Idolator
There was little doubt that James Brown's death on Christmas was going to inspire some posthumous re-appraisals (the guy was no angel, after all). But we didn't expect anything like this piece from the U.K. Guardian, in which writer John Harris tries to be contrarian, but winds up coming off like an ill-informed turdsmith:
...let's say it loud: funk is the worst musical genre ever invented, a big old stain on Brown's CV and the cause of at least four decades of grinding misery.
This, I will allow, is less a matter of such trailblazing proto-funk Brown pieces as Papa's Got a Brand New Bag, Sex Machine and I Got the Feelin', as the ongoing nightmare of chronic indulgence and musical slop they undoubtedly spawned. If you doubt this, listen to the supposed high points of the genre: anything by the likes of Tower of Power, pre-disco Kool and the Gang, Cameo before they discovered pop music, or the woeful Ohio Players. And before anyone mentions the peak-period work of George Clinton, I say only this: hats off for the UFO, onstage fancy dress and occasional pearling tune, but did everything have to be so long? (I have a friend who saw Funkadelic in Manchester in 1975 - a six-hour performance, he says, that amounted to an experiment involving the limits of human endurance.)
And that's just the beginning. Some more painful examples after the click-through.
...All that said, funk's acme of unbearability was only reached thanks to two developments: 1) its decisive hybridisation into jazz-funk, surely as awful an invention as, say, the thumbscrews; and 2) as with so many things, its wholesale appropriation by a certain kind of white person. On the latter count, I speak on the basis of experience: though the totemically funksome technique known as slap-bass was probably the invention of the sometime Sly & the Family Stone bass man Larry Graham, I will always associate it with a teenage acquaintance named Steve. He would occasionally drop in on my mod band and borrow our bassist's instrument, using his well-trained right hand to give it the old bink-bap-dip-dup, to nobody's great benefit.
Twenty-five years later, I saw decisive proof of funk's utter evil. On a trip to Clarksdale, Mississippi - one-time home of the blues, now home to a small blues industry - a friend and I were taken on a tour of a part of town that seemed to have been suddenly deserted in around 1975, leaving empty buildings and grass growing through the cracks in the road. Though I naively assumed this was probably down to the mechanisation of the cotton industry, our guide put us right: "Funk did this," he said (really, he did), claiming that, in killing the last traces of the blues, the nightmare genre had also done for his community. Just for a moment, my mind was filled with the image of a bass player dressed up like a BacoFoil model of a partridge, standing at the top of one of the town's taller buildings and blitzing all in front of him with every miserable thwack of his thumb.
So there you have it: Funk was evil, all because this guy once saw a white guy play bass poorly, and because he visited a decrepit Southern town. It's as if all you need to write for the Guardian are some sprawling generalizations and a few iffy anecdotes. Yay, dingbat limeys! Yay, bad journalism!
Funk Did This [Guardian]
Comments
British music obits seem to be unique in their idiocy.
I remember John Entwistle's- I wonder if it was by the same author. The guy claimed the crowning achievement of Entwistle's career was he "had a nice bass break on My Generation" - in other words the guy was so clueless about the music of The Who, rock music, and music in general, that he was unable to even hear the bass guitar, let alone understand its importance, except when he heard it in a solo.
He then went on to make the completely untrue claim that Entwistle was an "awful" singer, based on the one (and apparently only) Who concert he had ever seen. (Of course this concert took place post-2000, when Entwistle was old and near death.)
My favorite comment on this, via ILM: "...I don't think funk caused the massive nationwide agricultural/rural economic decline of the mid 1970s."
wow, it's like one of those reviews that says "i'm probably not the right person to be writing this" only it's longer and snootier, and there's no disclaimer.
p.s. tower of power rule!
Somebody needs to break that dude's kneecaps...
Hey this guy's right about JB. He's barely more significant than Ja Rule's hypeman's hypeman. But talkin shit on Tower of Power and thumbscrews! What other band backed Elton John, Huey Lewis AND Michael Bolton? And what other kind of hardware accessory needs not a driver with which to screw it? Try to answer those questions two and you'll come up with nothing but your own navel lint. Yeah fuck that guy. He sucks worse than James Brown.
did everything have to be so long? (I have a friend who saw Funkadelic in Manchester in 1975 - a six-hour performance, he says, that amounted to an experiment involving the limits of human endurance.)
What, were the exit doors blocked?
You can adapt this as follows:
I have a friend who saw Bruce Springsteen in Hartford, CT in 1975 - a six-hour performance, he says, that amounted to an experiment involving the limits of human endurance.
Who says a funk band can't play (as long as a) rock (band)?
Funk him.
Say what you will about funk, but please, lay off the slap bass.
There's a reasonable think-piece concept buried here - something about how Brown needn't be blamed for what he spawned (even I will admit that a 45-minute single-song funk workout can be tiresome), or a snarky homage to those old Spy magazine "Admit It! It Sucks" columns (especially if it acknowledged the fact that plenty of white folk don't "get" funk and probably don't want to).
But as it stands, this is just a confession to monumental out-of-touchness.
In the man's own immortal words, "Please, Please, Please."
One could argue that funk, like most of the works of Iggy Pop, suffers from a tendency to repetition at high speed over the course of fairly long songs. Repetition at speed is fine for minute-and-a-half punk songs; fast and long songs are fine when there's a good deal of variety... you get where I'm going with this. If you're really high, or dancing or getting rutty or doing the dishes, I guess you don't notice.
Well, yeah, not the greatest of articles, but John Harris did write The Last Party (published as Britpop! in the US) an excellent book about britpop, its roots, effects on society and place in history. One of my favorite books of music criticism (though that's surely affected by my somewhat misplaced nostalgia for the era).
...It's as if all you need to write for the Guardian are some sprawling generalizations and a few iffy anecdotes.
You've just outlined the template for nearly everything Chuck Klosterman has ever published.
Boo-urns.
This guy is the same writer who wrote that drivel on Britpop. Does he really think there would be a "Manchester Sound" without Funky Drummer, and the funk it "spawned". Douchebag.
As the wordsmiths of Extreme once wrote, "If you don't like what you see here, get the FUNK out."
Ahem.
God, what was Harris thinking?! He couldn't have ever thought this was a halfway decent idea, especially right now. I'd almost feel sorry for him if I didn't find his so offensive.
The Mothership needs to abduct this guy and funk him tha hell up. Someone call the Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis Enema Squad!
This is the third time today I've wanted to beat someone to death with a Talking Heads record.
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