I vividly remember this review - recently recirculated by NME80s. I cut it out at the time but then at some point mislaid it. "Defunkt are to funk in 1981 what the Pistols were to Rock in 1977. About time too." I was sold. Literally: I was down the record shop in a flash and bought it. The album very nearly lived up to Angus MacKinnon's hype too.
What puzzles me now, though, is the opening scene-setting - the characterisation of the State of Funk as flaccid and enervated. This is January 1981 - what would he have been talking about?
I mean, if "funk" is narrowly understood as P-funk type stuff, then yes, at that precise moment the Clinton clan was in disarray, tangled up in legal disputes with record companies, and musically right off the boil.
But surely the start of the 1980s was a great moment in discofunk. And the first glimmers of electrofunk and that postdisco club sound were coming through. Synth-bass. Drum machines.
In 1980, you had frabulous gooey bass monsters like this Yarborough & People's smash
And that same year The Gap Band romped across the charts with a string of rump-spanking grooves like "Burn Rubber" and "Humpin'". It was the era of the massive snare-thwack.
And there was this Tom Browne hit, which I bought at the time.
Slave were active, Rick James was peaking, you had things like Zapp's debut album, The S.O.S. Band... not forgetting Prince's Dirty Mind.
Sonically, funk would appear then to be in rude, evolving health, as 1980 flipped into 1981.
Perhaps McKinnon was referring to the lack of any kind of politically militant or just broadly insubordinate voices in the area of danceable Black American music. Something in the continuum of Sly and the Family Stone, Parliament-Funkadelic, Johnny 'Guitar' Watson, Gil Scott Heron, and the darker intimations within Chic (who by 1980 were losing their touch - their commercial touch, certainly)
On the Defunkt album, there's a track that reworks "Good Times" - already shadowed with bleak ironies - into a song about heroin addiction.
Of course, MacKinnon wasn't to know that rap - at that point, probably seeming like a novelty, a fad, as opposed to the birth pangs of a counterculture ("Rapper's Delight" = another reworking of "Good Times", of course) - would be within a year or two exactly what he was calling for: dance music with an aggressive street edge and gritty realism ("The Message").
The NME Funk Wall Chart from May 1981
Here's a little interview I did with Defunkt leader Joe Boyd when music from that debut album and the follow-up was compiled at the other end of the Eighties:
Along with the Defunkt review, I had another MacKinnon cutting amongst my earliest NME scraps: his 1980 interview with Jah Wobble. Done just before he left PiL, round the time of his solo album The Legend Lives on... Jah Wobble in 'Betrayal'. Wobble comes across as the "nice one" in PiL, the George Orwell fan always going down the library. I'll have to dig it out.
Ooh - another take on Defunkt from around this time, I Punman at his most Punmanliest. June 6 1981
Defunkt are pretty cool, I agree: certainly streets ahead of James White, who I always associate them with. (And they were linked, weren't they, through that whole Ze Records / NYC Mutant Disco scene?)
ReplyDeleteBut what always held me back from loving them - apart from their lack of any really great tunes - was their sense of self-consciousness. It's hard to be really edgy if your whole presentation is "Hey: look how edgy we are!"
In rock, self-consciousness is almost invariably fatal. Queen are better than the Darkness, Lynyrd Skynyrd are better than Kid Rock, and AC/DC are better than Queens of the Stone Age, in part because they are not trying too hard be camp, or authentic, or lecherous. It just comes naturally to them.
In funk, that was why some of the acts you mention, and the hip-hop artists in particular, would always have the edge over Defunkt.
As you say, Angus MacKinnon's dismissive attitude to more mainstream funk is a bit hard to parse at this distance. I was just listening to a playlist of the NME's very own C81 tape from that same year. It includes Linx's Don't Get in my Way, which is an absolute banger.
Shout out to Melvin Gibbs, who first emerged playing bass in the early incarnations of Defunkt, and went on to make some of the worst music in the history of rock with the Rollins Band in the 90s.
DeleteThe album he made in 1987 as Power Tools, with Ronald Shannon Jackson and Bill Frisell, is really gorgeous, though. It is a great shame that it is currently out of print.
