elem55 said:

So your original post wasn't ignorant and arrogant?

You dismissed these acts by calling them "weird kind of funk", when in reality, they play early Funk. Then you babbled something about "some 20 piece orchestra trying to look like Cab Calloway" and you compared them to Van Hunt.

The final proof of your ignorance on the matter was this: "Do an experiment at your next party put on some jams from the groups that I mentioned and watch the party start. Then put on a record by these cool cats in the picture and listen for the crickets."

This shows me that you really have no idea of what you're talking about. Because the artists I mentioned get play in Funk clubs all accross the world, and they do mainly sold out live performances. You claim to be a Funk expert, yet you dismiss the artists who seriously carry on the torch of Funk.

I happen to make my living as a Funk DJ who plays in many countries. I think SOS Band and Zapp are aight, but if I started playing those at my gigs, I'd be send back to my hometown in less than 20 minutes.

So once again my advice to you, open your mind, do some studying and learn how to appreciate the sounds of raw Funk, not just the played-out "Holy Ghost".

elem55 said:

So your original post wasn't ignorant and arrogant?

You dismissed these acts by calling them "weird kind of funk", when in reality, they play early Funk. Then you babbled something about "some 20 piece orchestra trying to look like Cab Calloway" and you compared them to Van Hunt.

The final proof of your ignorance on the matter was this: "Do an experiment at your next party put on some jams from the groups that I mentioned and watch the party start. Then put on a record by these cool cats in the picture and listen for the crickets."

This shows me that you really have no idea of what you're talking about. Because the artists I mentioned get play in Funk clubs all accross the world, and they do mainly sold out live performances. You claim to be a Funk expert, yet you dismiss the artists who seriously carry on the torch of Funk.

I happen to make my living as a Funk DJ who plays in many countries. I think SOS Band and Zapp are aight, but if I started playing those at my gigs, I'd be send back to my hometown in less than 20 minutes.

So once again my advice to you, open your mind, do some studying and learn how to appreciate the sounds of raw Funk, not just the played-out "Holy Ghost".

I enjoy Poogie Bell's drummin'. I'm not a huge Marcus Miller fan (simply because I'm not really into slap technique), but the drumming makes them worth listening.

SOS and ZAPP are aight? You should get sent to your hometown just for saying that. LOL. Cmon man get with it. Im gonna have to revoke your DJ license for that statement. Lets take a poll, who would rather party to EWF (Mighty Mighty)
The Barkays (Sexomatic), Cameo (Post Mortem), Confunkshun (Got to be enough, Midnightstar (No Parking on the dance floor)

I am not trying to get in a battle here but please do post something off of
youtube about the kind of 21st century funk you are talking about. Are you saying this funk is better than holy ghost. You are the first funk fan i've heard call holy ghost played out especially since that is still one of the barkays most requested songs.

MrSoulpower said:

Make me slap u upside yo' head! Here's some MM and Poogie youtube.




Wow, man! I might have to go get a 2nd dose of this tonight!!
[Edited 5/4/08 14:50pm]

MrSoulpower said:

SOS and ZAPP are aight? You should get sent to your hometown just for saying that. LOL. Cmon man get with it. Im gonna have to revoke your DJ license for that statement. Lets take a poll, who would rather party to EWF (Mighty Mighty)
The Barkays (Sexomatic), Cameo (Post Mortem), Confunkshun (Got to be enough, Midnightstar (No Parking on the dance floor)

elem55 said:

I got it, dude. You're into the late 70s/early 80s Funk thing. Good for you. Like I said, it's aight, but if you want to get a club crowd excited - around the globe - you need to come up with some better stuff. Nobody gets too excited with late 70s Barkays, Cameo and Confunkshun. You know why? Because it's watered down chart-Funk. It's good stuff, and I play it once in a while when I'm at home, but in Funk clubs, it don't work. Sorry, man.

I didn't argue that it was bad music, not at all. But this thread is about Funk artists that are relevant in the 21st century, and none of those who you've mentioned are relevant. They don't make relevant records today, and they don't play relevant shows. Period.

I really love EWF's "Mighty, Mighty", but it's not the tune that will get the Funk crowds movin'.

