Boulevards
GROOVE!
Label: Captured Tracks
With the possible exception of Scientology, funk is the most important religion to emerge from the twentieth century. The faith’s founding mothers and fathers, those bold souls of the late sixties and seventies, provided the musical and ideological tenets for a new Greatest Story Ever Told, a mix of Afrocentric attitudes and eruptive rapture. Funk delivered a full body experience, one that provided a mix of agony and ecstasy meant to convey the black experience in America. Devotees listened out of necessity and constancy.
After a considerable waning in the size of funk’s congregation, a new set of purveyors has taken up the genre’s lessons, though none of them seem particularly pious or inclined to tithe. You’ll recognize some of their namesBruno Mars, Pharrell Williams, Mark Ronson. These stars have taken a turn from what Dam-Funk and other funk revivalists and purists had already offered. They are plunderers of a sacred sound, modern-day raiders clicking and dragging from the scriptures of Parliament and The Gap Band with aims of topping the Billboard charts.
