ABSTRACT
To confront funk is to confront, on the one, James Brown: his words are no less telling than his music. The seemingly contradictory epigraphs mystically evade and overtly dictate funk meaning; in explaining the revolutionary musical work of his mid 1960s collective, the JBs, Brown first refuses to name and describe the object of inquiry and then briskly defines the object’s central feature, the offbeat. Definition is a funny thing. One way to free your mind of this contradiction has your ass following a well-worn path; funk is a ‘body music’ designed for dance and registers its politics at the gestural level.1 This can lead cultural studies to some overly familiar conclusions, polarizing and implicitly racist: check Simon Reynolds, who defends the ‘oppositional’ stance of mid 1980s British independent music by casually referring to the ‘delinquent animalism’ of successful r&b and funk (1989:245). Funk frees your mind, and the sequential emphasis of George Clinton’s axiom deserves attention: ‘and your ass will follow’ from the liberation of consciousness. Funk lives its contradictions, expands to the bulk of its diverse meanings, and is neither unknowable nor epistemologically plain (though it can be both).
