Funk: The Music, The People, and The Rhythm of The One [Paperback]

Rickey Vincent (Author), George Clinton (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 15, 1996

Funk: It's the only musical genre ever to have transformed the nation into a throbbing army of bell-bottomed, hoop-earringed, rainbow-Afro'd warriors on the dance floor. Its rhythms and lyrics turned bleak urban realties inside out with distinctive, danceable, downright irresistable music.

Funk hasn't received the critical attention that rock, jazz, and the blues have-until now. Colorful, intelligent, and in-you-face, Rickey Vincent's Funk celebrates the songs, the musicians, the philosophy, and the meaning of funk. The book spans from the early work of James Brown (the Godfather of Funk) through today, covering funky soul (Stevie Wonder, the Temptations), so-called "black rock" (Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone, the Isely Brothers), jazz-funk (Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock), monster funk (Parliament, Funkadelic, Bootsy's Rubber Band), naked funk (Rick James, Gap Band), disco-funk (Chic, K.C. and the Sunshine Band), funky pop (Kook & the Gang, Chaka Khan), P-Funk Hip Hop (Digital Underground, De La Soul), funk-sampling rap (Ice Cube, Dr. Dre), funk rock (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Primus), and more.

Funk tells a vital, vibrant history-the history of a uniquely American music born out of tradition and community, filled with energy, attitude, anger, hope, and an irrepressible spirit.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In his introduction, Clinton, the force behind Parliament/Funkadelic, defines the importance of "The Funk," as well as Vincent's written history, as political assertions: "[The] story told herein chronicles the predicament the [music] industry faces in trying to monopolize their profiteering of Black Music." By examining the Black jazz and blues roots of funk, Vincent depicts a people more often than not robbed of their music. Funk has remained considerably free from industry greed and gentrification due, argues Vincent, to its illicit power. In the next breath, he contends that James Brown, Sly Stone and Clinton owe as much to the Beatles for their successes?particularly the 1967 Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album, which would influence Jimi Hendrix's Electric Ladyland and Clinton's own Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow. Vincent's funk is broad, encompassing Hendrix; Miles Davis; Earth, Wind, and Fire; and Dr. Dre. It's true rap's sampling of funk classics brought new interest in sloppy, sexy jams. When rappers refused at first to pay their dues, by way of recording royalties, they only helped to draw attention to such forgotten bands as The Ohio Players and The Meters. Funk is an untidy quarrel of history, musicology and hearsay that certifies the cultural heritage of a Hip Hop nation.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

While it's usually easy to distinguish music that is funky from music that is not, it's much more difficult to say what funk actually is. In this book, Vincent, who has an all-funk show on KALX in California, attempts to arrive at such a definition and to provide a historical overview of "The Funk" (as he calls it) from its emergence as a recognizable element of black music in the 1960s to its varied manifestations in today's popular culture. He does a good job of demonstrating how funkiness celebrates various aspects of African American culture, many of which have historically not been valued by white society, and makes clear the broad impact of various funk styles on American music. Unfortunately, Vincent's encyclopedic knowledge of funk is not matched by a broad understanding of the larger musical context in which he wishes to place it; his stabs at music theory are weak and ill informed, and by the time he refers to the Rolling Stones as James Brown imitators and to Ronald Shannon Jackson as a guitarist, the reader has come to the uncomfortable conclusion that the author has bitten off far more than he can chew. Worst of all, Vincent's writing style borders on unreadable: the sentence "It would be a measure of any hip black act in the seventies to come with a funk bomb to get respect" is, unfortunately, typical. The book ends with a fine annotated discography, but it's not enough to justify purchase. Not recommended.?Rick Anderson, Contoocook, N.H.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin (April 15, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312134991
• ISBN-13: 978-0312134990
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #60,598 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #47 in Books > Arts & Photography > Music > Theory, Composition & Performance > Sheet Music & Scores > Forms & Genres > Popular

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dr. Funkenstein or: How I Learned to Love THA BOMB!, October 2, 2000

By 

Mike Stone - See all my reviews

This review is from: Funk: The Music, The People, and The Rhythm of The One (Paperback)

I wrote a paper in university on the social relevance of funk lyrics (focused on James Brown, George Clinton, and Sly Stone). When treading through the ethnomusicology section of our library, I was dismayed that there was not one funk treatise to be found. Thankfully, someone as versed in the funk as Mr. Vincent has taken a great first step down that path.

