Unit 5: Readings and Resources

Readings and Resources

Textbook or eBook:

Campbell, M. (2019).  Popular music in America. 5th ed. Cengage Learning.

In this unit, we will be exploring the development of soul to funk and its role in the adaptation ska to reggae. This unit also looks into disco, its culture and influence and the impact it had on the punk music scene. 

· Chapter 14: New Trends of the Late 1970s (pgs. 256-277)

Articles, Websites, and Videos:

The Funk Music Hall of Fame and Exhibition Center: This site offers some additional historical information about funk music and those punk stars that have been honored in the hall of fame.

· History of funk . (2016-2019).  The Funk Hall of Fame. 

CH. 59 Funk

· Chapter Introduction

· 59-1 From Soul to Funk: Sly and the Family Stone

· 59-1a Social Commentary and Seductive Grooves

· 59-2 George Clinton and Funk

· 59-3 Earth, Wind & Fire and a Black Music Synthesis

59-1 From Soul to Funk: Sly and the Family Stone

The path from soul to funk went through James Brown; Brown was the “father of funk” as well as the “godfather of soul.” Funk musicians built their music on both the basic concept of Brown’s music and many of its key features. However, it was Sly and the Family Stone who played the key role in the transition from soul to funk.

The band was the brainchild of Sly Stone (born Sylvester Stewart, 1944), a disc jockey turned producer and bandleader. More than any other band of the era, Sly and the Family Stone preached integration. The lineup included two of Stone’s siblings (his brother Freddie and sister Rosie), Cynthia Robinson on trumpet, and several others, including trend-setting bassist Larry Graham. There were blacks and whites, and women as well as men.

In a series of hits spanning a five-year period (1968–1972), Sly and the Family Stone created an exuberant new sound. We hear it in “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” which reached the top of the charts in January 1970. The music of James Brown is the direct antecedent of this song and this style. Like Brown’s music, there is a groove built up from multiple layers of riffs, played by rhythm and horns. There is no harmonic movement—everything happens over one chord, and the vocal part is intermittent, with long pauses between phrases.

The most direct antecedent for complex rhythms over static harmony is found in James Brown’s music. However, the sound is much denser and more active than that heard in “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” Although the drummer marks off a rock beat along with the backbeat, the underlying rhythmic feel of the song is twice as fast. This new rhythmic foundation is what is now often called a  sixteen-beat rhythm . We sense this faster-moving layer in virtually all the other parts: the opening bass riff, the guitar and horn riffs, and—most explicitly—in the “CHUCK-a-puck-a” vocalization. The more active texture opens up many more rhythmic patterns that can conflict with the beat.

There is a spontaneous aspect to the sound, as if it grows out of a jam over the basic groove. It is this quality that gives the song (and Stone’s music) its distinctive looseness—looseness that implores listeners to “dance to the music.”

59-1aSocial Commentary and Seductive Grooves

If we just listen to Sly’s music, it can hypnotize us with its contagious rhythm. However, when we consider the words—the opening lines of the lyric are “Lookin’ at the devil, grinnin’ at his gun/Fingers start shakin’, I begin to run”—we sense that the band is laughing to keep from crying, or burning down the house. As with many other Sly and the Family Stone songs, there is a strong political and social message. We sense that the music is the buffer between the band and society, a restraint against violent activism.

This is our first example of what would become a growing trend in Afro-centric music, from the United States and abroad: powerful lyrics over infectious rhythms. There is an apparent contradiction between the sharp social commentary in the lyrics and the seduction of the beat. They seem to be operating at cross-purposes: full attention and response versus surrender to the groove. Perhaps that’s so, but it’s also possible to interpret this apparent conflict in other ways. One is to view the music as a tool to draw in listeners, to expose them to the message of the words. Another is to understand the music as a means of removing the sting of the conditions described in the lyrics: lose yourself in the music, to avoid simply losing it.

Sly and the Family Stone became popular after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and after the backlash from the civil rights movement had built up steam. Although civil rights legislation removed much of the governmental support for the racial inequities in American life, it did not eliminate prejudice or racial hatred. The lyrics of this and other songs by Sly and the Family Stone speak to that.

