9.3. James Brown and 70s funk

James Brown and his band The JBs provided the genre with its first icon and remained popular until the late 70s, not before his career was revived thanks to the emergence of hip hop and excessive sampling. The title of Godfather of Funk, however, was bestowed onto George Clinton, the forefather of P-Funk. If soul music was the sound of the 60s, funk was certainly the sound of the 70s and onwards, influenced more by jazz than anything else, with a strong rhythmic aura compared to soul. Thoughts of God and worship were all but nonexistent although the elements of dancing harking back to the days of the African slave ring were still strong. Funk did away with the emphasis on melody and elaborated on the rhythmic section, although funk was influential in its use of “vamping”, a musical technique where a particular chord or note was repeated. This technique was also extended to the guitar, whereby the player would play a ninth chord while playing sixteenth notes throughout a whole song. This became colloquially known as “chicken grease”. Soon, more bands began to perform funk music and the genre was developed into fusion with jazz (thanks to Herbie Hancock, Stevie Wonder et al) and P-funk, which had an emphasised backbeat and characteristic bass lines from Bootsy (Bracket, 2001)

Soul music stands out as a genre that would really define what the term “black music” would mean. Stylistically, its power lied in all of the preceding black genres and culturally, it represented a victory for race equality. But some disagreed with this notion. Mark Anthony Neal in his essay Sold Out on Soul: The Corporate Annexation of Black Popular Music argued that Berry Gordy and his Motown outfit “sold out” as the title implied by institutionalising black popular music “as a viable and profitable fixture across America’s popular landscape” and that he impeded the expression within black culture even after the Civil Rights movement (Neal, 1997, p.117). However, due to the power of white people within the music industry and the audiences, it would have been almost impossible for them to have not been involved. Perhaps the sounds of Stax, with a roster comprising of Otis Redding and Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield and his politically charged music with The Impressions or James Brown’s mere existence on stage were “blacker” in a musical and social context but the fact remained that soul music helped the Civil Rights movement along and provided its soundtrack, just as funk did for the blaxploitation era of the 1970s
Of course, with all the preceding black music genres, soul music was appropriated to cater for the white audience in the form of “blue eyed soul”. One of the biggest names in this style of “white soul” was Dusty Springfield, a singer from London. Initially a pop artist, she began singing soul in the mid-60s and released Dusty In Memphis in 1969, an album of pop and soul covers, having signed with Atlantic Records, the home of Aretha Franklin. The appeal for blue–eyed soul continued to grow into the 70s and 80s, alongside northern soul, a brand of soul taken from the Northern areas of England. Although northern soul was defined by a geographical area (much like urban music), the towns and cities in which it thrived were predominately white, as were the performers