The great thing about the book to me is that Vincent manages to display both an academic's need for historical reason, and a funk-lover's passion for the music. It kills me every time he spends a page in the academic's voice, delineating the foundations of the music -- such as James Brown's emphasis on rhythm over melody -- only to wrap things up with a down-home phrase like "...fonk that created a breathless, animated, nasty hype-dog feel." It's a fine mix of reason and passion, in that one sentence. And notice the spelling of "fonk". He also throws in fonque, fonkey, FUNK, FONK (capitalization is his). It makes for a great conversational feel (you can just hear the guttural tone in his voice when he calls Stevie Wonder "fonkey").

He does a fine job displaying funk's lineage, although it is understandably ragged and all over the map. It can get confusing when a discussion of Parliament segues into a discussion of Rick James and Prince, back to James Brown and then onto Funkadelic. But that's the nature of any music's evolution: it bobs and weaves all over the place, taking notes from soul, jazz, gospel, blues, etc. Vincent does yeomen's work keeping the line as simple as possible, showing how we got from funk's beginnings to the various incarnations of the funk today (Dr. Dre and Red Hot Chili Peppers to list two examples Vincent positions under the contemporary funk umbrella).

I guess my original intention when I bought this book was to expand my funk palette. Vincent's range of knowledge is so vast, that anyone with the teeniest of funk leanings will learn of something new to pick up, and most likely, JAM to. The appendix listing his essential funk albums is worth the price of admission in and of itself.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Complete, informative, incredible, June 4, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Funk: The Music, The People, and The Rhythm of The One (Paperback)

This book is all of that. It is more than just a walk dowm memory lane, it breaks down just where it all started from and connects it to what's going on today. I come from a funk background, two parents who were musicaians in the Dayton, Ohio area funk scene and they have confirmed that this author did his homework. You may be into funk, but this book will make you understand funk. Your appreciation for funk will grow beyond belief. This is not a book that I have read and it stays on my bookshelf, I find myself going to it often. There are so many facts about this music in this book that a one time reading isn't enough. Bottom line get this book.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Can't Barely Handle This Much Funk!, October 17, 2001

By 

doomsdayer520 (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Funk: The Music, The People, and The Rhythm of The One (Paperback)

First, I propose a small title change for this book. It should be called "THE Funk". The word "funk" only refers to a musical genre. But THE Funk entails the whole lifestyle, attitude, and philosophy that go with the music. And that's what this book is about.

Rickey Vincent provides all the info you could possibly dig on the origins, artists, and influence behind the funk bomb that has been shaking the Earth since the 60's. You get the deep, ancient funk origins in jazz, soul, R&B, and even rockers like Hendrix and Santana. As should be expected, there's a ton of props for the musicians who invented funk, especially the Godfather, my main man James Brown; not to mention the old-school master, Sly Stone. Once the funk really took off in the 70's, Vincent provides top coverage of the entire phenomenon, with props for big men like the Isley Brothers, Ohio Players, Kool & the Gang, and Earth Wind & Fire; and unearths long-lost funkateeers like Slave and Zapp, who are ripe for rediscovery. But where would we be without P-Funk? No problem, as Vincent gives us an entire section on the most important and influential funk mob of all time, George Clinton's Parliament/Funkadelic thang. The story continues into the present with coverage of funk that survived underground in the 80's, and then rocked the world again in the 90's. Most interesting is Vincent's coverage of funk's humungous influence on the hip-hop nation, as well as a whole branch of rock-n-roll (populated by bands like Red Hot Chili Peppers and Primus).

When funk history gets ragged in the late 70's and early 80's, Vincent gets carried away in his endless condemnation of disco (you don't really need to say how much disco reeked), as well as the other new forms of dance music that temporarily buried the funk. But not to worry, because in the 90's the funk re-emerged triumphantly and in top booty-shakin' form. And get a load of the appendix, "Essential Funk Recordings," in which Vincent provides a gargantuan list of classic funk albums that will keep you on a buying spree for the rest of your life.