This is what gets the 21st century Funk crowd movin:












[Edited 5/4/08 17:04pm]

You are right dude. I would much rather spend money to see and party to the
aforementioned music you are talking about. I am open to listening to good live bands but for soulpower to state that the barkays, cameo, confunkshun, ewf are watered down and then he posted these bands off of youtube that are supposed to be 21st century funk bands. They don't resemble anything close to funk. Those bands have good horns section but they are more in the line of a lot of regional bands that i see in the south. I don't know you may live outside the states, but if you bought that stuff to charlotte and try to pass it off as funk people here would be like WTF.
Cameo,barkays,slave,ewf,confunkshun could outfunk these bands in their sleep.
I am not saying the bands you are talking about aren't good but it's not funk. You could call it uptempo jazz but you can't pass it off as funk no matter what century you are talking about. This music is far more watered down than the hard hitting funk of the bands me and elem55 speak of.

elem55 said:

A bold claim, bro

Are you serious? That has got to be the most redundant watered down JB copycatfakin the funk I ever heard. But if thats your thing I guess Im more into the innovators of funk . I hear club bands play rehashed JB stuff all the time. And its sounds just like that. Heres some real funk for you.

FuNkeNsteiN said:

You wouldn't want me to lie would you?

phunkdaddy said:

Have you seen any of the groups you've mentioned lately? They suck. And that's why they only get booked at cooperate functions and commercial events, but rarely at Funk clubs. And once again, I wasn't dissin' the Barkays/EWF/etc per se, but their later productions. Their early stuff remains the shit, unreached, and this is what the new Funk acts base their concept on. They don't base it on the late shit, but the early shit. That's where the legacy is.

If you think that you can hear acts like the Dap-Kings, Osaka Monaurail, the New Mastersounds, etc in Charlotte every weekend, then you have a hard tim hearing the difference in quality. Those groups yo are refering to might try to copy that sound (which confirms my theory that this is where Funk is today), but if they are just the same, why don't they make records that sell thousands of copies worldwide? Why don't they tour all over Europe, the States and Japan? Naw man, this is a huge difference.

elem55 said:

Show your skills, bro. Let's talk about Funk pre-1975. Are you down?

elem55 said:

You are right dude. I would much rather spend money to see and party to the
aforementioned music you are talking about. I am open to listening to good live bands but for soulpower to state that the barkays, cameo, confunkshun, ewf are watered down and then he posted these bands off of youtube that are supposed to be 21st century funk bands. They don't resemble anything close to funk. Those bands have good horns section but they are more in the line of a lot of regional bands that i see in the south. I don't know you may live outside the states, but if you bought that stuff to charlotte and try to pass it off as funk people here would be like WTF.
Cameo,barkays,slave,ewf,confunkshun could outfunk these bands in their sleep.
I am not saying the bands you are talking about aren't good but it's not funk. You could call it uptempo jazz but you can't pass it off as funk no matter what century you are talking about. This music is far more watered down than the hard hitting funk of the bands me and elem55 speak of.

The problem is that your audience probably thinks that the Dap-Kings, Osaka Monaurail, the New Mastersounds, etc invented this music. If they knew real funk
they wouldn't be so impressed with these guys. As I said before there is nothing remotely original about them. Believe me it's not hard to copy a James brown groove but dont even think these groups are anywhere near to the level of the originators of funk. You can try to Xerox the funk but it's still a pale imitation.

MrSoulpower said:

My brother why would you want to consign a conversation about Funk to pre-1975? Funk is to wide of a force to be nailed down to a certain time period. If you want to toke you must inhale all the smoke.

phunkdaddy said:

Have you seen any of the groups you've mentioned lately? They suck. And that's why they only get booked at cooperate functions and commercial events, but rarely at Funk clubs. And once again, I wasn't dissin' the Barkays/EWF/etc per se, but their later productions. Their early stuff remains the shit, unreached, and this is what the new Funk acts base their concept on. They don't base it on the late shit, but the early shit. That's where the legacy is.

If you think that you can hear acts like the Dap-Kings, Osaka Monaurail, the New Mastersounds, etc in Charlotte every weekend, then you have a hard tim hearing the difference in quality. Those groups yo are refering to might try to copy that sound (which confirms my theory that this is where Funk is today), but if they are just the same, why don't they make records that sell thousands of copies worldwide? Why don't they tour all over Europe, the States and Japan? Naw man, this is a huge difference.

elem55 said:

And there it is! In your original post on this thread, you've tried to downplay the contribution of the new artists as rather obscure, while exclusively praising the post 1975 Funk. And that's exactly why Funk is dead in America. You can't really understand Funk unless you start with the roots. It's the early Funk that has been neglected too long on this side of the pond. Most people think "Celebration" when you say Kool & the Gang, and they think "Fantasy" when you say EWF. A whole legacy of serious music is being left behind here. You mentioned the Barkays ... but "Holy Ghost" isn't even half as important as "Soulfinger" or "Sing and dance".

phunkdaddy said:

Yes i have seen Ewf as recently as 2006 at the verizon amphitheater in
charlotte where other big name acts like perform and they laid it down not
just playing the hits but digging into their 70's bag playing all their
funky instrumentals. Hell stevie wonder just performed here in november and he has more funk in his middle finger than any of those bargain bin acts you speak of. I've also seen the barkays, cameo, the time, the gap band all since 2001 and believe me none of them sounded like shit. None of them sounded like the
watered down brand of funk you speak of. Like i said those guys you speak of are basically some of the same acts i see perform at the local parks for free
on saturday. Oh and yes these acts do tour japan because a lot of old school
r&b acts are still popular in japan. I can't speak for europe because i don't live there and really don't care. And as far as selling records worldwide in case you haven't noticed the game has changed. Record sales today are basically sold to a teen demographic Are you telling me that the groups you speak of are selling records worldwide? Where are there touring in the states?

