Part 1: How Funk changed the way popular music moved.
If you want to understand modern day dance music or Hip-Hop, you eventually arrive at Funk, because Funk changed the way musicians thought about rhythm.
Funk took ideas that had existed in Soul, R&B, Gospel and Blues and stripped them down to their rhythmic foundations. The bass became a hook. The drums became a lead. The guitar became percussion. The horns became punctuation and a single rhythmic phrase could be repeated for minutes without needing a traditional verse or chorus.
The groove became the song.
And somewhere between the drum breaks of James Brown, the psychedelic universe of George Clinton, the stripped-down precision of Art Neville & Allen Toussaint and the infectious rhythms of Sylvester Stewart aka Sly Stone, a musical language emerged that would eventually become the raw material for producers worldwide.
Funk taught generations of musicians one simple lesson:
The rhythm doesn't have to support the song. The rhythm can be the song.
01 — SOUL FUELS THE FIRES OF FUNK
Funk didn't appear from nowhere.
Its roots stretch deep into the African American musical traditions that came before it: Blues, Gospel, Rhythm & Blues and Soul.
By the mid 1960s, Soul had become one of America's dominant musical forms. Artists such as Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and Sam & Dave were making records built around powerful vocal performances, horn sections and increasingly sophisticated rhythm sections.
But underneath those arrangements, something was changing.
The drums were becoming more aggressive, the bass was becoming more dominant and guitarists were beginning to play rhythmically rather than harmonically.
Musicians were discovering that a song could become more powerful by removing things rather than adding them.
James Brown was at the centre of this transformation.
His music gradually abandoned the conventional emphasis on melody and harmony and began placing extraordinary demands on the rhythm section. The band had to lock together with almost mechanical precision while still retaining the feel of a live performance.
The result was something new. It was Soul becoming Funk.
The Smithsonian describes Brown's approach as a stripped-down, rhythmically driven aesthetic, with his influence reaching far beyond Soul and Funk, and into Reggae, Afrobeat and Hip-Hop.
02 — JAMES BROWN CHANGES THE RULES
There are few artists in popular music whose influence can be measured simply by listening to the drums.
James Brown is one of them.
During the late 1960s, Brown increasingly treated his band less like an accompaniment and more like a single rhythmic machine.
Every instrument had a job, the bass didn't simply follow the chords, the guitar didn't simply provide harmony and the horns didn't simply carry melodies. Everything contributed to the groove.
Brown's arrangements could revolve around a single chord, a short horn figure or a repeating bassline. Instead of constantly moving from one section to another, the band could stay inside a groove and intensify it through subtle changes in rhythm and dynamics.
This was revolutionary.
The emphasis shifted from what happens next to what is happening right now.
The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame describes Brown as a Godfather of Soul, Funk and Rap, while the Smithsonian goes even further, stating that Hip-Hop is unimaginable without him.
For DJs and producers decades later, Brown's catalogue would become something even more valuable:
A library of passion, inspiration and ideas.
03 — GIVE THE DRUMMER SOME
Perhaps the clearest example of this philosophy can be heard in the work of Clyde Stubblefield.
Stubblefield joined James Brown's band in 1965, alongside fellow drummer John "Jabo" Starks. Together they formed one of the most important rhythm sections in the history of recorded music.
Brown demanded precision, but he also demanded feel.
The drums were not there simply to keep time. They were expected to create movement.
Tracks such as "Cold Sweat", "I Got the Feelin'", "Mother Popcorn" and "Ain't It Funky Now" demonstrated just how far the drums could be pushed while remaining completely locked into the groove.
Then came "Funky Drummer".
Recorded in 1969 and released in 1970, the track contained a relatively short drum solo that would eventually become one of the most important drum breaks in recorded music.
Brown famously tells Stubblefield to "give the drummer some", and Stubblefield responds with a loose, syncopated groove filled with ghost notes, accents and tiny rhythmic imperfections.
That imperfection was the magic. It sounded human, It sounded breakable.
And decades later, producers would discover that those few seconds could be isolated, looped, chopped and rebuilt into entirely new compositions. Roland's account of the recording highlights Stubblefield's ghost notes and the improvised break as central to the track's enduring influence.
"Funky Drummer" wasn't initially a huge commercial hit. Its real importance came later.
Hip-Hop heard something inside it that the original audience couldn't yet have imagined.
A loop.
And from Kool G Rap to Kool Moe Dee, from Gang Starr to BDP, LL Cool J to Public Enemy, and Eric B to Run-DMC.
Jazzy Jeff, Stetsasonic, Slick Rick, De La Soul, 2 Live Crew, Ultramagnetic MC’s.
The Funky Drummer has been sampled and used on literally thousands of records, hell even George Michael used it on his Freedom! '90 hit.
