Unit 5: Readings and Resources
Textbook or eBook:
Campbell, M. (2019). Popular music in America. 5th ed. Cengage Learning.
In this unit, we will be exploring the development of soul to funk and its role in the adaptation ska to reggae. This unit also looks into disco, its culture and influence and the impact it had on the punk music scene.
· Chapter 14: New Trends of the Late 1970s (pgs. 256-277)
Articles, Websites, and Videos:
The Funk Music Hall of Fame and Exhibition Center: This site offers some additional historical information about funk music and those punk stars that have been honored in the hall of fame.
· . (2016-2019). The Funk Hall of Fame.
CH. 59 Funk
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59-1 From Soul to Funk: Sly and the Family Stone
The path from soul to funk went through James Brown; Brown was the “father of funk” as well as the “godfather of soul.” Funk musicians built their music on both the basic concept of Brown’s music and many of its key features. However, it was Sly and the Family Stone who played the key role in the transition from soul to funk.
The band was the brainchild of Sly Stone (born Sylvester Stewart, 1944), a disc jockey turned producer and bandleader. More than any other band of the era, Sly and the Family Stone preached integration. The lineup included two of Stone’s siblings (his brother Freddie and sister Rosie), Cynthia Robinson on trumpet, and several others, including trend-setting bassist Larry Graham. There were blacks and whites, and women as well as men.
. We sense this faster-moving layer in virtually all the other parts: the opening bass riff, the guitar and horn riffs, and—most explicitly—in the “CHUCK-a-puck-a” vocalization. The more active texture opens up many more rhythmic patterns that can conflict with the beat.
There is a spontaneous aspect to the sound, as if it grows out of a jam over the basic groove. It is this quality that gives the song (and Stone’s music) its distinctive looseness—looseness that implores listeners to “dance to the music.”
59-1aSocial Commentary and Seductive Grooves
If we just listen to Sly’s music, it can hypnotize us with its contagious rhythm. However, when we consider the words—the opening lines of the lyric are “Lookin’ at the devil, grinnin’ at his gun/Fingers start shakin’, I begin to run”—we sense that the band is laughing to keep from crying, or burning down the house. As with many other Sly and the Family Stone songs, there is a strong political and social message. We sense that the music is the buffer between the band and society, a restraint against violent activism.
This is our first example of what would become a growing trend in Afro-centric music, from the United States and abroad: powerful lyrics over infectious rhythms. There is an apparent contradiction between the sharp social commentary in the lyrics and the seduction of the beat. They seem to be operating at cross-purposes: full attention and response versus surrender to the groove. Perhaps that’s so, but it’s also possible to interpret this apparent conflict in other ways. One is to view the music as a tool to draw in listeners, to expose them to the message of the words. Another is to understand the music as a means of removing the sting of the conditions described in the lyrics: lose yourself in the music, to avoid simply losing it.
Sly and the Family Stone became popular after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and after the backlash from the civil rights movement had built up steam. Although civil rights legislation removed much of the governmental support for the racial inequities in American life, it did not eliminate prejudice or racial hatred. The lyrics of this and other songs by Sly and the Family Stone speak to that.
The music provided one way to escape the pain of prejudice. Drugs were another. Sly Stone used them to excess and torpedoed his career in the process. He became increasingly unreliable, often not showing up for engagements; promoters stopped booking his band. Once again, drugs had silenced a truly innovative voice.
The influence of Stone’s innovations is evident in a wide range of music from the seventies and beyond—directly in styles like the art/funk jazz fusion of Herbie Hancock and the film music of Curtis Mayfield, and indirectly in styles like disco. However, it led most directly to funk, especially the music of George Clinton.
Disco
Volume 90%
©Michael Campbell/Cengage
59-2 George Clinton and Funk
George Clinton (b. 1941) was the mastermind behind two important funk bands, Parliament and Funkadelic. While still a teen, he formed the Parliaments, but as a doo-wop group. They signed with Motown in 1964 but did not break through. When Clinton left Motown, he had to relinquish the Parliaments name, so he formed Funkadelic while battling Motown to reclaim the name. Funkadelic represented a major change of direction. As the group’s name implies, it brought together funk and psychedelic rock: James Brown and Sly Stone meet Jimi Hendrix. When Clinton regained control of the Parliament name in 1974, he used two names for the same band.