It seems you are limiting funk to the early period of 69-75 james brown.

I can't see any of the clips but when MrSoulPower kept stressing James Brown and the early 1970s, I knew they must have had a jazzy type sound. I like James Brown and all but those are the very early years of funk and funk had progressed and changed in the late 1970s and changed even more in the early 1980s. To me, and most other people my age (40), early 1970s funk sounds very primitive. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, funk had gotten rid of a lot of the jazz sound and lots of people my age were glad of it.

Most other people your age? Bro, that's because you grew up with late 70s Funk. People in their 50s and 60s will tell you that the Funk that you like sounds boring and uninspired. And from a musical perspective, it is. The complexity of early Funk cannot be reached by disco-Funk. That's what killed Funk in the end.

I totally disagree that throwing on an early 1970s funk record would get a much better response at a party than a late 1970s or early 1980s funk record.

It depends on the party. If you talk about the average club or house party, sure, you're right. People want to hear the hits. And since you most likely will find more 40-somethings and partys and clubs than 50- and 60-somethings, they'll want to hear the music that they grew up on. Just like yourself.
But I'm talking about the actual Funk scene. I play about 60 gigs per year in clubs all over the world that only book Funk and Soul DJs or at least promote special nights. If I walked in there with "Holy Ghost", they wouldn't book me back. Because they want the hard-hitting Funk of the earlier years - promoters and crowd alike. If you play later shit, you gotta make sure that nobody has heard these tracks before. Big hits is the last thing the Funk crowd wants to hear. They want to be challenged.

And as for The Barkays, I have played a early 1970s Stax song like "AJ the Housefly" (which is a good song) and people are like "what the hell".

That's a great cut. But yeah, few people know it. But in the Funk scene, it's a standard. That's why you gotta make a clear difference between mainstream clubs and Funk clubs. "A.J. the housefly" will definitely not work in a mainstream club. Not because it's a bad track, but because the mainstream club doesn't know it.

I don't know of many people who are even familiar with The Barkays Stax material other than Holy Ghost. The Barkays that everyone is familiar with is the Mercury stuff.

Yeah, the mainstream crowd. I completely agree.

Even if you play an old James Brown song, a lot of the times, the dance floor will clear.

Obviously in the clubs that you frequent. But not at a Funk joint. James Brown is always a safe shot if you want to fill the floor ... the art is to do it without even playing James Brown.

Well, in my area, there is nothing wrong with James Brown but he has absolutely been played to death.

"Sex Machine" has. Maybe "Payback", too. But there's dozens of less known tunes that are heavily circulating in the Funk scene and constantly pack the floors.

Yeah, overseas in Europe they may be more into jazzy stuff like that because Europe has always had broader tastes than the States. They love to explore things more than we do and are much quicker to embrace something of an artsy/fartsy nature than we are in The States. And artsy/fartsy is exactly what people would call something jazzy sounding if it were played in my area. The ones that would be into it would be the "exploring type" who want to "experience culture"

You are right. The Funk scene here in the United States is very underdeveloped. You will hardly even find clubs that would promote Funk nights exclusively. There's a few major joints in L.A., NYC and D.C. that do it, but it's usually small clubs or even bars. Few promoters will dare to do 100% oldschool Funk and Soul nights here. But in Europe and Japan - and even Australia - even major clubs book Funk DJs for exclusive nights. Big clubs, with popular names and big capacities. And that should show you that ironically America - even though it's the birth place of Funk - has the smallest scene. People here only want to dance to shit they know, the big hits. They rarely get down to grooves that they've never heard before. And that's sad. And it's proof that Funk is in a bad position here in the States, when everybody wants to hear "Rollercoaster" instead of "Pleasure".
However, you continue to throw around the word "Jazz". We are talking Funk here. Just because a Funk band has a full horn section, it doesn't make it Jazz. In fact, horns can accent the groove much harder than almost anything. So please don't confuse those two, because you are gonna upset the Jazz purists.

but the most of the people I know that were actually listening to funk back in those days, would much rather hear the late 70s and early 80s.

