Funky/London/UK House

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gumdrops

Well-known member
a bit from paul gilroy on funky's apparent lack of funk:

"I am an agnostic when it comes to the "rudeness" comparison. I suppose my basic difficulty is that the misnamed "funky" and its adjacent styles are a problem precisely because they aren't remotely interested in bringing the funk. That has always been a dividing line for me. I haven't gone deeply into soca/grime but "funky" often sounds just like soca to me and has some of the same small island rapture that made that unlistenable."
 
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Tim F

Well-known member
It's an interesting POV but I don't know if it really works when you break it down to actual tracks.

Like, he's totally right that funky's notion of "funky" is increasingly divorced from that of conventional funky house, but beyond that, I see funky's rhythmic sensibility breaking down three ways:

1) the lumbering stiffness of grime (e.g. "Seasons")
2) the sharp sophistication of broken beat (e.g. "In The Morning")
3) the tautness of dancehall (already kind of halfway between the above two - e.g. "Inflation")

Now I think you can rate all of these in terms of their distance from conventional notions of funk but only the first group strikes me as arguably oppositional to funk per se - and even then there the whole purpose is to create a so-unfunky-it's-funky vibe.

(within and throughout all of these groups soca and house-qua-house act as counterveiling forces by keeping things tethered to a 4X4 thump, which I think neither pushes the music towards or further away from a sense of "funk")
 
U

UFO over easy

online mahjong
even after breaking it all down rhythmically like that things are complicated by how those rhythms sound in the mix with US stuff and other kinds of crazy different and varied house music. its important to acknowledge especially when you have djs like mak 10 who regularly play 40 tunes in an hour from loads of different places

also should be pointed out that the quote gumdrops isolated sounds a lot more hostile to the music on its own than it does in the context of that whole email on lower end spasm http://dot-alt.blogspot.com/2009/05/new-dialogues-regeneration-participant.html
 
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Tentative Andy

Tentative Andy

I'm in the Meal Deal
At the usual risk of stating the bleeding obvious -
The name 'funky' seems to have developed much more out of the where the music comes from than what it sounds like - i.e. its roots in funky house (which I don't think is all that conventionally funky either, to be fair, but was obviously trying to be, with the use of percussion and so forth).
So if there's a problem, it's with the potentially misleading name rather than with the music, surely. I don't think you can say that a style of music is necesseraly bad because it's not funky, at some level that's always going to be a taste judgement. Also, I'm not at all certain that people are making this music with the intention of it sounding like traditional funk music, so it may be a case of assessing it according to categories that don't apply.
To clarify, I do that this new style of house (or post-house?) music that we now have in the UK is rhythmically exciting in a lot of ways, but not always ways that have much to do with funk, at least in a narrow sense of the term.
Also, just saying that soca is 'unlistenable' isn't much of an arugment by itself (and also untrue imo!).
 
slackk

slackk

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Nah, for me the name has no real bearing on what the stuff sounds like at all. If anything, it's the same situation as grime wherein the label is attached to a large network of individuals making music without much regard for following a particular format.
It's just the name that's been allocated to this current generation's output between 123-133, that's all. As much as there's the very formulaic tracks all with the same soca pattern etc, the stuff that's being done outside of that varies massively from producer to producer.

I'm not just hearing Africa or JA or Dancehall or Soca, I'm hearing everything. "In The Morning" sounds like 80s rnb funk to an extent. The only thing that unites it is 4/4 and London (kind of).
 
Tentative Andy

Tentative Andy

I'm in the Meal Deal
Yeah, I'd pretty much agree with you, Slakk. I think there is a rough sort of beat template that's emerged, that is a little more specific than just 4/4. Not sure what you'd call it or how you'd precisely describe it, think it's to do with where you place the snares. But it's stil certainly a template that allows for loads of variation and different interpretations.
 
Tentative Andy

Tentative Andy

I'm in the Meal Deal
Tentative Andy said:
. I think there is a rough sort of beat template that's emerged, that is a little more specific than just 4/4.
Click to expand...