The music provided one way to escape the pain of prejudice. Drugs were another. Sly Stone used them to excess and torpedoed his career in the process. He became increasingly unreliable, often not showing up for engagements; promoters stopped booking his band. Once again, drugs had silenced a truly innovative voice.

The influence of Stone’s innovations is evident in a wide range of music from the seventies and beyond—directly in styles like the art/funk jazz fusion of Herbie Hancock and the film music of Curtis Mayfield, and indirectly in styles like disco. However, it led most directly to funk, especially the music of George Clinton.

Disco

Volume 90%

©Michael Campbell/Cengage

59-2 George Clinton and Funk

George Clinton (b. 1941) was the mastermind behind two important funk bands, Parliament and Funkadelic. While still a teen, he formed the Parliaments, but as a doo-wop group. They signed with Motown in 1964 but did not break through. When Clinton left Motown, he had to relinquish the Parliaments name, so he formed Funkadelic while battling Motown to reclaim the name. Funkadelic represented a major change of direction. As the group’s name implies, it brought together funk and psychedelic rock: James Brown and Sly Stone meet Jimi Hendrix. When Clinton regained control of the Parliament name in 1974, he used two names for the same band.

He recorded guitar-oriented material under the Funkadelic name and more polished horn-section material with vocal harmonies under Parliament’s. This enabled the two “bands” to perform on one stage at one time.

The song shows Clinton’s debt to James Brown and Sly and the Family Stone, and the ways in which his music went beyond theirs. Clinton’s most obvious debt to Brown is in personnel. After 1975 his roster included three significant James Brown alumni: bassist Bootsy Collins, saxophonist Maceo Parker, and trombonist Fred Wesley. They were key members of his large band, which included as many as twelve musicians at a time. As a result, the sound of Clinton’s bands is fuller than either James Brown’s or Sly Stone’s because there are more instruments and all of them are busy.

Listening Cue

· Chapter Introduction

· 60-1 Jamaican Independence and Social Unrest

· 60-2 Rastafarianism

· 60-3 Rhythm and Blues and Jamaican Popular Music

· 60-4 From Ska to Reggae

· 60-5 Jimmy Cliff and the Sound of Reggae

· 60-6 Bob Marley and 1970s Reggae

· 60-7 Reggae as an International Music

60-1 Jamaican Independence and Social Unrest

Most Jamaicans are of African descent—about 90 percent at the turn of the twenty-first century—and most trace their roots back to slavery. Like the United States, Cuba, and Brazil, Jamaica was a destination for the slave traders. More than 600,000 slaves arrived in Jamaica between 1665 and 1838, the year in which the slave trade ended. British colonial rule continued for more than a century. Great Britain gradually transferred authority to Jamaicans, with the final step—independence—taken in 1962. Redress of the economic and social inequities of colonialism, however, did not keep pace with the political changes.

One result was a great deal of social unrest in the sixties. “Rude boys,” disenfranchised young black Jamaicans who grew up in the most disadvantaged sections of Kingston, personified the violent dimension of this unrest. They were sharp dressers and often carried sharp knives and guns. For many Jamaicans, including the police, they were outlaws. Others, however, saw them as heroes, much as the James Brothers and Billy the Kid were heroes to earlier generations of Americans or as today’s gangsta rappers are to some young people. Another group with a much longer history of confrontation with white authorities were Rastafarians.

60-2 Rastafarianism

Rastafarianism was an important consequence of Marcus Garvey’s crusade to elevate the status of people of African descent. Garvey, born in Jamaica, agitated for black power in the United States during the 1920s in response to the dire poverty and discrimination that the vast majority of blacks living in the Americas faced. His efforts blended church and state. Even as he pressed for an African homeland to which former slaves could return (it never materialized), he prophesied that Christ would come again as a black man. After serving half of a five-year sentence in an Atlanta prison, he was exiled from the United States and returned to Jamaica.

Rastafarians claimed that Garvey’s prophesy had been fulfilled. Jesus had indeed come again, in the person of Haile Selassie (Prince Ras Tafari), the emperor of Ethiopia. Selassie claimed lineage back to King Solomon, which Rastafarians have taken as further proof of Selassie’s divine status. In line with Selassie’s personal genealogy, Rastafarians also claim to be descendants of the twelve tribes of Israel.