That's your age group ... like you said yourself. I find it sad when people only appreciate songs they grew up on. I'm 33, this concept would put me in a pretty bad position.

If you want to hear some watered down funk, pull out some late 80s funk records. Now that's some watered down funk....it was made to crossover. Most of the late 70s and early 80s funk never crossed over.

Actually it did. That's why Zapp, Rick James and Teena Marie are still big names among the American mainstream crowd. And that's why their hits will always work in any club. But if you ask them about Mandrill, The Counts, Hidden Strength etc they would pass ....
.

No, it seems like you dismiss anything pre-1975 as not as relevant.
The '67 to '73 period was the most diverse and most creative period of Funk. Most Funk 45s and albums were recorded in those years - not just James Brown.I'm talking about hundred's, if not thousands of acts. Even groups like the Ohio Players, EWF and Kool & The Gang recorded their most influential and most inspired music during those years and these records are considered their best among Funk collectors. By 1975, Disco started to take over Funk. Parliament/Funkadelic really were their own thing. But in the late 1970s, Funk was mainstream. It wasn't musically adventureous. You may have a special connection to it because you grew up on it, and I respect that. And remember, I'm not dissin' it at all. I got all those records myself. But in the global Funk scene, those records don't excite too many people because they are played out.

MrSoulpower said:

Check this out soulpower
This is the barkays influence on japan

www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdCxHpedtwg



www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e2grJ1MY9o


This band is playing two of the barkays songs and the
horn section is tight as hell on as one.
This is how funk should be done.

See, that's all I'm saying is that Europeans are more the exploring type than us Americans. The fact that you have funk clubs in this day and age is proof of that. We don't have any funk clubs in my area and I live in a city that is 80 percent black. All we have is shit hop clubs for the young people, blues clubs for the older people, and the people my age are just shit out of luck. Too many people my age are still married and their kids aren't grown yet. Maybe when we get some more age on us, their kids will be grown and there will be more divorces meaning more single people my age that want to go out whoring like the older blues crowd.

See, as bad as it sounds, but you nailed it when you said that you live in a city that is 80 percent black. Unfortunately, Funk is not popular in African-American mainstream. Even here in the States, 90 percent of the people coming to Funk gigs are white college kids who are hip to it. It's really sad. That specially counts for the smaller cities.

As for people in their 50s and 60s, all those folks in my area are into blues and have been since the shit hop era took over in the early 1990s. Hell, even a lot of folks my age and even younger have joined the blues crowd out of hate for shit hop. Even down to the black gay people my age going to the white gay clubs that play barely tolerable trance because the black gay club is playing shit hop. I'm telling you, shit hop is an epidemic.

Shit Hop did a lot for Funk's resurrection and the preservation of its legacy .. when it was still Hip Hop.

Back to the older people though, I've never heard any of them mention any funk from the early 70s. All I ever hear them talk about is people like Al Green, The Staple Singers, The Soul Children, Aretha Franklin, and folks like that. I'm sure some of them may be heavy into early 70s funk (the ones that are music heads like us) but most of them act like it either was rare or they have completely forgotten it. At least that's how it is in my area. Even back in the early 1980s, when the R&B stations would have their "Lunch Time Oldies" show, the only thing I ever heard from the early 70s was soulful R&B singers and very rarely some early 70s funk. It makes me wonder how popular funk was in the early 70s other than a handful of people.

True ... Funk has always been an underground phenomen, even back in the day when it was created. That's why so many people know little more about Funk than the great hits by James Brown and later by the groups that you have mentioned ... because they broke into the mainstream. But originally, Funk was dirty, raw and original. Whaty groups like Zapp made of it has little to do with the original concept of Funk .. I mean come on, just take the name .. Funk ... does that sound like clean-cut production, drum computers and synth horns to you? Naw, man ...

When I said if you really want to hear some watered down funk, listen to the late 80s, I wasn't referring to funk being known in the mainstream R&B crowd. I was referring to artists trying to crossover to pop/rock radio. As for folks like Zapp, Rick James, and Teena Marie, they only had one pop hit each. Yeah, they were totally mainstream on R&B radio but the pop world only knew them for one hit each. In the early 80s groups like Cameo, The Barkays, One Way, Skyy, Bill Summers and Summers Heat, Zapp, Con Funk Shun, etc. were totally mainstream on R&B radio and their stuff was strong. It's when folks tried crossing over to pop/rock radio that the funk became watered down. Hell, folks even stopped making funk because they were too busy trying to get a pop hit. This was rare in the early 1980s.

That's exactly my point. The artists you just mentioned are those mainly associated with Funk within the mainstream crowd, because these acts had the biggest commercial success (throw in James Brown as well). But in order to have such chart success, you need to sell out. These acts compromized ...