Where it all began

Stevie Wonder got me hooked on the Funk back in the 1970's. The man himself performed "Superstition" on Sesame Street in April 1973 but the clip got repeated over & over again. I must have first seen it in 1976 or 1977. The song was utterly unlike anything I ever heard before. Dad listened to solely classical music at the time, Mom was more into easy listening pop (think lots of Neil Diamond and Mac Davis). I was growing up in Boulder, Colorado while my Dad attended the University of Colorado.

Sesame Street has its origins in funky urban spaces. Early skits featured many multicultural ideas and a starring character called Roosevelt Franklin who led urban children to better places in the mind. The spread of the show beyond the confines of NYC also led to a reduction of its black aspects(1) — RF became something less than a minor character—but from the Root comes the Fruit. And the funky sensibilities of the show never really went away. Really, the show's monster allegories were an amazing way to teach difference and how to respect others (there was a reason why conservatives preferred Mister Roger's Neighborhood you know...).

1970 LP featuring Roosevelt Franklin

Funk was not on the menu in my house, nor was it spreading fast by those years. Soon I was hearing the Bee Gees everywhere, seeing every kind of band cop out to disco (remember Kiss' "I Was Made For Loving You"? Elton John and Kiki Dee? Shit, even Pink Floyd got in on some of that four-on-the-floor, hi-hat shit...). But Stevie was something special. A sound I had no way of confirming or understanding. No context. Nothing on the radio that grabbed me in the same way. There was that, and there was the incidental music used whenever Electric Company's Easy Reader (Morgan Freeman (2)) came in.

But those seeds lingered inside me, waiting for the rain to wash them, make them grow. I took in lots of musical influences in the days that freeform radio was still a thing. My dad was a record collector, so it seemed right to start my own: I bought lots of different things, Jethro Tull, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, then veered into Motown, and later so-called "college rock" and punk. I later had one of the many greatest hits albums by James Brown (a nice balanced one too, a double album, with plenty of early 70s heavy funk to go with the soulful 1960s), a healthy amount of Jimi Hendrix, maybe a Sly Stone cassette — that kept the ashes hot. But the 1980s with its disco backlash and the synthesification of funk acts brought no real satisfaction. I enjoyed MJ (very much in secret (3)) and I really loved Prince, but there was no history available to me to feed my soul, to bridge the arc backwards.

That rain came in 1988, with the release of De La Soul's "3 Feet High and Rising" and its exhilarating funk sounds & breaks. That keyboard riff from Funkadelic's "(Not Just) Knee Deep" opened the floodgates for me. Golden Age hip hop came streaming out, with its glorious arcana of funk samples (I especially loved X-Clan, BDP, Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest—others too, but those were the records I had at the time). This was a sound unlike anything I've ever heard, reconstructed in staggering new ways. These DJs & producers were creating a living history, not deadening nostalgia, not some trendy look back (always plenty of that to go around), but a reimagination of what we owe the past, and what that past means to us. A way to use it to build a future.

Anyways, Parliament soon followed ("The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein" was my first P-Funk album, recorded onto cassette from a college friend's CD). Later funk-rock bands helped scratch the itch — I appreciated the Red Hot Chili Peppers' respect for the old school, and no one was a bigger Fishbone fan than me. This was a time of so-called "Black Rock Movement"(4) — and I dug Living Colour, 24-7 Spyz, and of course loved loved Bad Brains. Prince of course stuck with me through myriad changes of taste.

That historical connection, a sense for the deep currents that Funk embodies came with a paperback copy of Ricky Vincent's Funk: The Music, The People, and The Rhythm of the One. There I learned why this old music was culturally significant, historically important, how it all fit together. His appendix listed hundreds of LPs to seek out, and seek them I did. I learned about Trouble Funk, the Isley Brothers, early Kool & the Gang, the Meters, Betty Davis. From there it was into the crates and the compilations, always seeking deeper and rarer. I continue to scrape around today, loving the plethora of "deep funk" compilations that curate the breadth of this musical juggernaut.

Now, with the reinitialization of "Music on the One," (5) I am able to bring to life these smoldering embers, reconnect with the Funk in my soul, articulate its lessons and importance to American society. Now I'm grown, I've read Marx and Frantz Fanon. I've watched the contradictions of white supremacist capitalism only become more spasmodic, more devastating, more sinister. I see that nothing racist is new: it's the same steaming pile of shit fresh from the microwave. Funk has an answer to all that, because America has gone through this shit before, over & over again.

The struggles of Funk artists to articulate reality are the same that face hip hop artists, slam poets, and BLM activists. Names have changed, the forces aligned against humanity have not.

I see the tears of fragile white privilege and realize that history is the means to growing up at last. Not as nostalgia. Not as novelty. Not as platform shoes. We need to see the threads of history and cultural pressures and heritage the way a DJ sees a break: on the fly, spot it coming off a spinning object — a living truth that just needs to be re-contextualized to make the people move. What's relevant is under the needle. What is old serves its purpose in these coursing patterns of existence because the struggle is not new. White privilege only makes it seem like a new problem to many and insists that we have no context for facing it. Ignoring history is privilege — and ignorance is bliss. The DJ does not forget, he or she just keeps it in the mix. So you know it ain't going away.

Sorry to get all political at the end of what started as a personal reminisce, but the urge is to speak nothing but truth. Fantasy and self-delusion is what has brought society to this point. And anyway the personal is the political. So there.

I also find it difficult to admire the music without trying to understand its politics and shaping cultural forces. It's what moves these songs' genius from amusing and entertaining to inspiring and thought-provoking. I said it elsewhere: a brain can be both edified and set to shaking it at one and the same moment.


(1) Some say there was discussion that Roosevelt Franklin was considered too much of a stereotype, and needed to be scoped back.

(2) This was years before Freeman became the Mandatory Black Actor in Hollywood.

(3) In my school, all the real boys preferred hair metal, the aggressive sound of White Mediocrity pressed into wax. It was just very very totally obvious there was nothing sexually ambiguous about screeching guys in tights and long hair. Not at all -- it was all Michael's fault for being sensitive.

(4) This term always got under my skin. Rock was the term used to classify black music in the 1950s — it ought to be called "White Rock" if we're really being honest here...

(5) The first "Music on the One" radio show ran from 2001-2003 on Radio 1190 AM (KVCU) in Boulder, Colorado. It started out very mainstream indeed, but I soon learned where the real shit was soon enough. [Incidentally, I located a very old file trying to scope out a Top 25 list of funk songs from when I first started. Needless to say there were only one or two songs there I would still say are essential or fundamental, much less the shit I want to listen to...)