An interesting read for anyone who wants to learn more about the history of funk music and its major artists. Worth noting is the excellent discography which I found very useful as a guide to delving further into the funk universe.
It's not an incredibly well-written book though: stylistically, it hovers uncomfortably between a serious piece of musical/cultural writing and a throwaway hype-driven magazine article. There's a lot of flowery waffle and in some parts it seems to lose a sense of direction. Content-wise, it's lacking in direct input from original practitioners, and doesn't go into as much depth as I would have liked on the actual music itself.
Another mild peeve for me is the occasionally militant attitude of the author, an African American, towards race issues in the US and the contribution of white musicians to funk music. Quotes like "Unfortunately, any time white musicians get into a black thang, things can get messy" (here describing white scottish funksters Average White Band) seem to diminish, unfairly, the contribution of non-black musicians to funk music. And as a white boy confronted with this residual bitterness you can't help but echo Ben Folds' sentiment in Rockin' The Suburbs: "because my great-great-great grandaddy made someone's great-great-great grandaddy his slave.... it wasn't my idea!".
Nevertheless, short-comings aside it is essential reading for noobs to the genre, like myself.
A couple of interesting factoids that I learned in the discussion of rap and hip-hop music towards the end:
1. Part of the riff to Tone Loc's Wild Thing is actually a sample of Van Halen's Jamie's Crying.
2. Rage Against The Machine's Renegades of Funk is actually a (brilliant) cover of a rap song by Afrika Bambaataa from 1983.
It's not an incredibly well-written book though: stylistically, it hovers uncomfortably between a serious piece of musical/cultural writing and a throwaway hype-driven magazine article. There's a lot of flowery waffle and in some parts it seems to lose a sense of direction. Content-wise, it's lacking in direct input from original practitioners, and doesn't go into as much depth as I would have liked on the actual music itself.
Another mild peeve for me is the occasionally militant attitude of the author, an African American, towards race issues in the US and the contribution of white musicians to funk music. Quotes like "Unfortunately, any time white musicians get into a black thang, things can get messy" (here describing white scottish funksters Average White Band) seem to diminish, unfairly, the contribution of non-black musicians to funk music. And as a white boy confronted with this residual bitterness you can't help but echo Ben Folds' sentiment in Rockin' The Suburbs: "because my great-great-great grandaddy made someone's great-great-great grandaddy his slave.... it wasn't my idea!".
Nevertheless, short-comings aside it is essential reading for noobs to the genre, like myself.
A couple of interesting factoids that I learned in the discussion of rap and hip-hop music towards the end:
1. Part of the riff to Tone Loc's Wild Thing is actually a sample of Van Halen's Jamie's Crying.
2. Rage Against The Machine's Renegades of Funk is actually a (brilliant) cover of a rap song by Afrika Bambaataa from 1983.
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