funkiness

[blissblogger]

>nutmeg
>cousin cockroach
>pavel koustik
>da one away
>nature's plan
>visioneers
>silhouette brown


just the names alone tell me everything i need to know [shudder]

no but seriously at some point (jacob's opptical stairway probly) 4 hero got stuck on this one synth sound, that sort of shimmer-squelch, didn't they -- i can't remember the precise track but i was listening to a roy ayers best of and there it was The Synth Sound, the one they're fixated on, i was like "aha!"

i've got no problems with slick, some of my favorite black music, whether it's Earth wind Fire or SOS Band or Zapp or whatever, is slick -- almost by definition black music is slick innit (there's no black equivalent of Swell Maps, no cult of sloppy or amateurism, it just doesn't compute), it's almost always aiming for supertight perfection and dazzle

what some of us are railing (slight exaggeration) about isn't slickness, it's tepidity and a sort of fussy noodly quality and a kind of over-exaggerated lightness of touch that's pretty prissy

and of course, compared with the sheer grind of crunk or even grime, a lot of the soi-disant funkoid stuff isn't actually that funky

this discussion is reminding me of the genuine shock i got when Matt outed himself, in the twilight days of woebot, as a onetime acid-jazz afficianado!

 

[hint]

at some point (jacob's opptical stairway probly) 4 hero got stuck on this one synth sound, that sort of shimmer-squelch, didn't they -- i can't remember the precise track but i was listening to a roy ayers best of and there it was The Synth Sound, the one they're fixated on, i was like "aha!"...[snip]... what some of us are railing (slight exaggeration) about isn't slickness, it's tepidity and a sort of fussy noodly quality and a kind of over-exaggerated lightness of touch that's pretty prissy

I know exactly what you mean and acknowledge that there is a high noodle content in a lot of music that is termed "broken beat". I also avoid it and occasionally even rib my friends who lap it up. but I've always maintained that the genre is a bit of a mongrel anyway. most of it doesn't need a new tag at all - there's a lot of smooth house, techno and uptempo r'n'b being labelled as broken beat and it's going to kill off any scene that there is, sooner or later.

I guess my point is that what I personally class as a (good) broken beat record is certainly not going to be tepid, fussy or prissy and I think it's wrong that people are dismissing these records because they didn't like the last 4Hero LP. I'd draw a parallel here with people procaliming that they either like or dislike grime solely as a result of hearing the M.I.A. LP (apologies for bringing it up again). if you listen to grime that makes no sense.

and of course, compared with the sheer grind of crunk or even grime, a lot of the soi-disant funkoid stuff isn't actually that funky

sure. funk = excitement rather than just entertainment or pleasure.

 

[borderpolice]

almost by definition black music is slick innit

early hiphop? booty, miami bass? bad brains? funk carioca? dub? early house? getto-tec?

 

[Pearsall]

I guess my point is that what I personally class as a (good) broken beat record is certainly not going to be tepid, fussy or prissy and I think it's wrong that people are dismissing these records because they didn't like the last 4Hero LP. I'd draw a parallel here with people procaliming that they either like or dislike grime solely as a result of hearing the M.I.A. LP (apologies for bringing it up again). if you listen to grime that makes no sense.

I wasn't saying that I was dismissing it because of the last 4 Hero album, merely that I'd stopped paying attention to their work after that (snoozeworthy) effort.

 

[bassnation]

I wasn't saying that I was dismissing it because of the last 4 Hero album, merely that I'd stopped paying attention to their work after that (snoozeworthy) effort.

there were some good tunes on that album - i'm thinking about the more industrial reinforced style dnb efforts - but the jazzy stuff - yuck.

 

[Pearsall]

there were some good tunes on that album - i'm thinking about the more industrial reinforced style dnb efforts - but the jazzy stuff - yuck.

Yeah, weren't there two parts to it, one jazzy/fusiony and one Reinforced-style? I sold my copy off a while ago.

 

[ladyboygrimsby]

lol, why is there this assumption that everyone on this forum is middle class? i grew up on a council estate and still don't like jazz funk fusion, so where does that leave your theory, eh?

besides, no-one is having a go at chi-lites, just the smug wine-bar fusion side of things.

just as a point of interest, when was the last tek9 or tom & jerry project? i've got some t&j from 1994, but thats abotu it.

