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Funkin’ You Right Vol. 1

One hundred tracks with a single brief: funk, loud, no apologies. This is the deep end of the record collection.

What funk actually is

Funk is a rhythmic argument. It moved the emphasis in American popular music from the second and fourth beats to the first — the One, as James Brown insisted on calling it — and it made the bass and drums the lead instruments rather than the accompaniment. Everything else in the arrangement serves that.

What a hundred-track set like this can do is show the idea developing: from Brown's 1970s band through Parliament-Funkadelic's cosmology, the boogie era's synth bass, Minneapolis, and into the modern revival.

What to listen for

James Brown's "The Payback" and "Get On The Good Foot" are the source. Everything else here is downstream, and "The Payback" in particular — nearly eight minutes built on a single vamp — is the whole philosophy in one record.

George Clinton's "Atomic Dog" appears twice, which is forgivable. It is among the most sampled records in hip-hop, and that backwards-sounding synth line has financed a generation of West Coast rap.

The Time's "777-9311" is the Minneapolis entry and one of the most technically absurd basslines ever recorded — played by Prince, on a synthesiser.

Teena Marie gets two, and she deserves them. "Square Biz" and "Behind The Groove" are as funky as anything from Motown in that period, and she wrote and produced her own material.

Slave's "Watching You" in the Mike Maurro remix is the collector's pick, and Cameo's "Candy" is the one that stayed on the radio.

Tom Browne's "Funkin' for Jamaica" is a trumpeter's record that became a New York anthem, and Kris Kross's "Tonite's Tha Night" shows how directly hip-hop inherited all of it.

Anderson .Paak's "Come Down" is the modern proof that the tradition is alive.

Go deeper

Three albums: James Brown's The Payback, Funkadelic's One Nation Under a Groove, and Sly and the Family Stone's There's a Riot Goin' On.

Bootsy Collins and Bernie Worrell are the two individual players whose catalogues will take you furthest.

And Teena Marie deserves a proper listen — It Must Be Magic is superb, and she remains the most fully accepted white artist in the history of Black American music.

Listening note: funk lives in what the players leave out. Follow the space between the bass and the kick across this set — the groove is built from those gaps, and the tracks that hit hardest are almost always the ones with the fewest notes in them.

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