This month marked the beginning of my semester at Bootsy’s Funk University, an online school for the philosophy of funk (seriously!). I was a bit skeptical at first, but then imagine my joy when I logged in and found dozens of videos discussing The One! A central theme in the spirit of funk, it’s the subject of our album iB4the1, and has been the center of our conversations around the house.
Check out the video above of Norwood Fisher, and then below you’ll find Divinity Roxxx, lead bassist for Beyoncé. That’s all I can share though, lest I get expelled. Daang they’re smart. It’s good stuff, trust me. More info about The Funk University!
A few weeks ago I told y’all about Bootsy’s Funk University, and since then I’ve been musing over whether or not I want to check it out. Bootsy Collins is one of my biggest influences, and during moments of indecision I often find it helpful to take the advice of those who have inspired me artistically. I’ve been going around calling myself a student of the funk. Time to put my moola where my mouth is. I’ll keep you posted!
In the alternative universe where I was alive during the 60′s and 70′s, I see myself as a borderline Parliament-Funkadelic groupie. Not to the point where I’m lifting up my shirt and screaming every time “Cosmic Slop” comes on, but at least the the point where I could get kicked offstage of air-guitaring. A couple of years ago I caught P-Funk at DC, but was surrounded by an audience of 50+ year-olds so I restrained from any form of craziness out of fear of someone reaching for my throat-eel. So up until now, I thought that the new millennium held no place for a youngin’ like me to be a Funkateer. However, Bootsy Collins is opening the Funk University, an online intensive for bass players across the world! Is this a real opportunity to tap into the Funk? Or did I just sign up for another mailing list I won’t read (damn you, David Plouffe!!). Only time will tell. But chances are, if it’s Bootsy, I can digit.
When I was in middle school, I heard much about the Freaknik – Atlanta’s periodic outdoor street parties complete with music, art, and people dancing on cars butt-or-nearly-butt naked. I was intrigued, but being at the height of my germiphobia during this point in my life, was terrified by the idea of walking around and accidentally bumping into a face full of chest hair. By the time I made my first visit to Atlanta, the Freaknik was long gone, but now The Boondocks producer Carl Jones and T-Pain have linked up to present Freaknik: The Musical!!! And sure, a cartoon on Adult Swim isn’t nearly as appealing as a party filled with scantily-clad college students, but the all-star lineup of some of my favorite musicians including Lil Wayne, Big Boi, George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Cee-Lo, Snoop Dogg, and Kelis makes for something worth checking out regardless.
Freaknik: The Musical premieres on Adult Swim March 7 @ 11:30pm (ET/PT).
If you’ve heard our record, you’ve probably caught our drift that we’re huge on double-entendres. After a plethora of title ideas, we finally landed on iB4the1 not only as the name of our record, but a code that speaks to the way we develop our music, interact with each other, and ultimately live our lives. It’s our mission statement. But hey. We’re artists. So we don’t like giving meanings away all at once.
So to start off, here’s Bootsy Collins explaining his interpretation of “the1.” It’s all science!
Yup, still on my P-Funkhype. So hopefully by now you’ve had a chance to take a listen to our new track “Gentleman’s Kool-Aid,” and for better or worse some of the reviews and comments have been that it’s “not quite hip-hop,” which is quite fine with us since our music centers around le FUNKE (that’s fake French for “the funk,” digit?)
So as we venture deeper into the voyage that is our upcoming record, I’d like to dedicate this installment of Friday Funk to none other than Bootsy Collins, the conductor of the album Player of the Year which convinced me that it just might be okay to drop a record with every single track exceeding 5 minutes.
And yes, I understand that making long songs is totally counter-intuitive for our increasingly-A.D.D. listening world, but this is certainly where the Funk lends its hand — primarily someone like Bootsy, who not only dresses outlandishly, interchanges several character voices within songs, and is quite overwhelmingly the king of doing too much — but in the most delightful way, because he has the musical prowess to back it all up.
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Yuuup, I’m still trippin off that Big Boi, Too $hort, and George Clinton joint. I could really just go on and on about how much P-Funk has influenced my perception and creation of music. Growing up in California in the 90′s when G-Funk — an offspring genre of Clinton’s music coined by Dr. Dre & co — was in its prime, Clinton was a key contributor to a lot of the music that was in rotation. Snoop, Ice Cube, Dru Down, 2pac, Adina Howard, and so many more were quite intentionally carrying the torch that Parliament-Funkadelic had lit, and by the time I reached middle school I was as familiar with “Flashlight” as I was with any Michael Jackson song.
While many soul artists during that time either dismissed hip-hop as a fad or rebuked it for its unconventional reinterpretations of old records, Clinton was one of the few who not only embraced the new artform, but directly supported its development by artistically engaging with artists and openly welcoming them to sample his work.
In doing so, he has managed to maintain a relevance that few musicians are able to — not only does he remain a respected icon within the music scene, the storylines, reoccurring characters, and motifs scattered throughout his music continue to live on in the music of younger, more youth-accessible artists. Modern funk-lore. Check out the videos after the jump.
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