Thinking on this a bit more, I reckon the term I want to use is the clave, that basic 3:2 beat pattern. But that's not really precise enough, because only sometimes in funky/UK house/whatever we want to call it is the pattern stated explicitly, often it's more implied, or else a related but different pattern is used. Also, while this kind of rhythm is prominent on top of the tracks, the traditonal 4 x 4 pulse of house is usually an element of them too, albeit often buried quite far down in the mix. That's actually a big part of what I like about the music, that there's a certain tension in it, it's like the tracks are equally rolling forwards and jerking backwards at the same time.

Quoting one's self feels very decadent. ;)
 
slackk

slackk

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Tentative Andy said:
That's actually a big part of what I like about the music, that there's a certain tension in it, it's like the tracks are equally rolling forwards and jerking backwards at the same time.
Click to expand...

Yeah I can agree with this. Especially in tracks like Funky Roller/What Goes Around & some others that I can't think of right now.
 
T

Tim F

Well-known member
Granted that the name "funky" is inherited, I think that in an odd way it does have purchase.

With the benefit of hindsight it's clear that a big part of the appeal of more conventional funky house was, perhaps from the beginning (or certainly from 2005), a certain allegiance to syncopation, the push-'n'-pull between the 4X4 kick and the counter-rhythm patterns on top, which perseveres in current funky.

Hence the Dennis Ferrer mix of "The Cure and the Cause" being such a pivotal track in the UK scene's emergence as a distinct (though not necessarily original or innovative at that stage) scene in itself.

While soca patterns have a huge role within current funky, it's also clear that they don't exhaust the current rhythmic template of the genre (no-one in this thread is saying it does - I just want to be clear). In this sense that soca beat could be said to occupy the same role as the basic 2-step beat in garage - lots of tracks use it or a variation of it, but it's only the most obvious of many forms the rhythmic template thows up.

However, I think you could characterise the overall rhythmic template as being one in which counter-rhythms are given a more decisive and prominent role, at times resulting in the abolition of the 4X4 kick (e.g. "A Little Bit Funky" or "Always Be Mine" - though even on tunes like these the absent kick has an implied presence in a way it didn't in, say, 2-step).

Off the top of my head I can't think of many tunes at all which just use a straight house beat with no counter-rhythmic adornment. That awsome Spryo tune on Marcus Nasty's November set with all the MCs toasting on top comes to mind, but even there there was a counter-rhythmic 5-pulse-per-bar chord which provided the same push'n'pull tension. You don't get really monolithic 1-2-3-4 tracks that predominate in regular house.

It's that sense in which "funky" actually means something still I think - whether it accords with more conservative definitions of funk is a separate question, but I'd say if it did the music probably wouldn't be as interesting...
 
Grievous Angel

Grievous Angel

Beast of Burden
Ice Rink remix is about. Two versions - one vocal, one instrumental that's basically a massive latin percussion work out.

I tried to make them really generic uk funky but they've veered off a bit. Still good though. I think Paul Gilroy is expressing the widely-held critique of post-funk music, that it tends to compress the swing, anticipation and drop of funky into one or two bar phrases at relatively high (>100bpm) tempos, rather than in pure funk's four bar langour. People have been complaining about this since disco took hold. It's a fair point, but Funky still sounds funky to me.

BTW, 70/140bpm halfstep has great potential for the funk, keeping it on the one and dropping the bomb, as people like Joker have made clear.
 
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gabriel

The Heatwave
my problem with gilroy's thing about 'funk' in funky is that it's such a widely used word, to mean so many different things to different people, that it seems ridiculous to start making claims that something does or doesn't have it. there are many more interesting things to say about funky than this.

and yeah the soca/unlistenable/small island rapture comment is weird as well. his other stuff is interesting though, like the african majority thing. someone told me recently that 1 in 8 'black' people (not quite sure the definition of black in this context) in the world is nigerian (also not sure if this means they live in nigeria or were born there or are of nigerian descent, but there's what, 160m people there?) which was interestingly large.
 
