From Funk to Thunk

Georgia Anne Muldrow
James Brown - Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine (Parts 1 & 2) -
Revolution of the Mind (Polydor 1971)


Georgia Anne Muldrow - Lo Mein - Worthnothings EP (Stones Throw 2006)


Dudley Perkins - Testin' Me - Expressions (2012 A.U.) (Stones Throw 2006)




I came home at the end of last week in a good mood. One of those effervescing moods that can only be accentuated with a hardy helping of bread, wine and wonderful music. So I purchased a $1.50 loaf of bread, broke out my gallon of cheap, but remarkably tastey table wine and put on my newest acquistions from Stones Throw Records, a personal favorite label of mine. Needless to say, three glasses and half a loaf later, my effervesing mood was now boiling in a pot full soulful expressions and future-funk breakdowns. It got me thinking about the roots of funk music and how it has evolved into it's current state. So I did what I always do in situations like these, I broke out the laptop and sent my thoughts on a rollercoaster ride starting at my brain, down my arms, through my fingertips and on to the keys. After my creative outburst I slept for a good three hours to recover. When I woke up this article was meandering on my screen and all in all, I am impressed with my inebriated composing. I'm attempting to get it published in The Reader, Chicago's weekly free newspaper, but they have not responded. Oh well, I live to drink and write another day, and in the mean time enjoy the samples from Georgia Anne Muldrow and Dudley Perkin's amazing new albums along with a classic James Brown cut.

From Funk to Thunk
From its very conception, funk was the epitome of sheer emotional outburst. As James Brown continually upped the energetic ante of each concurrent soul single, an extremely powerful genre began to take form. Brown understood what his people felt, what his people needed, more rhythm, more blues, more soul. These innate feelings were always there, they just needed a catalyst, a vent to let the boiling expression free. Musicians had attempted this before; great voices like Otis Redding understood the possibilities of endless energy and unsuppressed emotion and the unparalleled power that came from combining the two. Maybe Redding would have been able to unleash this primitive spirit if he was only given the chance, but its time had not come just yet. Then, in the mid-60s, James Brown had an idea. What if he played the music he wanted to, what if he played the music he could feel stirring in the deepest regions of his soul? Fuck restrictions. There is no template for pure expression. Songs needn’t be confined to just three minutes, if he feels like jamming for seven, eight, fifteen minutes, he would; he embraced that freedom. Brown understood where he came from, where he was going. He knew that he was free, no matter what society told him. He reached back and embraced his roots enlisting African rhythms into his already powerful Southern soul. He understood the entrancement of a deep electric bass line, he understood the bright accentuations that blaring brass horns provided. He championed his fellow black musicians, infusing their personalities into his music. He heard Jimi Hendrix’s intoxicating psychedelic blues and shared his penchant for epic electric guitar solos. He heard Otis Redding’s unprecedented soul scream and shared his vocal urgency. He heard Coltrane’s deafening tenor, Grant Green’s intricate guitar, Ornette Coleman’s early explorations into discordant sounds, Art Blakey’s perfectly timed groove. He heard the preaching of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X and understood the need for a singular voice. He heard black America and he manifested it into what we now call funk. And great musicians like Sly Stone, George Clinton and Curtis Mayfield heard it too, and innately came to the same conclusion, but in styles each their own. Popular music would never be the same, and this new funk energy spread like wildfire from southeast America to Chicago to New York to L.A. to Africa to Europe to every corner of the Earth that had ears and a soul.

Music was never the same, and the world was never the same; and both were far better for it. Funk had an essential hand in the birth of everything from hip-hop to disco and was now a permanent staple in popular music and black culture. Today funk lives on in many different shapes and forms, but there is a specific niche that is moving forward by embracing its roots, just like Brown had done in the 60s. Sometimes dubbed ‘future-funk,’ the style stems obviously from the foundation eagerly set by George Clinton and later, Prince, but with the opportunity of being able to look back, especially on the now well established rap genre, with 20/20 retrospective vision. The style may contain some of the musical characteristics usually associated with rap and the more party-oriented funk, but definitely not its superficial qualities. Deeply introspective and observational, this new approach would be better called thunk than funk, which still retains the original connotations as being a slang word for ‘stink.’ And where is this music coming from? Well, all over thanks to our newly interconnected internet-oriented worldwide society, but more specifically, L.A.’s premier indie-hip-hop label, Stones Throw Records. DJ/producer Peanut Butter Wolf’s record company has been growing exponentially since the mid-90s thanks to its addictive and highly creative hip-hop and electro-funk output, and especially thanks to its most ambitious and extremely productive artist, Madlib. But last week, Stones Throw released two amazing records from two of their lesser known artists, new signee Georgia Anne Muldrow and soul singing oddball Dudley Perkins.

