What the Fu*k is Funk?

i wonder if swearing your fuckin' head off around here blocks the page to some office saps?

Foundations laid on the chitlin circuit, James Brown invents it, Sly takes it to another level, Clinton and crew take it to a whole nother level, with Ohio Players and too many others to mention manning the ramparts. Stevie Wonder takes it to #1 with "Superstition". See The Funky 16 Corners, the second Stax-Volt box, Afrique's "House of the Rising Funk" for further details.

you have to be able to get busy in the back of a ford to it. that's funk.

It was actually invented as a jazz style years before that, although more subtle & bouncy.

Dunno about funk, but according to George Clinton, soul is chitlins foo young. Sounds pretty good to me.

As Jez sez, see also swing. Funk is just swing with platforms on.

a common word used by conservative music journos to shit on electronic music missing a certain degree of danceability " hey this shit is completely funkless"

That's the problem - heaps of music can be very danceable but not funky: industrial, 50s & 60s pop, waltzes, charlestons etc. etc.
So where do you draw the line?
Kraftwerk inspired funky music, but were they funky themselves?
Autechre are inspired by funky music, but are they funky themselves?
Can music that goes doof doof doof doof (I mean disco/house/techno/trance, and I'm deliberately oversimplifying - I don't mean to disparage them) really be funky?
Did jungle take the funk out of funk by speeding it up?
Is black pop funky any more? Did Timbaland invent a completely new kind of rhythm, or is it just a continuation of the funk?

Why aren't Funk and Soul loaded concepts like Rock(ism) and Pop?

music that goes doof doof doof doof

That's exactly how it sounds to me.

i think that the song 'funky 16 corners' is hilarious. 16 TIMES!! BOMP! BOMP! BOMP! BOMP! BOMP! BOMP! BOMP! BOMP! BOMP! BOMP! BOMP! BOMP! BOMP! BOMP! BOMP! BOMP! OOOOOOOOOWWW!

i often hear people describing funk as paying a lot of attention to the spaces between notes. I think that the funkiest beat is just a simple kick/snare (boom bap, as it were) with more complex rhythm in the bassline. also a somewhat lagging drummer is a plus. and its about tension/release, thus dancing and sexual etc.

Keith they totally are loaded concepts - don't know if you were around on ILM when the first big Doompatrol pow-wow got going but so much of that was based on him using "soul" as a hot-button word. And for instance I think that the idea of stuff having "the funk" is mystical bullshit but then again I surely haven't got it or want it so what do I know?

There are certain words which basically get used to mean "I like this" but with a bit more flavour than that phrase carries. So "this rocks", or "perfect pop", or "it has soul" or "it has the funk" - gives you a bare minimum of info about the music but is handy for communicating something about the kind of things the user values.

Why aren't Funk and Soul loaded concepts?

They are, aren't they? If someone asks "who are the best soul singers", you end up with a list of great (and boring) singers being listened to/examined in the most drearifying possible way (ie for what makes them alike, not what makes them difft). And "funk" (loaded version) just means "all european music ever is rubbish, why do you even bother listening?"

bah tom-mark unfunky mindmeld

Autechre are inspired by funky music, but are they funky themselves?

Listen to "Dael" and you'll bust out your rhinestone-glasses!

Soul and funk are both totally loaded terms that get thrown around with reckless abandon, but if you're discussing the *genre* of funk, there are some very, very specific musical characteristics that denote "funky" (eg, btwn a certain bpm range - I forget what it is offhand, drum accents on 1 and 3 beat, horn lines starting on the 2 beat, repetitive bass line figures that lope ahead of the drums, etc.)

The Uhuru Maggot's book "Funk!" is an excellent resource, tracing the roots of the term "funk", its development as a music style, etc.

Uhuru Maggot is Rickey Vincent.

[...]the musical output of black America around 1970 had changed towards funk - music which was still by predominantly black artists but generally not 4/4 (on the one and the three - James Brown would famously say. Although Brown is known as the 'Godfather of Soul', his musical style defines the difference between soul and funk - his being funk - in British cultural terminolgy, his music being harder and more guitar based and unlike the swirling string and brass sections of the 1960's upbeat soul)

http://www.jahsonic.com/Funk.html

Yours
Jan