B

bungatuffie

New member
gilroy speaks

I didn't mean to recycle anti-disco heresies but rather to point out that the issues of swing, syncopation and what I call "generic thump thump" electronica do correspond directly to the conceptual and critical problems that arise when the racialised attributes of musical styles are articulated.

What is disco? Are Chic funky, is Sharon Redd, are The System, Ian Levine and the South Shore Commission? These questions aren't very interesting. But the problems involved in finding, using, claiming and loving the black in this music are, as this thread reveals, still alive.

Some folks love the blackness they hear but aren't quite so keen on the company of the people whose being invests that quality in the music. This matters as we (hopefully) shift towards a post-exotic relationship with black culture.

Above all, I wanted to highlight the evolving and unstable character of contemporary Britain's (europe's) black communities. Ethiopianism is still there but it is residual. Another, postcolonial Africa is emergent. Does unfunky, funky herald its becoming? probably.
 
A

Algierstwin

Well-known member
SAMI ATACKED, CURRENTLY IN A COMA!
IMPORTANT!!!!!!!!!!
DJ SAMI SANCHEZ WAS ATTACKED BY 7 COWARDS THIS BANK HOLIDAY SUNDAY/MONDAY MORN, OUT SIDE SE1 CLUB IN LONDON BRIDGE AFTER HAVING PLAYED A SET THERE.... HE IS CURRENTLY IN CRITICAL CONDITION AND IN COMA..... PLS PLS PLS ANYONE WHO MAY HAVE SEEN ANYTHING ANY SMALL DETAIL CAN MAKE I HUGE DIFFERENCE, IN CATCHING THE COWARDS THAT DID THIS.... PLS CONTACT PC JOSEPH ON 07500918977......
ANY ONE WHO KNOWS SAMI, WILL KNOW HE IS A FUN LOVING ENERGETIC CHARACTER ,AND HAS NO PROBLEMS WITH NOONE... SO PLS COME FOWARD WITH ANY INFO, SILENCE SHOULD NEVER BE A CHOICE, WHEN A LIFE IS AT STAKE.........

SILENCE IS THE REASON SO MANY PEOPLE GET AWAY WITH THIS SHIT, DESTROYING LIVES AND THE HEARTS OF FAMILIES AND FRIENDS ALONG THE WAY... ITS TIME TO STAND UP AND COME FOWARD!!

http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=116174922&blogId=487340570
 
F

faustus

Well-known member
Algierstwin said:
SAMI ATACKED, CURRENTLY IN A COMA!
IMPORTANT!!!!!!!!!!
DJ SAMI SANCHEZ WAS ATTACKED BY 7 COWARDS THIS BANK HOLIDAY SUNDAY/MONDAY MORN, OUT SIDE SE1 CLUB IN LONDON BRIDGE AFTER HAVING PLAYED A SET THERE.... HE IS CURRENTLY IN CRITICAL CONDITION AND IN COMA..... PLS PLS PLS ANYONE WHO MAY HAVE SEEN ANYTHING ANY SMALL DETAIL CAN MAKE I HUGE DIFFERENCE, IN CATCHING THE COWARDS THAT DID THIS.... PLS CONTACT PC JOSEPH ON 07500918977......
ANY ONE WHO KNOWS SAMI, WILL KNOW HE IS A FUN LOVING ENERGETIC CHARACTER ,AND HAS NO PROBLEMS WITH NOONE... SO PLS COME FOWARD WITH ANY INFO, SILENCE SHOULD NEVER BE A CHOICE, WHEN A LIFE IS AT STAKE.........

SILENCE IS THE REASON SO MANY PEOPLE GET AWAY WITH THIS SHIT, DESTROYING LIVES AND THE HEARTS OF FAMILIES AND FRIENDS ALONG THE WAY... ITS TIME TO STAND UP AND COME FOWARD!!

http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=116174922&blogId=487340570
Click to expand...


fuck that
 
slackk

slackk

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Marcus B2B Mak10 now. Although that seems a bit irrelevant after reading that.

Is there a worse song than the Love Lockdown cover, by the way?
 
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