Here Are Four Reasons I Love Funk Music.

(n.b. + because it's funky!)

(Translation: Holy Shit you've just typed out my exact thoughts on the matter of funk!)

Although I was kinda expecting a humorist list something like:

1. Cause I can shake my ass to it.

2. Cause I can shake my ass to it.

3. When I take my girl to a funk show, you KNOW what's going on when we get home.

4. Cause I can shake my ass to it.

Not to be a killjoy, but it's unparalleled in modern pop music, but not in other kinds of music. Actually, the 20th Century was all about rhythmic variation, in all kinds of music. What JB did is analogous, in a way, to Henry Cowell, just JB didn't write books about it.

Uh, yeah.

Okay with "modern" classical music...but wasn't the first half of the century somewhat obsessed with the 12-tone system instead of rhythmic stuff? (I really don't know, so please let me know more about it.)

But more importantly: Henry Cowell, Charles Ives, all these dudes: fascinating, interesting, cool as hell, etc.--but they had nowhere near the world-wide impact that James Brown and Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix had. They changed the way people thought about music much more than did any classical composer. But I'm agreeing with you. Rock and roll.

As for your question about 12-tone, well Serialism was more of a Western European thing (although obv. some Americans compose using the method), and the people I'm thinking of, while in the "modern classical" vein to a degree, are really considered more American mavericks/outsiders. People like Cowell, Lou Harrison, John Cage (his prepared piano seems to me to be a form of "rhythm...be[ing] melody").

I really like your four reasons btw, very well articulated.

...12 tone gobbeldy-gook? It's an artificial structure, too mechanized to be embraced for any aesthetic or "visceral" (human) reasons.

What have you got left to work with when you trash the melody? Why is the beat of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring so bad-ass? Rhythm. Hellooo pop music! : )

I think it was in response to someone who asked "why the hell do you like funk music so much?"

ONE! TWO! THREE! HIT ME!!

I am being self indulgent right now but I am listen to Jean Terrel "How can you live without love" pretty much on repeat. I love funk because it is always a lift, even when you feel like life is a bit bewildering and your feeling sad, just put on the tunes, turn up the volume and shake that ass. Instant feel good factor. Thank funk for errrr funk.

Why would someone ask why you like funk music? Remove yourself from their company ASAP.

funk is its own reward

1. Makes me want to dance.
2. Makes me think I'm much cooler than I actually am when listening to it.
3. Makes the kind of people I love horny as hell / Separates the wheat from the chaff.
4. Hours and hours worth of samples and bin-hunts.

OTM Moka, especially like number 3 ;)

What James Brown did by inverting the "Western" or "white" (or whatever) paradigm of emphasizing melody over rhythm is unparalleled in modern music. He flipped the script, and so did everyone else who came along after him to say that rhythm could in fact BE melody

I don't know about this. It seems like there was tons of folk and blues music that had limited harmonic movement and put an emphasis on rhythm long before James Brown. Not to minimize James Brown or anything but I don't think that "justification" for funk makes any sense at all.

At most of son's high school baseball games at home or at schools elsewhere, they usually play lots of Springsteen and other rock hits, but at a recent away game they played Parliament; some other funk I did not recognize; Afrika Bambaata; Kool & the Gang; Sugarhill Gang and Run-DMC... I was digging it but couldn't tell what the other parents in the bleachers thought (or the players in the dugouts). I said to one parent "they're playing lots of stuff from the late 70s and early 80s, aren't they?" but didn't get much a reaction.

bet the other parent is like, yeah but where's the

http://images.artistdirect.com/Images/artd/amg/music/bio/583722_smashmouth2_200x200.jpg

What James Brown did by inverting the "Western" or "white" (or whatever) paradigm of emphasizing melody over rhythm is unparalleled in modern music. He flipped the script, and so did everyone else who came along after him to say that rhythm could in fact BE melody, including reggae and hip-hop and techno. This is my "intellectual" justification when I actually think of it. I hardly ever do, though.

I understand what the OP is saying though. Good for Neudonym for not dwelling on it. I like all of the textures in funk and r & b but who says innovation can't be fun.

I guess you could say that James Brow popularized that approach, but yeah, all you need to do is look into the history of jazz to find plenty of pre-James Brown examples of that: Art Blakey's Orgy in Rhythm albums, Jack McDuff's "Soulful Drums", Lionel Hampton's "Jack the Bellboy", etc.