I'm not suggesting everyone on the forum is middle class (though I'd wager the majority are), but there is an argument - and I'm not saying everyone here subscribes to it - that suggests that the gritty urban sound of, say, grime, evokes black youth better than broken beat does, probably because it sounds disenfranchised.

In many ways, what 4Hero and Bugz In The Attic and all those guys are doing is a continuum that goes back as far as Crackers in the early 70s, with the jazz dancing and continues right through to the Horseshoe, Electric Ballroom and Dingwalls up to now. Personally, I don't care for the more fusion end of broken beat, but this stuff is as valid and real as grime and it has genuine roots in the black community, certainly in London (and Bristol and Manchester) that go back 30 years.

I don't necessarily think that all black music aspire to slickness at all. Most funk records are anything but slick, James Brown stuff might be tight but I wouldn't describe it as slick. I don't know whether that's simply a case of the studios that were available back then or an aesthetic choice in the control room, though. Who knows? I think it's a natural working class aspiration, though, to want to simulate and emulate symbols of wealth and that's certainly something evident in black music culture from Berry Gordy and Chic to hip hop's bling.

I like Acid Jazz, too. Well some of it. Stories by Izit is a classic.

 

[blissblogger]

>early hiphop? booty, miami bass? bad brains? funk carioca? dub? early house? getto-tec?

touche, and i was wondering if anyone was going to come back at me for that massive generalisation!

however, i would say this: there's black music that's lo-fi of necessity but i don't think it ever makes a virtue or a fetish of sloppiness etc in the way that white alt-rockers from nyc punk rock to swell maps to pavement to... do

with early hip hop and dub and early house the lo-fi hiss and crackle is just a byproduct of the means of production available to them, they were going for the best sound they could get from their gear

yeah you're right w/ the booty-bass-baile continuum, i spose

but Bad Brains actually is proof positive of my point, those guys were incredibly slick musicians! before being Bad Brains they were a jazz-rock fusion band called Mind Power! when you saw them live even at their most hardcore you could tell they had amazing fluency and technique, and HR's singing had this weird blend of snarl and exquisite delicacy

that's one of the hallmarks (and downfalls, often) of black rock, they're all so into technique and the virtuoso trip

like Vernon Reid with his Eddie Van Halen fetish and desire "to more smoothly incorporate intervallic skips into my playing"

 

[captain easychord]

can't help but bring up the new school breaks' thing with funkiness. it's this fetishization taken to the n'th degree where every single DJ has not only "funk" in their name, but the dreaded "phunk". phat, phunk.... so cheesy.

 

[hint]

I wasn't saying that I was dismissing it because of the last 4 Hero album, merely that I'd stopped paying attention to their work after that (snoozeworthy) effort.

yeah - sorry... that was unfair, I didn't mean to address you directly with that comment.

I was clumsily attempting to make the wider observation that there's more to the broken beat genre than the previous (or even current) form of some of the leading artists might suggest. they use different names for a reason.

 

[dominic]

there's black music that's lo-fi of necessity but i don't think it ever makes a virtue or a fetish of sloppiness etc in the way that white alt-rockers from nyc punk rock to swell maps to pavement to... do

with early hip hop and dub and early house the lo-fi hiss and crackle is just a byproduct of the means of production available to them, they were going for the best sound they could get from their gear

yes, but they often make a virtue of "ruffness," though they use technique to achieve a ruff sound -- indeed, why do so many acts put "ruff" in their name if they're not very consciously striving to achieve such a sound -- and this is true of hip hop to dancehall to grime and back to breakbeat hardcore, i.e., so many acts and labels calling themselves ruff

the other intentionally anti-virtuosic aspect of some black music is "rawness" -- and to my mind a lot of early house was quite self-consciously raw -- e.g., in a song like lnr's "work it to the bone," the chant refers not only to dancers working it on the floor but also to the raw sound of the track

of course as soon as most house producers had the technology in hand, they began to make lush & deep productions -- even so i think that rawness remains a quality that many black producers intentionally try to capture

 

[dominic]

In many ways, what 4Hero and Bugz In The Attic and all those guys are doing is a continuum that goes back as far as Crackers in the early 70s, with the jazz dancing and continues right through to the Horseshoe, Electric Ballroom and Dingwalls up to now. Personally, I don't care for the more fusion end of broken beat, but this stuff is as valid and real as grime and it has genuine roots in the black community, certainly in London (and Bristol and Manchester) that go back 30 years.