These beliefs, which have never come together as “official” doctrine—as has happened in organized religions—are the religious dimension of Rastafarians’ efforts to promote a more positive image of Africa and Africans. This has largely come from within the movement.

For those on the outside, the most vivid impressions of Rastafarianism are images, smells, and sounds: dreadlocks, ganja (marijuana, which they ingest as part of their religious practice), and music. To Jamaican music, they gave a sound—Rastafarian drums—and reggae superstar Bob Marley.

60-3 Rhythm and Blues and Jamaican Popular Music

The influence of rhythm and blues on Jamaican music is in part a matter of geography. Kingston, the capital city, is just over 500 miles from Miami as the crow flies and about 1,000 miles from New Orleans. Stations from all over the southern United States were within reach, at least after dark. So it should not surprise us that Jamaicans tuned in their radios to American stations in the years after World War II. For many young Jamaicans, rhythm and blues replaced  mento , the Jamaican popular music of the early fifties.

Sound systems, the mobile discos so much a part of daily life in Jamaica, offered another way to hear new music from America. Sound systems were trucks outfitted with the musical necessities for a street party: records, turntables, speakers, and a microphone for the DJ. Operators would drive around, pick a place to set up, and begin to play the R&B hits that the enterprising DJs had gone to the United States to fetch.

60-4 From Ska to Reggae

By the end of the 1950s, Jamaican musicians had begun to absorb rhythm and blues and transform it into new kinds of music.  Ska , the first new style, emerged around 1960; it would remain the dominant Jamaican sound through the first part of the decade. Ska’s most distinctive feature is a strong afterbeat: a strong, crisp chunk on the latter part of each beat. This was a Jamaican take on the shuffle rhythm heard in so much fifties R&B. It kept the long/short rhythm of the shuffle but reversed the pattern of emphasis within each beat. In the shuffle rhythm, the note that falls on the beat gets the weight; the afterbeat is lighter. In ska it is just the opposite, at times to the extent that the note on the beat is absent—there is just the afterbeat. It remains the aural trademark of early ska.

As ska evolved into  rock steady  in the latter half of the sixties, musicians added a backbeat layer over the afterbeats. This created a core rhythm of afterbeats at two speeds, slow and fast: which soon became the characteristic offbeat ka-CHUN-ka rhythm of  reggae . Because the bass had no role in establishing and maintaining this rhythm, bass players were free to create their own lines, and the best ones did. As rock steady evolved further into reggae, other rhythmic layers were added. The absence of beat marking, the mid-range reggae rhythm, the free-roaming bass, and the complex interplay among the many instruments produced a buoyant rhythm, as we hear in Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come.”

60-5 Jimmy Cliff and the Sound of Reggae

Jimmy Cliff (born James Chambers in 1948) was one of reggae’s first stars. By the time he landed the lead role in the 1972 film The Harder They Come, he had gained an international reputation as a singer-songwriter. His appearance in the film and the songs that he recorded for the soundtrack cemented his place in popular music history. In The Harder They Come, Cliff plays Ivan O. Martin, a musician who becomes a gangster. Although his character is loosely based on a real person from the 1940s, Cliff’s title song brings the story into the present. The lyric resonates with overtones of social injustice and police oppression and brutality even as it outlines how the character will respond: “I’m gonna get my share now of what’s mine.”

Listening Cue

“The Harder They Come” (1972)

Jimmy Cliff

Cliff, vocal.

STYLE Reggae ⋅ FORM Verse/chorus

Listen For …

INSTRUMENTATION

Lead vocal, two keyboards (with organ sounds), piano, electric bass, drums, electric guitar

PERFORMANCE STYLE

Cliff’s vocal style, with its use of falsetto and melisma, seems inspired by sixties American music. Choked guitar sound.

RHYTHM

Moderate tempo; rock-based rhythm with distinctive reggae feel; considerable syncopation and lots of activity, some of it double-time (moving twice as fast as the rock rhythm)

MELODY

Long phrases, which are repeated, in the verse and the first part of the chorus (bridge); the title phrase is a short riff

TEXTURE

Densely layered, with several chord instruments, plus busy bass and drums behind the vocal

Remember …

REGGAE AS PROTEST MUSIC

Jamaican people’s music: It came from them, and it spoke to them and for them, in direct, uncompromising language

REGGAE RHYTH

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