Funk: The Music, The People, and The Rhythm of The One Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I wrote a paper in university on the social relevance of funk lyrics (focused on James Brown, George Clinton, and Sly Stone). When treading through the ethnomusicology section of our library, I was dismayed that there was not one funk treatise to be found. Thankfully, someone as versed in the funk as Mr. Vincent has taken a great first step down that path.
The great thing about the book to me is that Vincent manages to display both an academic's need for historical reason, and a funk-lover's passion for the music. It kills me every time he spends a page in the academic's voice, delineating the foundations of the music -- such as James Brown's emphasis on rhythm over melody -- only to wrap things up with a down-home phrase like "...fonk that created a breathless, animated, nasty hype-dog feel." It's a fine mix of reason and passion, in that one sentence. And notice the spelling of "fonk". He also throws in fonque, fonkey, FUNK, FONK (capitalization is his). It makes for a great conversational feel (you can just hear the guttural tone in his voice when he calls Stevie Wonder "fonkey").
He does a fine job displaying funk's lineage, although it is understandably ragged and all over the map. It can get confusing when a discussion of Parliament segues into a discussion of Rick James and Prince, back to James Brown and then onto Funkadelic. But that's the nature of any music's evolution: it bobs and weaves all over the place, taking notes from soul, jazz, gospel, blues, etc. Vincent does yeomen's work keeping the line as simple as possible, showing how we got from funk's beginnings to the various incarnations of the funk today (Dr. Dre and Red Hot Chili Peppers to list two examples Vincent positions under the contemporary funk umbrella).
I guess my original intention when I bought this book was to expand my funk palette. Vincent's range of knowledge is so vast, that anyone with the teeniest of funk leanings will learn of something new to pick up, and most likely, JAM to. The appendix listing his essential funk albums is worth the price of admission in and of itself.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Funk: The Music, The People, and The Rhythm of The One

Get 32% OFF

Buy cheap Funk: The Music, The People, and The Rhythm of The One now.