Vincent — Funk

Author: Rickey Vincent
Title: Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One
Year: 1996
Type: Book (St. Martin’s Griffin; foreword by George Clinton)

Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One is a history of funk by the Berkeley radio host and writer Rickey Vincent, published by St. Martin’s Griffin in 1996 with a foreword by George Clinton. It argues that America has taken up one Black music after another without crediting its makers, funk among them, and it sets out to give funk its due. Vincent tells funk’s history in five dynasties, from James Brown and Sly and the Family Stone in the late 1960s through P-Funk in the late 1970s and the stripped-down funk of the 1980s to hip hop, which he counts as the fifth, and he makes the “Rhythm of the One” of his subtitle the music’s shared pulse. Its evidence is the records and the musicians’ own words, and Vincent came to it from ten years of radio shows on KALX and a master’s thesis on the history of funk. Publishers Weekly’s notice was mixed, Douglas Payne later praised it, and it won an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award in 1997.

Vincent grew up in Berkeley “soaking up The Funk from radio stations KDIA, KSOL and KSFX.” From 1983, as a Berkeley student, he presented shows on the station KALX for ten years, and in 1993 he took a master’s degree at San Francisco State with a thesis titled “The History of Funk.”¹ St. Martin’s Griffin published the book in New York in 1996, with a foreword by George Clinton.² Vincent writes on his site that “the initial run of 10,000 copies ran out within a few months.”¹ He later took a doctorate in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2008, lectures there, and presents The History of Funk, a two-hour program on KPFA.³

“Funk music is worth studying because it has a place in popular culture as one more in a long line of black musical styles — ragtime, swing, blues, and rock — that are often borrowed but not acknowledged,” Vincent writes. “One purpose of this book is to acknowledge The Funk as another chapter in America’s legacy of acquisition and assimilation of black music and culture.”² At the music’s heart he places the One, the first beat of the bar, which Clinton’s bands celebrate in the chant “Every-thing-is-on-the-One.” “‘On the One’ means the oneness of everything,” he writes. “When The Funk is in full effect, every participant is a part of the Rhythm of the One.”²

He divides the music’s history into dynasties, each on its own timeline. The first, from 1965 to 1972, he calls “the period of unification,” when James Brown and then Sly and the Family Stone shaped the music. The United Funk Dynasty followed from 1972 to 1976, then the P-Funk Dynasty of 1976 to 1979, built on Clinton’s Parliament and Funkadelic. In the 1980s, he writes, “a number of factors conspired to strip down the essential funk impulse into Naked Funk.” The fifth dynasty, in the 1990s, is the Hip Hop Nation, because to a listener who comes to rap “from a funk perspective,” its values and ideals “had their genesis in The Funk.”² He treats the music’s parts as melodies in their own right: “The bass line, the guitar line, the horn lines in funk often deliver such complete melodic phrases that each could be the primary melody of a simpler soul or R&B tune.” Throughout, the book draws on the musicians’ own recollections, among them those of Bootsy Collins and Clyde Stubblefield, one of James Brown’s drummers.²

Publishers Weekly’s notice, in April 1996, was mixed: it called the book “an untidy quarrel of history, musicology and hearsay” that “certifies the cultural heritage of a Hip Hop nation.”⁴ It won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for Excellence in Music Journalism in 1997.¹ In 2009 Douglas Payne, on his blog Sound Insights, called it “the single-most essential history of this music.”⁵

Key contributions

• Funk placed among the Black American styles “often borrowed but not acknowledged,” in a book written to acknowledge it.
• A history of funk in five dynasties, from the late-1960s unification through P-Funk and Naked Funk to the Hip Hop Nation.
• The “Rhythm of the One” as funk’s idea of shared participation.

See also

• Black Noise — Tricia Rose’s 1994 study of rap music and Black culture
• The color line in pop — the color line as industry infrastructure, from market categories to radio formats