i think ladyboy grimsby is on the mark with this comment

and wasn't there a (prematurely aborted) thread on dissensus about the hardcore continuum stretching back before breakbeat hardcore into "ragga hip hop" and adrian sherwood-type stuff -- and then back to what?

that is, maybe in the uk there's been 30 years of fusion-y black sounds, and perhaps 20 years or so of hardcore sounds . . . .

not sure how this works out in usa and jamaica

maybe white folks prefer the more hardcore sounds b/c such sounds are more akin to rock'n'roll = iggy pop and so forth

OR RATHER, perhaps we're using a white rock paradigm to make sense of black music

grime & breakbeat hardcore = iggy pop & garage rock

slick broken beats stuff = ?????? -- or perhaps this music is in some ways too black in that it evades easy comparison to white musical expression ----- or perhaps it's akin to phil collins or the west coast jazz noodlings of dave brubeck and others

(and yet shouldn't the challenge be to understand black music on its own terms? or is it rather the case that even though black music has shaped all popular music for past 200 years or so, certain aspects of the black music experience are inaccessible to outsiders? -- which is to say that whites necessarily translate black music into more familiar terms? -- or am i needlessly resorting to mystification?)

 

[Pearsall]

slick broken beats stuff = ?????? -- or perhaps this music is in some ways too black in that it evades easy comparison to white musical expression ----- or perhaps it's akin to phil collins or the west coast jazz noodlings of dave brubeck and others

I would have thought that it's kind of easy drawing white comparisons.

The fetishizing of technical virtuosity = Jam bands and IDM.

Fetishizing (and ripping) off a particular sort of 1970's/early 80's sound = Post-post-punk

Beerbellied table-poundin' "real music for grown-ups" rhetoric = Several million modern white musicians doing curatorial country, rock, and dance music (ie Nuphonic-style 'dad house')

 

[dominic]

I would have thought that it's kind of easy drawing white comparisons

the comparisons you make are reasonable -- but not convincing (though i can't for the moment say why i'm not convinced)

HOWEVER, to get back to ladyboy's point -- isn't it rather the case that hardcore sounds are structurally related to fusion-y sounds -- i.e, the fusion sounds antedate the hardcore sounds = you can only go hardcore in response to fusion

so maybe the moments are as follows:

(1) original funky music

(2) sophisticated fusion sounds

(3) hardcore sounds

such that all black music moves through these moments, participates in this argument

 

[gumdrops]

however, i would say this: there's black music that's lo-fi of necessity but i don't think it ever makes a virtue or a fetish of sloppiness etc in the way that white alt-rockers from nyc punk rock to swell maps to pavement to... do

yes, black music values professionalism, good playing, tight musicianship etc (what do you expect though - the white masses declared that black music wasnt 'real' music which must have been ingrained on some level in the minds of many black musicians so maybe they tried their best to counter that acusation by playing as good as possible)

but to go against the generalisation, how about: prince (dirty mind, the mixes for sign o the times were pretty demo-like if not actually lo-fi in a beck sense), funkadelic, sly stone, dangelo circa voodoo, virtually all east coast hip hop from 84 or thereabouts (run dmc's first LP) to 1994... all these people purposely made a point of being sloppy, loose, etc etc. you can probably also include many early rural blues artists (rock critics and fans tend to prefer their blues acoustic or rough rather than the stuff made by big bands and blues queens that was more popular and 'tighter').

 

[dominic]

The fetishizing of technical virtuosity = Jam bands and IDM.

or you could say it's a jazz thing

Fetishizing (and ripping) off a particular sort of 1970's/early 80's sound = Post-post-punk

except that the broken beats thing is not so much a new retro phenomenon, but as was said upthread a "new name" for long-existing currents in urban soul and house music -- and the artists and fans see this music as constantly pushing things forward -- incrementally so, but still forward

whereas retro-post-punk is a self-conscious return after many years spent away from the source material -- and it isn't taking anything forward

Beerbellied table-poundin' "real music for grown-ups" rhetoric = Several million modern white musicians doing curatorial country, rock, and dance music (ie Nuphonic-style 'dad house')

this is the most valid but also the most sweeping point that you make

maybe the "real music for grown ups" thing has something to do w/ young turks realizing that they're part of a community that extends back in time -- i.e., they begin as hardcore operators, but they eventually assume the concerns of their progenitors (and with dance music, it all goes back to the 70s, i.e., when you first had discotheques and dance music as such)

again, i say all of this despite my pronounced preference for the rough and the raw

and when it comes to more "mature" dance sounds, i prefer classic knuckles/morales stuff or balearic stuff -- not anything new that strives for sophistication

 

[Pearsall]

the comparisons you make are reasonable -- but not convincing (though i can't for the moment say why i'm not convinced)

They weren't meant to be like hyper-convincing, just silly.

