Into The Music
Funk is the genre that built half of modern music and gets thanked for it about a quarter of the time. Sample a James Brown break and you are building on funk. Layer a Sly Stone bass line and you are standing on funk’s foundation. Make a hip-hop track, a neo-soul record, a dance-pop smash with any sense of groove in it, and somewhere in the DNA there is funk, unacknowledged and essential.
It emerged out of the mid-1960s as James Brown and his band started stripping the arrangement down to rhythm, making the one-beat of the measure the organizing principle of the entire song. This was a radical departure from the jazz and R&B that preceded it. Instead of chords resolving and melodies reaching for something, everything locked in and stayed there, the tension sustained rather than released. The groove became the point. Repetition became the vehicle for transcendence.
Brown was the architect, but he was not the only builder. Sly and the Family Stone brought psychedelia and a politics of inclusion into the form. George Clinton, through both Parliament and Funkadelic, took Brown’s template and made it cosmically weird, stretching arrangements into extended jams, recruiting a revolving cast of collaborators, and creating a mythology around the music. The P-Funk universe was a fever dream of aliens and motherships and liberation theology, but underneath all of it was the tightest rhythm section working.
Funk produced several distinct strains. There was the tight, percussion-heavy JB’s-style funk, where every instrument functioned as a rhythm instrument. There was the more melodic Memphis soul-funk of Al Green and Ann Peebles, where the groove served the song rather than consuming it. There was the New Orleans second-line tradition, with its syncopated brass and parade energy. There was West Coast funk, influenced by jazz, and later by the emerging hip-hop scene that would borrow so heavily from it.
The genre’s relationship to hip-hop is one of the most significant stories in 20th century music. When DJs in the Bronx began isolating the break sections of funk and soul records, playing them on loop, and MCing over them, they were working directly with funk’s grammar. The break beat is a funk phenomenon. The sample-based architecture of hip-hop from the late 1980s and 1990s is largely a funk architecture, with producers like J Dilla and Pete Rock taking funk rhythms apart and rebuilding them into something new while keeping the essential feel intact.
Funk also shaped disco more than disco usually admits. The four-on-the-floor production of late-70s disco was built on top of funk’s rhythmic DNA, and acts like Chic, led by Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, were essentially making extremely clean, radio-ready funk. When disco died, the funk stayed, absorbed into post-disco, new wave, and whatever you want to call Prince’s music in the 1980s, which is maybe the fullest expression the genre ever found in a single artist.
Modern funk is everywhere and called other things. Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk,” Anderson .Paak’s entire discography, Cory Wong’s guitar work, Vulfpeck’s deliberately lo-fi recordings, the bass-forward neo-soul of Thundercat — all of it is working in the tradition, even when “funk” is not the word used to describe it. The genre has the unusual property of being simultaneously one of the most influential in popular music history and one of the least visible in how contemporary music talks about itself.
Which is fine. Funk never needed your acknowledgment. It just needed you to feel it. And if you are listening to almost any music with a pulse, you already are.
I came to funk late , honestly it was through a Spotify rabbit hole that started with Nina Simone , and the first time I really heard James Brown I had to stop what I was doing. Not because it was what I expected but because it was so far from what I expected. I grew up on Polish folk and acoustic indie; everything was about the melody, the lyric. Funk is almost aggressively NOT about that and somehow it still hit something very deep. I think about why that is a lot.
Mia, your Spotify rabbit hole experience is actually a perfect description of how funk works as a musical force. It doesn’t announce itself, it just pulls you in through something adjacent, and then suddenly you’re deep in the Meters or Sly Stone and you don’t quite remember how you got there. I tell my students that funk is the most democratic of the foundational American genres because it doesn’t require you to understand it to feel it. Your body figures it out before your brain does. That’s what the article means by ‘built everything,’ it’s in the architecture, not just the surface.
Mia, the stopping-what-you’re-doing reaction is interesting because it points to something James Brown understood about sonic impact that a lot of producers still don’t. In J-rock and visual kei the arrangements are built to create those interruption moments deliberately, sudden dynamic shifts that demand your attention. Brown was doing that live, in real time, with a full band responding to his cues. The fact that it still lands that way on a recording is remarkable production.
Funk does what flamenco does, it pulls something up from below the floor, from somewhere older than the song itself. When I hear James Brown at his best I feel the same thing I feel standing at the edge of a tablao when the dancer stamps and the room changes pressure. The article is right that it doesn’t get the credit. Music that carries that kind of ancestral weight never does, because the people who write the credits are usually not the people who felt it first.
What the article is circling around without quite saying is that funk operates in music the way oral tradition operates in literature: it’s foundational, deeply present in everything that comes after it, and systematically underattributed because the mechanisms of attribution were never built with it in mind. Chinua Achebe wrote about how African storytelling shaped narrative structures that European critics then claimed as universal. The same logic applies here. When hip-hop producers sample James Brown, when pop songwriters reach for that 16th-note bass feel, they are drawing from a well that was dug by specific Black American artists under specific historical conditions, and the ‘half the credit’ in this headline is honestly generous.
Chioma, your oral tradition parallel is exactly right and worth extending further. What oral tradition and funk share is a particular relationship to authorship: the originating voice matters less than the living transmission. When you sample James Brown, you’re not quoting him, you’re continuing a conversation he started. The legal frameworks around sampling have always struggled with this because they assume static, bounded authorship. Funk assumes the opposite. It assumes the music belongs to whoever can do something generative with it next.
I’ll take the slightly unpopular position here: yes funk built a lot, but so did post-punk and alternative, and those genres get dismissed just as fast when they feed into something that sells. The credit problem isn’t unique to funk, it’s how music commerce works. The genre that influences everything gets called background noise until a think piece rehabilitates it twenty years later. Ask me how I feel about grunge’s debt to Pixies.