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60-1 Jamaican Independence and Social Unrest
Most Jamaicans are of African descent—about 90 percent at the turn of the twenty-first century—and most trace their roots back to slavery. Like the United States, Cuba, and Brazil, Jamaica was a destination for the slave traders. More than 600,000 slaves arrived in Jamaica between 1665 and 1838, the year in which the slave trade ended. British colonial rule continued for more than a century. Great Britain gradually transferred authority to Jamaicans, with the final step—independence—taken in 1962. Redress of the economic and social inequities of colonialism, however, did not keep pace with the political changes.
One result was a great deal of social unrest in the sixties. “Rude boys,” disenfranchised young black Jamaicans who grew up in the most disadvantaged sections of Kingston, personified the violent dimension of this unrest. They were sharp dressers and often carried sharp knives and guns. For many Jamaicans, including the police, they were outlaws. Others, however, saw them as heroes, much as the James Brothers and Billy the Kid were heroes to earlier generations of Americans or as today’s gangsta rappers are to some young people. Another group with a much longer history of confrontation with white authorities were Rastafarians.
60-2 Rastafarianism
Rastafarianism was an important consequence of Marcus Garvey’s crusade to elevate the status of people of African descent. Garvey, born in Jamaica, agitated for black power in the United States during the 1920s in response to the dire poverty and discrimination that the vast majority of blacks living in the Americas faced. His efforts blended church and state. Even as he pressed for an African homeland to which former slaves could return (it never materialized), he prophesied that Christ would come again as a black man. After serving half of a five-year sentence in an Atlanta prison, he was exiled from the United States and returned to Jamaica.
Rastafarians claimed that Garvey’s prophesy had been fulfilled. Jesus had indeed come again, in the person of Haile Selassie (Prince Ras Tafari), the emperor of Ethiopia. Selassie claimed lineage back to King Solomon, which Rastafarians have taken as further proof of Selassie’s divine status. In line with Selassie’s personal genealogy, Rastafarians also claim to be descendants of the twelve tribes of Israel.
These beliefs, which have never come together as “official” doctrine—as has happened in organized religions—are the religious dimension of Rastafarians’ efforts to promote a more positive image of Africa and Africans. This has largely come from within the movement.
For those on the outside, the most vivid impressions of Rastafarianism are images, smells, and sounds: dreadlocks, ganja (marijuana, which they ingest as part of their religious practice), and music. To Jamaican music, they gave a sound—Rastafarian drums—and reggae superstar Bob Marley.
60-3 Rhythm and Blues and Jamaican Popular Music
The influence of rhythm and blues on Jamaican music is in part a matter of geography. Kingston, the capital city, is just over 500 miles from Miami as the crow flies and about 1,000 miles from New Orleans. Stations from all over the southern United States were within reach, at least after dark. So it should not surprise us that Jamaicans tuned in their radios to American stations in the years after World War II. For many young Jamaicans, rhythm and blues replaced , the Jamaican popular music of the early fifties.
Sound systems, the mobile discos so much a part of daily life in Jamaica, offered another way to hear new music from America. Sound systems were trucks outfitted with the musical necessities for a street party: records, turntables, speakers, and a microphone for the DJ. Operators would drive around, pick a place to set up, and begin to play the R&B hits that the enterprising DJs had gone to the United States to fetch.
60-4 From Ska to Reggae
By the end of the 1950s, Jamaican musicians had begun to absorb rhythm and blues and transform it into new kinds of music. , the first new style, emerged around 1960; it would remain the dominant Jamaican sound through the first part of the decade. Ska’s most distinctive feature is a strong afterbeat: a strong, crisp chunk on the latter part of each beat. This was a Jamaican take on the shuffle rhythm heard in so much fifties R&B. It kept the long/short rhythm of the shuffle but reversed the pattern of emphasis within each beat. In the shuffle rhythm, the note that falls on the beat gets the weight; the afterbeat is lighter. In ska it is just the opposite, at times to the extent that the note on the beat is absent—there is just the afterbeat. It remains the aural trademark of early ska.
As ska evolved into in the latter half of the sixties, musicians added a backbeat layer over the afterbeats. This created a core rhythm of afterbeats at two speeds, slow and fast: which soon became the characteristic offbeat ka-CHUN-ka rhythm of . Because the bass had no role in establishing and maintaining this rhythm, bass players were free to create their own lines, and the best ones did. As rock steady evolved further into reggae, other rhythmic layers were added. The absence of beat marking, the mid-range reggae rhythm, the free-roaming bass, and the complex interplay among the many instruments produced a buoyant rhythm, as we hear in Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come.”
