The Dust Brothers.
I was reading this interview of brother E.Z. Mike in Waxpoetic and couldn’t stop but think that Funk is so central and yet so not understood.
E.Z. Mike did with King Gizmo the insanely funky and acclaimed Beastie Boys Paul’s Boutique, Beck’s Odelay and Fight Club soundtrack among others.
Question:
Waxpoetic: “I’ve run into a lot of different people from a lot of different backgrounds who really dig the Fight Club soundtrack. Along with the movie, it’s really become a cult classic as an instrumental record. Do you feel that record now?”
E.Z. Mike: […] To me, the funk is the core of everything I do. To me, the thing I focus on is the bass and the beat. To me, that’s the driving force of music at least [the music] I want to hear. So I always start there; that’s the foundation. The cool thing is, with funk as the foundation I mean, it’s incredible how versatile the funk is: you can throw anything on top of it and it works. […]
That’s why as a music producer from the 2000s I did start to dig funk in its original flavor from the 70s to 80s instead of wanting to buy the exact same sample machine of some famous hip-hop producer or stuff like that.
People may think that I appreciate and love funk and soul music just for the black side of it but that’s not my first argument. The argument is musical: funk is the foundation of almost all the music of the last decades. It evolved to hip-hop – like it or not, it’s the most international music ever, it’s everywhere-, it gave soundtracks that funkyness, it is the base of house music, JPop etc. It almost gave birth to reggae too (the US RnB and jazz were the biggest influences on Jamaïca well-known music).
The versatility of production on funk records is seriously quite unmatched. There is no music with that wide choice of how the record sounds, from heavy bass to heavy horns to heavy guitar saturated or not, heavy keyboards, synthetizers, to heavy beats with all the gradient between them all together. It’s truly amazing.
Picture of the funk. Keywords: Sun, urban, dirty, searching, exciting, cool.
So when listening to Paul’s Boutique or whatever in the 90s sample music I was always really frustrated to only have a fragment, a loop, two bars of it. I wanted all the funk and nothing but the root, the original. I was always thinking “there must be a lot more that this breakbeat which is brilliant but I want to listen to more. Btw who the fuck is Bob James???”.
There is so much to learn about music and its effectiveness with funk:
“Funk utilized the same extended chords found in bebop jazz, such as minor chords with added sevenths and elevenths, or dominant seventh chords with altered ninths. However, unlike bebop jazz, with its complex, rapid-fire chord changes, funk virtually abandoned chord changes, creating static single chord vamps with little harmonic movement, but with a complex and driving rhythmic feel.
The chords used in funk songs typically imply a dorian or mixolydian mode, as opposed to the major or natural minor tonalities of most popular music. Melodic content was derived by mixing these modes with the blues scale.”
I mean funk is simply a lighter and rhythm based jazz music. It’s like it tends to be the most efficient way to make you wanna move physically or “active in your head” using music knowledge from bebop which is one of the most expressive and complex music ever created. That’s why it works so well, body and soul at the same time. It comes from there.
And yet funk is either consider as gimmicky, soul-less (compared to rock like U2 maybe, but it’s less boring) or meaning dancefloor and bottom bell pants.
It’s way more than that. You should dig more my friend.