An overview of the genre

As we have previously argued, in many respects funk was essentially a development of soul rather than a distinctive genre in its own right. However, the sheer radicalism of the sound of funk in terms of its explicit challenge to popular music structure, instrumentation, lyrics and affect means that the form merits its own chapter. In addition, its legacy on musical genres of the past thirty years is almost immeasurable - the funkbased breakbeat is one of the principal rhythmic building blocks in contemporary pop, with wide utilisation in most major genres of popular music. For this reason, and owing to the strong similarities between soul and funk in areas such as social and historical background, this chapter will be rather imbalanced, concentrating upon the musical texts and subsequent developments at the partial expense of the other headings.

From its roots in gospel, soul and jazz (where the term, in its musical sense, originates: see Palmer 1995: 238-9), funk began to carve a distinctive niche in the late 1960s. This occurred in the hands of diverse musicians such as James Brown and his band(s), Sly and the Family Stone, and the Meters, and in specific locations such as Memphis and New Orleans.

Funk differed from soul in several ways:

• Funk was more concerned with the concept of a highly syncopated, relentless ‘groove’ rather than traditional song structures built upon a smooth ‘pulse’.

• Funk employed an insistent riff more extensively than soul.

• Funk changed the role and emphasis of instruments within the sound mix, bringing hitherto partially subsumed elements to the fore and ‘relegating’ lead instruments to subsidiary, rhythmic duties.

• Funk often used vocals and lyrics as verbal ‘punctuations’ rather than melodic deliverers of coherent messages, and it constructed polyrhythmic tracks full of syncopated gaps, with intermeshed, often staccato ‘stabs’ of sound functioning as part of a whole, rather than being significant as individual elements.

All of these individual dimensions can be found throughout popular music. The use of groove or of syncopation can be applied in any genre of music to bring a certain degree of ‘funkiness’.