The big difference between funky and grime circa 2002 is that at the same time as making instrumentals for MCs producers are also making full-fledged songs (and often it's the same producers! Screama, Champion, Naughty, Ill Blu etc.)
I don't know if there were any big 2-step vocal anthems in 2002, though someone may be able to correct me. "Gotta Get Through This" doesn't count as it had been big on the scene since the beginning of 2001 at least. Everything else I can remember were commissioned remixes of major label acts e.g. Misteeq.
The full-bore 2 hour MC (and by extension MC-track) only funky radio set is actually a bit of a rarity in funky, the formula usually being something more like 2 loopy instrumentals for every 1 full-fledged song, if you amortise them across an entire set.
What funky doesn't make is epic slowbuild instrumentals that weave in lots of disparate elements gradually over course of the song (as opposed to Night Slugs as per martin's initial comparison, but also as opposed to a lot of the more accomplished jungle/drum & bass) (also this itself is a distortive generalisation: tunes like "Time To Get Nasty" or "Inflation" or "Windrush Riddim" or "Fuller" might make the grade. At any rate I think martin's point was that from his perspective funky doesn't do this enough).
But it's not merely grime that avoided or avoids this: that habit is also missing from dancehall, from mainstream rap, from mainstream R&B - almost any populist vocal-heavy "dance music" (in the broad sense of the term). Even more radically: reggaeton, soca, kuduro, juke.
On the slow-build epic side you've got: some (not contemporary) jungle, some dubstep, techno, non-populist-house, broken beat.
(these are non-exhaustive lists but I expect the dynamic I'm describing will apply to anything else you care to mention)
The defining disparity is the medium: not surprisingly everything in the second group tended or tends to be vinyl fetishist (that's not a criticism btw).
Whereas everything in the first column tends to be experienced by way of radio or the club or (if applicable) video clips. There's an in-built expectation that the listener's engagement with a track is likely to be more transient, is not going to involve them listening and appraising the tune in isolation as a discrete artifact. There's also an expectation that the listener's attention is going to be diverted by whatever vocals are present, such that the arrangement is likely to be only part of the story.
So it's not surprising that the arrangements favour impact over internal development, that effectively a funky tune might have only 8 bars worth of musical variety (but those 8 bars are killer).
To my mind this simply aligns it more closely with a whole bunch of genres (but, as I've said with annoying repetition in this thread, dancehall in particular) that take this approach. It's not some trend which is unique to funky by any means - though of course almost by definition its specific manifestation is.
I don't know if there were any big 2-step vocal anthems in 2002, though someone may be able to correct me. "Gotta Get Through This" doesn't count as it had been big on the scene since the beginning of 2001 at least. Everything else I can remember were commissioned remixes of major label acts e.g. Misteeq.
The full-bore 2 hour MC (and by extension MC-track) only funky radio set is actually a bit of a rarity in funky, the formula usually being something more like 2 loopy instrumentals for every 1 full-fledged song, if you amortise them across an entire set.
What funky doesn't make is epic slowbuild instrumentals that weave in lots of disparate elements gradually over course of the song (as opposed to Night Slugs as per martin's initial comparison, but also as opposed to a lot of the more accomplished jungle/drum & bass) (also this itself is a distortive generalisation: tunes like "Time To Get Nasty" or "Inflation" or "Windrush Riddim" or "Fuller" might make the grade. At any rate I think martin's point was that from his perspective funky doesn't do this enough).
But it's not merely grime that avoided or avoids this: that habit is also missing from dancehall, from mainstream rap, from mainstream R&B - almost any populist vocal-heavy "dance music" (in the broad sense of the term). Even more radically: reggaeton, soca, kuduro, juke.
On the slow-build epic side you've got: some (not contemporary) jungle, some dubstep, techno, non-populist-house, broken beat.
(these are non-exhaustive lists but I expect the dynamic I'm describing will apply to anything else you care to mention)
The defining disparity is the medium: not surprisingly everything in the second group tended or tends to be vinyl fetishist (that's not a criticism btw).
Whereas everything in the first column tends to be experienced by way of radio or the club or (if applicable) video clips. There's an in-built expectation that the listener's engagement with a track is likely to be more transient, is not going to involve them listening and appraising the tune in isolation as a discrete artifact. There's also an expectation that the listener's attention is going to be diverted by whatever vocals are present, such that the arrangement is likely to be only part of the story.
So it's not surprising that the arrangements favour impact over internal development, that effectively a funky tune might have only 8 bars worth of musical variety (but those 8 bars are killer).
To my mind this simply aligns it more closely with a whole bunch of genres (but, as I've said with annoying repetition in this thread, dancehall in particular) that take this approach. It's not some trend which is unique to funky by any means - though of course almost by definition its specific manifestation is.
