I love to hear raunchy over the top distorted guitars in my funk. Also accompanied by the clean rhythm guitar. Most of the time they both seem to be in separate worlds working together.
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Funk is ending up like the Blues
- Thread starter Dr. Cheese
- Start date
You make some very good points here. I'm well aware that, having checked out a lot of music over the course of my life, part of what taints my experience where a considerable amount of newer music is concerned is that I feel I'm just not hearing anything that I haven't, in essence, heard before. At worst I'm hearing stuff that's very familiar but with something missing (could be in the writing, the production, the feel, etc.). If I were to listen to, say, Bruno Mars without having already listened to a lot of stuff from the 70s and 80s in the funk vein then maybe I wouldn't think "pastiche" and dismiss it as such. I think a big part of the negative reaction here with a band such as Vulfpeck is that the recordings sound "quantized" and cleaned up to a degree that was impossible with 70s (and even 80s) recording technology. Everything is expected to sound squeaky clean now, and it does. Another thing is what I see as the effect of a pop culture obsessed with "hits" of the clicking kind. If you want hits on YouTube you need a quirky video and you need arrangements where the priority is not necessarily what works best for the music but instead what will most likely evoke a "wow" from the person on the other side of the computer screen. Viewers no longer have the patience to sit through a song or performance that doesn't have the potential to go "viral" based on how "sick" a performance (or mise en scene) is.
You don't have to understand it. It's a simple request. The rules here are slanted and I'm tired of the double standard. I have to deal with a lot of trolling and then get threatened with banning when I report it... as I've been told to do. If it were equal ground it would be different... but it's been this way for a long time.
If you feel the need to continue to troll me, which you have a long history of, knock yourself out. I asked you to stop. No one else will. I figured I'd give that a try.
Isn't all music of any value today being produced by "music nerds?"
I mean, anything radio friendly has always been bottom of the barrel in terms of musical complexity, but in case you have been under a rock for the last 20 years, the "duh" to popularity ratio has really shot up. The large majority of top singles over that time period have been written by a handful of producers, most of which are middle aged Scandinavian men. Music that makes money has been completely commoditized and is built on a assembly line. It is dumb AF on purpose because the largest portion of music consumers are dumb AF and only want music to be background noise while they do something else.
If you write all of your own music, play your own instruments, and put more than 2 seconds of thought into your song structure, you are a music nerd. And lets not kid ourselves, the great composers and players in jazz, blues, funk, classical and metal have always been music nerds. You can't tell me Giant Steps isn't some straight up super nerd level stuff.
I mean, anything radio friendly has always been bottom of the barrel in terms of musical complexity, but in case you have been under a rock for the last 20 years, the "duh" to popularity ratio has really shot up. The large majority of top singles over that time period have been written by a handful of producers, most of which are middle aged Scandinavian men. Music that makes money has been completely commoditized and is built on a assembly line. It is dumb AF on purpose because the largest portion of music consumers are dumb AF and only want music to be background noise while they do something else.
If you write all of your own music, play your own instruments, and put more than 2 seconds of thought into your song structure, you are a music nerd. And lets not kid ourselves, the great composers and players in jazz, blues, funk, classical and metal have always been music nerds. You can't tell me Giant Steps isn't some straight up super nerd level stuff.
LOL, QFT. I'd argue that all good stuff comes from nerds, if we are using the term as meaning someone who is single mindedly passionate about their focus. Get close enough to the source and they are all nerds. Distance is required for coolness. To me, my personal definition of funk literally requires that the artist straddle the line between cool and uncool, it's that tension that makes the stank.
I just hope that in present-day parlance, the term nerd is no longer derogatory, and just means someone who knows more stuff about something, or has more than a passing interest in said something, than the average person...
I know some of the worry about this stems from how black artists were treated in the early days of rock 'n roll compared to white artists, both by labels and music historians. However that was at the very beginning of the "music industry" as we know it, during a time in the US when convenient racism was the norm. We have really moved the ball forward in that regard. We as a society, and as musicians, have learned from those mistakes. Modern artists are very good about citing their influences and giving credit where credit is due. Guys like Vulf Peck, BadBadNotGood, or Snarky Puppy are never going to try to say they invented the wheel with their music. And even if they tried, the information on the internet would quickly prove such assertions wrong.
