffit Bridge album ...why would you even talk about peeing in someone's cup. OK...I'm just nitpicking now.

but you're right ...I"m prejudice against funk. Don't act like hybrids are true funk. And as far as blues fathering all that music --- i know that and actually happen to like the blues.

Even the blues residue, however, can't elevate the abhorrence of funk.

It's not a thinking man's music (like jazz, classical, or even rock which I think is a deeply reflective, philosophical genre. Seriously). It's very base and only hormonal. Detestable.

Love,
Synthia.
[Edited 2/20/07 9:34am]