Exploring the ‘musical audacity’ of funk
Top image: Earth, Wind & Fire perform in 1982 (Photo: Chris Hakkens/WikiCommons)
In a newly published book, Professor Reiland Rabaka delves into the culture and sound of music’s ‘best-kept secret’
Barely two months into the ‘70s, Funkadelic—led by George Clinton, Jr.—released something of a musical manifesto with the song “Good Old Music”:
Everybody’s gettin’ funky
In the days when the funk was gone
I recall not long ago
When the funk it was goin’ strong.
Professor Reiland Rabaka (left) recently published The Funk Movement: Music, Culture, and Politics.
In hindsight, the lyrics hint not only at funk’s musical and cultural impact, but at the forgotten shadows in which funk has often lived.
“One of the many reasons funk frequently is not understood to be funk has to do with its ghettoization within the music industry and White music critics’ tendency to lazily lump most post-1945 Black popular music under the ‘rhythm & blues’ moniker,” writes musicologist Reiland Rabaka.
“In other words, because White music critics often serve as musical gatekeepers for White music fans, telling them what is ‘hip’ and ‘hot’ and what is not, most White folks never developed an ear for, or serious appreciation of, classic funk in the ways they did for pre-funk Black popular music such as blues, jazz, rhythm & blues or even soul music.”
Rabaka, a professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies and director of the Center for African and African American Studies, aims a scholar’s eye at funk in his newly published book The Funk Movement: Music, Culture, and Politics. Originally scheduled for 2025 release, a deluge of pre-orders prompted publisher Routledge to release it in late October.
“(Funk is) this musical gumbo, where you’ve got all these different kinds of music and not just distinctly Black music,” Rabaka explains. “African American culture is a hybrid heritage—we’re talking about an incredibly creolized culture, and as Black folk in America, we’re not searching for some sort of purity. Music reflects our multiple traditions and heritages and also allows us to live out loud. The musical audacity in funk, even if it’s just for three minutes and 30 seconds, when Parliament Funkaldelic says dance without constrictions, we’re dancing without constrictions.”
No rap without funk
The Funk Movement joins Black Power Music! Protest Songs, Message Music, and the Black Power Movement, released in 2022, and Black Women's Liberation Movement Music: Soul Sisters, Black Feminist Funksters, and Afro-Disco Divas, released in 2023, in Rabaka’s ongoing exploration of the confluences of music, culture, identity, politics, place and people.
"It’s not a coincidence that James Brown comes out and says, ‘Say it out loud, I’m Black and I’m proud’ after Martin Luther King was assassinated,” says Reiland Rabaka. (Photo: James Brown performing in the Musikhalle in Hamburg, Germany, February 1973. Heinrich Klaffs/WikiCommons)
He comes to this work not only as a scholar, but as a musician: “I was the kid from the projects who got bussed to these incredible creative arts schools,” he says. “From there, I was able to get a truckload of music scholarships, which is how I became the first person in my family to go to college.
“I really feel like my musicology is coming full circle, coming back to where I started. I was a performing jazz musician and have a performing arts degree, so in a way I’m what social scientists call a participant researcher—I’m deeply involved in a lot of the music I write about. It lends my work a kind of insider’s knowledge, a kind of intimacy with my subject. I’m not just somebody writing to achieve tenure; these are passion projects to me.”
Rabaka came to funk not only loving the music but fascinated by its place at the nexus of the women’s liberation movement, the sexual revolution, the Black power movement, the evolving civil rights and gay rights movements and all the other political and social upheavals of the 1970s. However, he acknowledges in his book that funk—both the music and the culture—is often subsumed into musical movements that are more broadly familiar to non-Black audiences.
“Most funk, both as a genre of music and a cultural movement, has not resonated with non-Black fans of Black popular music the way a lot of pre-funk Black popular music has,” Rabaka writes. “It is like funk is one of the best kept secrets of Black popular music, even though it, more than any other post-war Black popular music genre, laid the foundation for the mercurial rise of rap music and hip-hop culture in the 1980s and 1990s.”
In other words, Rabaka says, “there’s no rap, no hip-hop, without funk.”
Reiland Rabaka’s book Black Women's Liberation Movement Music: Soul Sisters, Black Feminist Funksters, and Afro-Disco Divas was recently named Best History in the category Best Historical Research in Recorded Blues, R&B, Gospel, Hip Hop or Soul Music in the 2024
The goal of the ARSC Awards Program, according to the organization, “is to recognize and draw attention to the finest work now being published in the field of recorded sound research.”
In the book, Rabaka, a professor in the University of Colorado Department of Ethnic Studies, critically explores the ways the soundtracks of the Black Women’s Liberation Movement often overlapped with those of other 1960s and 1970s social, political and cultural movements, such as the Black Power Movement, Women’s Liberation Movement and sexual revolution. His research reveals that “much of the soul, funk and disco performed by Black women was most often the very popular music of a very unpopular and unsung movement: The Black Women’s Liberation Movement.”
Rabaka and his fellow award winners will be recognized at an awards ceremony during ARSC’s annual conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in May.
Say it out loud
However, funk—like the broader umbrella of “art” under which it lives—can be difficult to define; listeners know it when they hear it. And it’s more than music: “It’s the sound and the aesthetics of Black bohemia,” Rabaka says.
In his book, Rabaka approaches the funk movement as it encapsulates both the music and the culture of funk, focusing on the golden age of funk that’s generally categorized between 1965 and 1979. He notes that while funk is often dismissed as simple party music, it addressed and embodied the upheaval and frustrations of the times in which it was born.
“To adequately interpret funk, one needs to understand key moments in African American history and culture, especially the struggle to end racial segregation that culminated in the 1960s and the beginning (and unfulfilled promises) of the era of racial integration in the 1970s,” Rabaka writes.
“Funk can be interpreted as ‘a discourse of social protest’ and ‘the critical voice of a post-Civil Rights Movement counterculture’ that challenged mainstream histories that attempt to nicely and neatly paint the 1960s as the decade of racial segregation and the 1970s as the decade of racial integration, ‘equal opportunity,’ and ‘ubiquitous optimism.’”
When Marvin Gaye asked “What’s Going On,” Rabaka says, Sly Stone answered several months later with “There’s a Riot Goin’ On.”
“In the book I say it’s not a coincidence that James Brown comes out and says, ‘Say it out loud, I’m Black and I’m proud’ after Martin Luther King was assassinated,” Rabaka says. “There was mass disillusionment, mass depression, so funk is also a deeper and darker sound, a grittier sound. It exists in a lot of levels, where it can be good-time music, sure, but sometimes there are a lot of heavier topics and themes that go on in funk.”
Rabaka is particularly fascinated with the women of funk and is already working on a book that brings them out of the shadows.
“Funk, I argue, was a Black popular music response to the hippie movement, to the women’s movement, to Stonewall even,” Rabaka says. “Black America has a way of refracting things that are going on in mainstream America, saying, ‘How does that speak to us?’”
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