For Fans of Funk

Before James Brown, rhythm sections supported melodies. After him, rhythm was the point. On records like 'Funky Drummer' and 'Sex Machine,' the groove is not the vehicle for the song; the groove is the song. Every horn player, every guitarist, every singer becomes a percussionist. This inversion is the hinge that everything after it swings on: hip-hop producers sampling JB breaks, house producers building kicks around his template, neo-soul vocalists phrasing against the pulse rather than with it.

George Clinton understood that great funk needed a world to live in. The P-Funk mythology, with its Mothership, its Dr. Funkenstein, its battles between the Bop Gun and Sir Nose D'Voidoffunk, gave audiences a cosmology as elaborate as any science fiction universe. It was absurdist, political, and ecstatic at the same time. No other genre in American music produced a mythology this detailed while also producing this many indispensable dance records.

By the early 1980s, funk had fragmented. Prince pulled it back together. He absorbed James Brown's band discipline, Sly Stone's studio experimentation, and George Clinton's conceptual ambition, then recorded almost every instrument himself. 'Sign O' the Times' and 'Purple Rain' are demonstrations of total fluency: he could slow the groove to almost nothing, or lock it into overdrive, and the feeling never left. When he played guitar over a funk foundation, the interplay between lead line and rhythm was as compositionally precise as Bach.

When disco collapsed and funk dropped off radio playlists, hip-hop producers in New York and Los Angeles were already mining its archives. From Afrika Bambaataa looping Kraftwerk over JB breaks to Dr. Dre rebuilding Parliament riffs into G-funk, the tradition survived through sampling. Kendrick Lamar's 'To Pimp a Butterfly' proved the line had never broken: live Thundercat bass lines, Kamasi Washington horns, and arrangements that are structurally indistinguishable from the great 1970s records.