Jazz, Rock, R&B, Rap and Hip Hop--even look at the history of string band music in the south including the actual history of the Banjo. That has happened to every major musical style developed by America's African subcultures. I don't want to dip too far into Race Theory on a Bass forum, but it's not simply a comparison between two musical styles. Funk isn't ending up like The Blues so much as all African American musical traditions end up becoming absorbed into the dominant American culture.
I have an even bigger problem with the genres R&B and Soul in that case.
Funk is such a broad term to me and seems to go in different directions every decade or so. For instance when I started playing funk was acts like George Clinton and even Earth wind & fire. Then came the period where funk almost had to have some heavy slap- and pop-bass. Then in all this there’s always been an element of jazz in some funk like the Headhunters. Tower of power... is both a lot of traditional soul music and funky Rocco stuff.
I guess it has a lot to do with when you're born what is funky to you.
Funk is such a broad term to me and seems to go in different directions every decade or so. For instance when I started playing funk was acts like George Clinton and even Earth wind & fire. Then came the period where funk almost had to have some heavy slap- and pop-bass. Then in all this there’s always been an element of jazz in some funk like the Headhunters. Tower of power... is both a lot of traditional soul music and funky Rocco stuff.
I guess it has a lot to do with when you're born what is funky to you.
There are slight, but important differences between a nerd, a geek, and a dork.
"Dorks tend to be socially inept, and obsessed (again, not so fast)
Nerds tend to be equal parts intelligent, obsessed, and socially inept
Geeks tend to be intelligent and obsessed (but—importantly—not socially inept)"
So I guess Music Geek would be a more proper term in this context. Personally, I am more of a music nerd because I don't like people.
I'm not using the term in a negative sense, but rather more as sarcasm in how "normies" would see people that actually know what a scale is. I agree that geeks and nerds are what make the world go around.
Exactly why I rarely listen to new music these days. I've always hated hip hop/rap, and anything that even hints of that "sound" or production value goes off as soon as I hear it. I'm sure I'm doing myself a disservice by throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but honestly I can't stand to even hear a couple measures of that... well, explicative deleted.
Luckily I have discovered a few decent bands from recent years, like Vulfpeck, Snarky Puppy, etc. But there are undoubtedly so many good funk, fusion, rock, and soul bands I miss out on because I refused to even chance being subjected to hip hop. I'd sooner listen to a mule farting.
You acknowledged it with the baby/bath-water, but this is like saying, "I hate the sound of rock music." Such a broad array of music/artists is covered in the hip-hop and rap classifications. If you look in the right places (i.e. Not relying on radio, internet top 10 lists, spotify recommended, etc.) you may be pleasantly surprised by what you find.
I seem to hear this most with "country" and hip-hop. i.e. "I'll listen to anything but that..." I'm not overly surprised to hear those generalizations in random conversations, but I'm always surprised when I see it on music-related forums.
I remember hearing a trio playing outside a storefront church in North Philly (Ridge Ave) back in '69. They were killin' it. REAL driving funky gospel with walking, thumping bass doubled by the organists' pedals! Funk, like blues, has it's roots in gospel/black church music. That's my spin on it anyway.
I can appreciate the talent in these videos, but they both feel like overplaying to me. I'm not saying there's no room for 16th notes or busy fills in funk, but there's almost no use of space and breath in these...
Well first of all, Vulfpeck is a fine group but they are by no means doing anything that hasn't been done years before. Your post sounds regretful but at the same time each musician has to do something to wave their own flag for themselves. I'm sure that thousands of us, hell maybe even millions of us feel a longing for the music that we grew up with but the reality is that life rolls on and doesn't wait for any of us. My advice would be to roll with them punches and try to play what you love by infusing it into whatever else is an enjoyable art that's coming your way. To put it in very simple terms there ain't nothing we can do about it. Peace
Vulfpeck does come off as music department nerds. But they are able to pull it off because they are so good. I agree in general with your analogy. However, there is a generation coming up that have homogenized all of these different genre's of music. The first wave of it sounds somewhat like what Bruno Mars has done over the past 5 years. More to come.
