thirdform

pass the sick bucket
another dichotomy I've seen made is funk (JB, Meters, etc) vs fonky (P-Funk)

like all such things it shouldn't be taken as a hard and fast division but it's a useful conceptual framework

fonky seems to have much less of that unresolved tension, as Funkadelic. again I'm sure there are technical reasons why that's so. much closer to rock.

it's interesting to trace those traditions on thru the 80s

JB looms massively, as he always will, over everything in any way funky, but you'd have to say P-Funk etc was a much bigger direct influence on boogie, synth funk and etc

i.e. Atomic Dog, Zapp, and so on

whereas the continuation of funk proper was in the largely white avant-funk crew, until it resurfaced in rap

I don't agree with this! first three funkadelic albums are rock. funk rock but fundamentally rock. or black rock after rock got whitened, if you will. it's only when funkadelic start cribbing licks from deep funk and james brown that they actually become funky in the retroactive teleological sense we understand it today. so to say that synth funk has more to do with p-funk than it does James Brown seems to be making it an either/or, which i don't think is the case.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Boogie gets all of those things in its bass lines and synth sounds imo. Like those chord stabs with the wiggly pitch

Not boogie, but electro. obvs there is crossover EG D Train but no, patrice rushen forget me nots is boogie and it has absolutely nothing to do with spasm.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
compare and contrast. boogie/post-disco:


all glide and groove. even the pitched synths are groove, not spasm.

electro:


from beat one straight up we're in a juttering bassquake.
 

forclosure

Well-known member
was glad to see one or two links in here but got to ask

if funk is cancelled what does afrobeat/beats fit in then? like im not superversed in fuji/ju-ju or stuff like that but without it theres no King Sunny Ade or Kuti and by that extention you get none of the stuff coming out of west africa and Britain now so yeah wha gwan with that?
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
if funk is cancelled...

It isn't. delusional thread premise. I was at several jams in the last few weeks playing funky music where a huge range of ages of non jaded people were really enjoying playing and listening to very funky music. Also worth noting, luka doesn't dance.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
It isn't. delusional thread premise. I was at several jams in the last few weeks playing funky music where a huge range of ages of non jaded people were really enjoying playing and listening to very funky music. Also worth noting, luka doesn't dance.

luka's working on his grand anthology on poems about al-fresko shitting and nothing but the liberation of taking spicey smelly dumps and it's going to be his magnum opus but that's no reason to keep repeating that jaded line lol, we all know that if a nuclear apocalypse happened you'd still be on a natural MD high :p

The premise of the thread is totally reductive yes but the next time I hear an English detroit techno head fetishise p-funk for the sake of being down with the belleville lot I may just pull my eyeballs out. fact is p-funk is very much of its time and is a bit (um: can i say charmingly goofy today?) in a way that funk 45s and deep funk organ workouts are not. funk is a bit of a teleological thing. that's to say it didn't really exist in the 70s as we know it today, hence to answer web eschatology's question, a lot of what we call afrofunk today would have probably been called soukous, rhumba, afro-latin jazz, afro-rock etc. the line between james brown and rock is that thin, yaknow.

anyway: pisses over nearly all US funk compillations from olympian heights I know. all killer literally no filler:

 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
It isn't. delusional thread premise. I was at several jams in the last few weeks playing funky music where a huge range of ages of non jaded people were really enjoying playing and listening to very funky music. Also worth noting, luka doesn't dance.

huh? You were at these jams telling me that Germans don't understand funk and that Wolfgang Voigt was a closetted nazi whilst playing funk with these very germans? Giss a clue to your life philosophy mate?
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
Would I right in saying they(Parliament) were more an album than a singles bands?
"P-funk" can mean two things

1st, literal Parliament-Funkadelic, the actual bands themselves and the endless galaxy of side projects around George Clinton, and Bootsy, Hazel, Worrell, etc

2nd, a synecdoche for the style inspired by (and including) them, their most significant follower definitely being Zapp

I've been using it in the 2nd sense here

as far as P-F themselves, yeah kinda. Huge live act(s) too. They never broke thru with white audiences the way James Brown did, tho. bit too far out, likely.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
I think I see what you're trying to get at but all the main P-F dudes were from NJ or Ohio. so was Zapp.

(and Slave, Ohio Players, Lakeside, etc. idk why. Ohio is not a funky place)

for whatever reason p-funk resonated on the West Coast on a way it didn't the East. my personal pop psychology thesis, having lived on both, is loosen up vs. tighten up.

when I think of NY rap I think of boom-bap - I realized that hasn't been the case for 15+ years, but we're talking 80s + 90s. JB loops. cold sweat. tighten up.

when I of the west coast and especially Socal, I think smokin indo laid back. a land where the rhythm is the bass and the bass is the treble. loosen up.

two different ways of expressing the same pressure
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
and I also don't know what you're on about

funk 100% existed in a self-aware sense in the 70s. Funky President, Give Up the Funk, etc ad inf references.

"deep funk" or whatever marketing terms didn't exist sure, as reissue culture had yet to rear its all-consuming head outside of things like Nuggets or whatever.

nothing exists now as it did then, as to paraphrase Heraclitus you can never listen to the same record twice

but it's a nonsense saying it's a retroactive thing. "afrobeat" or "afrofunk" (whatever tf that means) you're on firmer ground ya.

this is a pointless digression tho tbh, arguing about old labels.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
P-F are of their time in some ways but in others they exist outside time like Sun Ra

yeah they were pretty goofy, sometimes in a pretty fucking corny way, it's not a secret (also, what's wrong with being goofy)

they also inspired hella people, ain't no one fetishizing nothing

waypoints on the Afrofuturist mythology continuum (simplified) Space Is the Place->1983 A Merman->Mothership Connection->Welcome to Drexciya
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
P-F (proper, but also synecdoche) on synth funk in 3 easy to follow stops

1975 - basically funk proper, Worrell already starting to get far out but there are prominent horns, bass is still popping rather than squelchy, lyrical theme is of this earth

1977 - bass is full on squelch, synths are full on g-funk

1982 - electrofunk blueprint avant la lettre
 
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