60-5 Jimmy Cliff and the Sound of Reggae
Jimmy Cliff (born James Chambers in 1948) was one of reggae’s first stars. By the time he landed the lead role in the 1972 film The Harder They Come, he had gained an international reputation as a singer-songwriter. His appearance in the film and the songs that he recorded for the soundtrack cemented his place in popular music history. In The Harder They Come, Cliff plays Ivan O. Martin, a musician who becomes a gangster. Although his character is loosely based on a real person from the 1940s, Cliff’s title song brings the story into the present. The lyric resonates with overtones of social injustice and police oppression and brutality even as it outlines how the character will respond: “I’m gonna get my share now of what’s mine.”
Listening Cue
“The Harder They Come” (1972)
Jimmy Cliff
Cliff, vocal.
STYLE Reggae ⋅ FORM Verse/chorus
Listen For …
INSTRUMENTATION
Lead vocal, two keyboards (with organ sounds), piano, electric bass, drums, electric guitar
PERFORMANCE STYLE
Cliff’s vocal style, with its use of falsetto and melisma, seems inspired by sixties American music. Choked guitar sound.
RHYTHM
Moderate tempo; rock-based rhythm with distinctive reggae feel; considerable syncopation and lots of activity, some of it double-time (moving twice as fast as the rock rhythm)
MELODY
Long phrases, which are repeated, in the verse and the first part of the chorus (bridge); the title phrase is a short riff
TEXTURE
Densely layered, with several chord instruments, plus busy bass and drums behind the vocal
Remember …
REGGAE AS PROTEST MUSIC
Jamaican people’s music: It came from them, and it spoke to them and for them, in direct, uncompromising language
REGGAE RHYTHM
The interaction of the two organs produces the distinctive ka-CHUN-ka rhythm of reggae heard mainly in two organ parts
WORDS AND MUSIC/WORDS VS. MUSIC
Combines lyrics that describe the harsh conditions in which the black underclass lives with irresistible, joyous music
Listen to this selection in the unit playlist.
. It became so popular that Jamaican record producers like Lee “Scratch” Perry began releasing discs in which the B side was simply the A side without the vocal track. The instrumental track would then serve as the musical backdrop for the DJ’s toasting—and save the producers some money.
Toasting is a direct forerunner of rap. Kool Herc, a Jamaican who moved to the Bronx as a young teen, brought toasting from Kingston to the streets of New York, where it quickly evolved into hip-hop: Grandmaster Flash, one of the seminal figures in early rap, described Kool Herc as his hero. Rap’s first hit, the Sugar Hill Gang’s 1979 “Rapper’s Delight,” is a classic example of the practice: extended raps over a loop of Chic’s “Good Times.”
CH.61 Disco
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61-1 From Discothèques to Disco
Discothèques survived the war, and after the war became increasingly popular in France. The first of the famous discos was the Whisky à Gogo in Paris, which featured American liquors and American dance music, both live and on record. Others sprung up in the postwar years, eventually becoming a favored destination of jet-setters. Discothèques began to open in the United States around 1960. The first was Whisky a Go Go in Chicago, in 1958. The Peppermint Lounge, which Joey Dee and the Starlighters called home and where the rich and famous did the Twist, opened in 1961 in New York City.
As dance fads like the Twist moved out of the clubs and into mainstream society, the original audience sought out new dance music in different, less exclusive, and less pricey venues. By the end of the sixties, a new club culture was thriving. It was an egalitarian, nonrestrictive environment. The new, danceable black music of the late sixties and early seventies provided the soundtrack: Sly and the Family Stone, Funkadelic, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, Barry White, and above all the Philadelphia acts, such as the Spinners, the Stylistics, the O’Jays, and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. Clubbers included not only blacks but also Latinos, working-class women, and gays, for whom clubbing had become a welcome chance to come out of the closet and express themselves. Despite the gains of the various “rights” movements in the sixties and seventies, these were still marginalized constituencies.
61-1aThe Mainstreaming of Disco
By mid-decade, however, had begun to cross over. Integrated groups like KC and the Sunshine Band, which exploded onto the singles charts in 1975, began making music expressly for discos. Saturday Night Fever was the commercial breakthrough for the music. Almost overnight, what had been a largely underground scene briefly became the thing to do.
In New York, the favored venue was Studio 54, a converted theater on 54th Street in Manhattan. It became so popular that crowds clamoring to get in stretched around the corner. It was the place to see and be seen. Writing about Studio 54 at the end of the seventies, Truman Capote noted, “Disco is the best floor show in town. It’s very democratic, boys with boys, girls with girls, girls with boys, blacks and whites, capitalists and Marxists, Chinese and everything else, all in one big mix.”