Stones Throw’s roster is as diverse as it comes, but they have been missing an essential component of any good ensemble, a strong-minded woman. Georgia Anne Muldrow’s future funk-soul sound fits so snuggly into the Stones Throw niche its eerie. Written, composed and produced solely by her lonesome, the debut EP, Worthnothings, is an emotional, multi-layered take on deep soul with a gritty hip-hop pulse that echoes back to free jazz and more specifically, Sun Ra vocalist June Tyson. Coming from a deeply musical family, her fathered invented instruments for Eddie Harris and her mother performed with experimental soul-jazz pioneer Pharoah Sanders, so its easy to decipher Muldrow’s influences, but her strongest characteristic seems to be the freshness she brings to the hip-hop/soul/funk genre. The EP, originally self-released in 2004, sounds simultaneously modern and classic, not to mention light-years ahead of what the now 22-year-old singer should sound like at her age. For the limited experience, she sounds abnormally mature and a bit jaded by the every day’s of life, which is reflected heavily by her poignant lyrics. With only one EP, Muldrow already seems to be distancing herself already from the forward-funk collective that’s groomed her (L.A.’s Sa-Ra Creative Partners, Detroit’s Platinum Pied Pipers), and I have a feeling that this is only the very beginning for the blooming songstress. She has that unteachable talent of being able to absorb and utilize her surroundings into her music without copping someone else’s style. You can easily hear her more successful contemporaries like Madlib and the late, great J Dilla within the EP, but it remains to be distinctively Muldrow. It seems unfair that Stones Throw is now not only the home to most creative male mind in modern hip-hop/soul/jazz/funk, Mad ‘there is no genre I can’t create’ lib, but also his possible female counterpart.

I don’t know if anyone was really predicting a significant amount of progression from Stones Throw’s warbling crooner Dudley Perkins; in fact, I’m pretty sure most people took his confusingly addictive debut album as Dudley (he also used to rap under the moniker Declaime), ‘A Lil’ Light,’ as nothing but humorous kitsch. But as his sophomore album Expressions (2012 A.U.) blatantly states, whether by Madlib’s A-game beats and production or Dudley’s progressive strides in songwriting, Mr. Perkins is a significant force all his own in modern funk-soul music. Carving an immensely individual path, Dudley pairs a truly distinctive voice with mischievous lyrics about his favorite subjects: weed, music, women and his god (whom, in the final track, he has a conversation with about his proud addiction to marijuana). While the album is solid as a whole, just the first few tracks are simply amazing in comparison to his sporadic debut. Madlib paints a colorful canvas of 70s funk and soul, while Dudley enlists his strongest assets to the nth degree, unconventional note-hanging and scatting with unparalleled adlibs and vocal layering. ‘Funky Dudley’ is the perfect introduction, as he repeatedly asks himself over Parliament funk, ‘how’d you get so funky, Dudley?’ ‘Testin’ Me’ with its instantly familiar piano loop may be the pinnacle Dudley Perkins track, simple, laid back and chock full of rhetorical questions and comments about the hardships of life and the pursuit of personal happiness. On ‘Inside,’ Dudley speak-sings deeply introspective observations about himself, and in turn reflecting his surrounding society and aptly concludes the song with ‘one day when you listen, you might be a better person.’ His debut definitely left questions about where he could go, if anywhere; ‘Expressions’ is a potent answer, but only really entices more questions about the possibilities of Dudley and his beloved music.

Georgia Anne Muldrow, Dudley Perkins and Stones Throw all share the same forward-thinking characteristic with the original pioneers of funk music. They are embracing rather than shedding all of their truly individual characteristics, just like James Brown did in the 60s. There is no limit to the possibilities for these creative minds, and with a growing audience, they will soon enough have a sturdy enough platform to support yet another musical revolution.