What We Are About Here at Music on the One

"What is Soul? Soul is the ring around your bathtub..." — Funkadelic, "What is Soul" (1970) Welcome to the funkiest c...

Sunday, November 26, 2017

What We Are About Here at Music on the One

"What is Soul? Soul is the ring around your bathtub..."
— Funkadelic, "What is Soul" (1970)

Welcome to the funkiest corner of the galaxy: "Music on the One" hosted by me DJ EZ Reader, Funk Grammaticologist, Scientist of All Tha Dank Stank. I'm blasting out live on Saturdays, from 1 to 4:30 pm EST on WCCR Rutgers-Camden streaming radio, on the banks of the funky Delaware, directly from Chocolate City, Camden New Jersey.


In the earliest incarnations of CTW show The Electric Company
Easy Reader (Morgan Freeman) was a cool DJ that taught you how to read
(I can relate: I'm a teacher who read about how to be a cool DJ...)

Funk literally means "stank" -- it's the smell of life, the sweat when you dance, the miasma in your bedroom after a night of fun, the whiff of the kitchen, a fart on a crowded train, the undeniable presence of living humans all around you. Worldliness that hangs about your body like clothing, the habit of your existence. Something that's funky can be cool, pleasurable, life-affirming. It can also be the opposite, a bad deal, something that ain't quite right. But it's life no matter how you slice it. Transgressive. Revolutionary. Mythological. Transcendental.

Funk music exploded from late 1960s black culture, rising from the tremors of the Civil Rights Movement, Black Nationalism, the long-standing ghettoization of black music, and the radical response to the Vietnam War. It is the collision of jazz and soul with psychedelia, the reclamation of rock from its appropriators — all injected with deep history, throbbing with political urgency. Its roots go back to Africa and it spread through the black diaspora. Its wisdom was born hard from the failed promises of America, the depredations of its capitalist faith and Richard Nixon's drug war, but shot through with strength of church and community, sopping molasses along the way. Funk is deeply ironic but its ironies are those of the proletariat, the exile, the revolutionary. Funny until it burns down your bodega. Funk signifies in the face of white privilege. It endures and pervades through its attention to the drum, to rhythm, to sound.

Fela Anikulapo Kuti, "The Black President," ca. 1976

Funk is itself built on an inversion of tempo. Most popular musical styles features the downbeat on the two and the four (in 4/4 time). However, Funk drops on the One — and that is what we celebrate here on this show. A music that is inside out, abjected, sticky, threatening to turn your existence inside out—promising to actualize your funkiest possibilities.

Funk was most strongly expressed in the years 1968 to 1974, but lives on still today, most powerfully in hip hop, which built its sound out of funk breaks and beats. Lots of things might fall under the umbrella of Funk: jazz, soul, rock, blues, swamp country, early rap, spoken word poetry, even early electronic genres. Not all of it is dance music, but much will make you move if you let it. Much is party music, but a real head can party and plot revolution at the same time.

Funk is America because America was always a funky deal. Black labor built this country but this country does not want to acknowledge what it owes these millions of hands. The simple, long-overdue idea that Black Lives Matter is enough to reduce some to sputtering incoherence. And almost all American music is appropriated in some way from black expression — Funk just reminds us of the debt.

Back LP cover, Gil Scott-Heron's Pieces of a Man (1971)

Funk is also cosmic, because space is black, comprising infinite light-years of righteous darkness.

But nothing, no matter how beautiful, can last forever. Funk went away as an independent genre. It might be proper to say that disco subsumed the urgency of Funk in the late 70s, bought it out — often produced by white Europeans, appealing to different markets, taking advantage of new technologies, and played in different venues,* but Funk never really went away — and can be seen in the products of dozens of funk tribute bands and neo-soul acts (think the late great Sharon Jones for example). So there's a lot of ground to cover each week even in this long-playing timeslot.

Sharon Jones
Funk is dense, convoluted, and complicated music. It is the art of revolutionaries. It is not designed to conform to your strictures about what black is or what black means. It is built to fuck your binary epistemology right in the brainstem, pee on your institutional biases, and tear down your sonic ghettos.

It has always appealed to crate-diggers and eclectic specialists, but also had its moment in the sun. James Brown, Sly Stone, George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, and others all became famous playing Funk music, but genre goes beyond that to thousands of craggy 45s performed by often-forgotten musicians, burned into the collective memory by their samples.

Vocal and instrumental. Bass and drum. Horn riff and call-out. The sublime build-up to a breath-taking break. Outer space. The secrets of the pyramids. The gold mines of ancient Mali. Down-home country. Hip urban spaces. Cauldrons of time and history. Long painful experience and the explosion of spirit that cannot be constrained by whiteness or concrete.

P-Funk All-Stars in concert

There may be other funk shows out there, and I give props to all who respect the Old School. But Music on the One promises to go deeper, beyond the pale (so to speak), where music is wild and dangerous. We plumb the deepest currents of this powerful stream, and bring you what you will not hear anywhere else. We represent. We are built to appeal to souls and brains, and aim to excavate the future out of the past. With Funk we will build a better world.

That is the Music on the One guarantee. Music. Culture. History. Life. Every Saturday from 1 to 4:30 pm on WCCR.**

Our URL is right here. Listen anytime you like, though right now our shows are clustered during business hours, Monday through Saturday.

WCCR feed

WCCR is an independent student-run station, started in 2016, pumping out on a devoted streaming feed, audio and video both. We're starting small, but hope to get a full schedule of eclectic and various shows going soon. We are supported by RUC's generosity, and you will not hear commercials or pledge drives. What we play is limited only by our (good) taste and (eccentric) knowledge, our unique, enthusiastic DJs free to craft their own radio visions without worrying about algorithms or market share. (We'll have a devoted webpage very soon, complete with current schedule & information...) There will be elbows and missteps, but there will also be brilliance aplenty. Don't miss it.

* And we don't hate on disco here at Music on the One. It's different (though related), and its expression of urban, black, gay, and Latino cultures was met with what could only be called a lynching by white, AOR-oriented audiences in the very early 1980s. Disco doesn't appeal to me that much, but it fits into the great cycle of Funk, so we'll play some from time to time.

** Opinions and analysis appearing on Music on the One or this website belong solely to DJ EZ Reader, and do not represent those of WCCR or its management or Rutgers University-Camden as a whole.

I am happy to engage in constructive dialogue on what appears here or is said on the air, so share your knowledge and experience if you'd like. I have a responsibility to educate as well as entertain, and my love is to learn as much as teach.

But I am not going to give time to white privilege or white supremacy, whether your aggressions are micro or all done grown. You will be blocked and deleted with the quickness.

back cover, Parliament's Funkentelechy vs. The Placebo Syndrome (1977)

PS) I'm a tinkerer and a writer by trade, so no text found on this page can ever be considered fully finished. I'll always be fixing & changing things as I see fit — it's just how I roll. Updates & reconsiderations will appear as they come in all posts, no matter how old. Links & images will accrue as I locate interesting material. I want the playlists to be informative & educational.


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