61-1bDisco and Electronics
Meanwhile, the discothèque scene continued to flourish in Europe. The new element in the music there was the innovative use of synthesizers to create dance tracks. Among the most important musicians in this new domain were Kraftwerk, a two-person German group, and Giorgio Moroder, an Italian-born, Germany-based producer and electronics wizard who provided the musical setting for many of Donna Summer’s disco-era hits.
Kraftwerk and Moroder exemplified the increasingly central roles of the producer and of technology. Disco became a producers’ music, even more than the girl groups of the sixties. Just as Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” was more famous than the singers in front of it, so did the sound of disco belong more to the men creating and mixing the instrumental tracks than the vocalists in the studios. Here, the wall of sound was laced with electronic as well as acoustic instruments. Singers were relatively unimportant and interchangeable; there were numerous one-hit wonders. Donna Summer was an exception.
61-2 Donna Summer: The Queen of Disco
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62-1 The Roots of Punk
Punk took shape in New York. Much like the folksingers of the sixties, bands performed in small clubs located in Greenwich Village and Soho. CBGB, the most famous of these clubs, launched the careers of a host of punk and new wave bands. Among the CBGB graduates were Patti Smith, Richard Hell (in the Neon Boys, then Television, and finally as Richard Hell and the Voidoids), the Ramones, and Talking Heads. Ohio was another spawning ground: Pere Ubu, from Cleveland, and Devo, from Akron, both had careers under way by 1975.
Among the major influences on punk in New York were the Velvet Underground and the New York Dolls. The Velvet Underground embraced the New York City subculture sensibility and nurtured it in their music. Their songs (for example, “Heroin”) were dark, which foreshadowed punk’s “no future” mentality, and the sound of their music was often abrasive and minimalist. They presented an anti-artistic approach to art, a rejection of the artistic aspirations of the Beatles and other like-minded bands. Moreover, their impresario was an artist, Andy Warhol, who packaged them as part of a multimedia experience (the famous Exploding Plastic Inevitable). This anticipated McLaren’s vision of punk as a fusion of image and sound in the service of outrage.
The New York Dolls, led by David Johansen, were America’s answer to David Bowie, Marc Bolan, and the rest of the British glam bands. They lacked Bowie’s musical craft and vision; their musical heroes were not only the Velvet Underground but also the MC5 and Iggy Pop and the Stooges. In effect, they dressed up the latter groups’ proto-punk and made it even more outrageous, wearing makeup and cross-dressing outlandishly—they out-Bowied Bowie in this respect—and in taking bold risks in performance. Brinksmanship came easily to them, as they were, in the words of one critic, “semi-professional” at best.
Patti Smith, a rock critic turned poet-performer, was the first major figure in the punk movement to emerge from the New York club subculture. Smith was its poet laureate, a performer for whom words were primary. There is nothing groundbreaking in the sound of her music. Indeed, she wanted her music to make a statement, not create a spectacle. Her work had much of the purity and power of punk: purity in the sense that it returned rock to its garage-band spirit, and power in the outrage. But it was not outrageous, at least not by the Sex Pistols’ standards. Smith was also important because she was a woman in charge; she played a pivotal role in the creation of this new/old style. Partly because of her presence, punk and new wave music were much more receptive to strong women than conventional rock.
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63-1 New Wave
was the umbrella term used to identify the music that emerged in small clubs, mainly in New York and London, during the mid-seventies. It embraced not only punk acts but also other bands seeking a similar audience. Among the more important were Talking Heads and Devo in the United States and Elvis Costello and the Attractions in England.
These diverse acts shared considerable common ground. Both bands and audience assumed an anti-mainstream position. With few exceptions, their music, whatever form it took, was a reaction against prevailing tastes. The reaction could be rage, weirdness, cleverness, humor, and more; but it was typically a reaction.
As this new music emerged, it was labeled “punk” or “new wave” more or less interchangeably. In retrospect, one of the significant distinctions between punk, or at least the “pure” punk of the Ramones and Sex Pistols, and the new wave styles that emerged at the same time is the aim of the music. Punk aims for the gut; new wave aims for the brain, or perhaps the funny bone. The songs of new wave acts such as Talking Heads and Elvis Costello demand attention to the words, and the musical setting puts the lyrics in the forefront.
To support clear delivery of the lyrics, new wave bands favored a stripped-down, streamlined sound: guitar(s), bass, and drums, with the occasional keyboard. (Elvis Costello seemed fond of cheesy-sounding synthesizers.) The rhythmic texture was relatively clean, with little syncopation or rhythmic interplay. This energized the songs without overpowering or deflecting attention from the vocals. Instrumental solos were at a minimum; the primary role of the music was to enhance the words.