 

[blissblogger]

yes, black music values professionalism, good playing, tight musicianship etc (what do you expect though - but to go against the generalisation, how about: prince (dirty mind, the mixes for sign o the times were pretty demo-like if not actually lo-fi in a beck sense), funkadelic, sly stone, dangelo circa voodoo, virtually all east coast hip hop from 84 or thereabouts (run dmc's first LP) to 1994... all these people purposely made a point of being sloppy, loose, etc etc. you can probably also include many early rural blues artists (rock critics and fans tend to prefer their blues acoustic or rough rather than the stuff made by big bands and blues queens that was more popular and 'tighter').

i'm not sure prince is a good argument for the case that's there selfconsciously amateurish black music, surely he's all about daintiness and supreme skill... he might at various points use more lo-fi sounds, though, i'm not sure about though -- dirty mind isn't sloppy, it's uptight, neurotic New Wave/funk merger -- and i can't hear what you're saying in re. Sign of the Times, there's playing on there that's like Santana for chrissakes!

the thing about black music is that even when it's raw'n'ruff it's supertight -- look at james brown's tightly drilled funk regiments -- most of the players in P-funk were ace technically, surely (bootsy-as-jimi-of-bass guitar, worrell etc)... Sly Stone only goes from slick to slack with There Goes A Riot, which is all about being fucked up

re. dominic's point, it's a dialectic innit, back and forth between ruff 'n' smooth

also in re UK soulboyism and jazzfunk fandom, it's as much a white thing as a black thing... the ginger twat in Spandau Ballet, he would go on about how his favorite artists were Ronnie Laws and Gato Barbieri and Grover Washington... there was a whole jazzfunky culture based Robbie Vincent and souljazz weekenders... totally mixed racially ... Danny Baker wrote a piece in NME on this scene in which he started with a long rant about how failed-funky and dead-below-the-waist Gang of Four, A Certain Ratio and the rest of the avant-funk cru were, and how the true funk was on the furry-dice underground, bands like LIght of the World and Beggar & Co. i was supposed to be going on his show re. Rip It Up and was planning to bring it up (Beggar & Co, enduring musical reference point, eh, Dan?)

actually 'true working class soulboys' Spandau used Beggar & Co's horn section come to think of it

i would say that a more crucial determinant is class, slickness and foregrounded skill connoting 'qualiteee', 'the finer things in life', aspirationalism etc

this thing about understanding black music on its own terms is fine up to a point, but i think music's history is all about creative misunderstandings/misreadings by white folk of black music... and i don't really know if it's possible or desirable to somehow achieve a kind of preconception-free translucence of mind whereby you don't bring anything to the table when you listen to something

in other words, without our cultural biases, what would we actually be? where would we write from?

 

[gumdrops]

without addressing each point individually right now, i just wanted to say that this idea that being conscious of what youre doing = art and not being conscious of it = accidental, i.e. no intelligence being used, they play by instinct, its all primal, etc etc seems a bit redolent of the age old idea that black art is merely oozed out while white art is 'intelligent' and the result of real thinking going on. im not sure if intent should be such a high factor in how we view the end result. ted nugent always thought of as the funk brothers from motown as playing really loose and free and as he depressingly put it 'like a nigger'. they on the other hand, likely thought of it as being tight, taut, and fierce. its always assumed isnt it that black musicians dont 'think' about anything they make (other than in jazz), while white artists, its assumed, do.

 

[AshRa]

but to go against the generalisation, how about: prince (dirty mind, the mixes for sign o the times were pretty demo-like if not actually lo-fi in a beck sense), funkadelic, sly stone, dangelo circa voodoo, virtually all east coast hip hop from 84 or thereabouts (run dmc's first LP) to 1994... all these people purposely made a point of being sloppy, loose, etc etc.

But surely that's what makes THE FUNK isn't it - being so tight that you can do sloppy style with finesse...?

I can't think of anyone with more FUNK than the people you mentioned above (except JB of course)