A liking for the Gap Band (etc) would've brought your average NME reader in perilous proximity to people who used to sit down on the dance floor and row to 'Oops Upside Your Head'! I'm always struck by people such as your Prelude-loving mate Stubbs (and I also recall an anecdote about Killing Joke's Youth playing West End 12"s through Marshall speakers) who genuinely did cross what were essentially tribal boundaries. To have really got on top of what was happening funk-wise in 1980/81, one would've had to have listened to Greg Edwards or Robbie Vincent (impossible outside London), and for a lot of people that simply would've been out of the question. All to do with a sensibility at the end of day, I guess.
ReplyDeleteYes, as you say, that was a time when the silos of youth culture were pretty impregnable. At my school there were Chic kids and Zeppelin kids and Joy Division kids, and the groups did not really overlap at all.
DeleteFor sure, the bulk of the NME readership was not interested in discofunk. But many of the writers were and NME covered a wide spectrum of it. Danny Baker was reporting on the UK jazz-funk scene and doing big pieces on Chic, the Jacksons and Earth Wind and Fire. Club records would get reviewed in the singles columns. Rick James, Prince, all these artists would get their albums and concerts reviewed.... features too.
DeleteSome of this music I heard from when it made the charts - Yarborough & Peoples, Tom Browne - but a lot of it I read about before I heard it and bought because recommended by my favorite critics.
(The other music papers covered it too, along with reggae)
Plus 'funk' was a huge buzzword all through '79, '80, '81, you had all the slightly hamfisted attempts to do the Nile Rodgers guitar in postpunk bands.
Somewhere I have the NME Guide to Funk Wall Chart, a centre spread pull-out. Genuinely educational. It may have been aversive to the average reader but I think quite a few would been guided to new realms.
That wall chart is great. As you say, an admirable attempt to open some minds.
DeleteNot sure about some of the entries, though. Has there ever been a musician less funky than John Coltrane?
Yeah it's a big over-comprehensive maybe, it's that journalistic impulse to pad out the survey with as many examples and outliers as possible.
DeleteI clicked through to read the excellent piece on "the massive snare thwack", and suddenly a lightbulb went on. You know who else loved the Gap Band's snare thwacks? Dave Grohl.
ReplyDeleteHe loved the thwacks so much, in fact, that he borrowed them, for "Smells Like Teen Spirit" among other tracks. Once you hear it, it's unmistakeable. But I hadn't noticed it until I saw the video that went round a couple of years ago, with him explaining the connection to Pharrell Williams: https://youtu.be/dZCrdSC2-1I?si=7qCCllyEoUxa_s9B
Minds were blown at the time, and the video became a bit of a sensation on social media. Even 40 years on, some people could still be surprised by the idea that Rock musicians could learn from Disco.
I came across that story a few years ago and it blew my mind. But as you say, musicians listen to all sorts of things and are receptive to ideas from all over. It's in the tradition of Foghat having a Larry Graham-esque slap bass bit in the middle of "Slowride", or Johnny Marr being so obsessed with Chic he named his kid "Nile", or... well that strange funky crazy bit in "Welcome to the Jungle". And specifically with disco the genuine musical enthusiasm that Old Wave Brit rockers like the Stones and Rod Stewart took it on as a mode.
DeleteThe New Agers have a concept called "scarcity mentality", which is the tendency to believe that scarcity is a fundamental condition of the world. It's very prevalent in leftists, and seems to be the attitude that McKinnon had towards funk.
ReplyDeleteBut this seems to have been inherent to the punk cohort, viz. the idea that the early 70's were some kind of musical desert, when they were probably the most fruitful period of the whole post-war era.
I don't think you can explain punk by the scarcity mentality... it had multiple motivations and grievances that all converged, but a main one was the craving for an aggressively teenage sound that simpletons could play, and there really wasn't much of that around in '75 / '76... there was Kiss, in the States
DeleteIt's easy to go back and look at 1975's tally of great albums and think "what were they complaining about?". But those great albums were mostly very grown-up and sophisto... it's also abstracting a recordings harvest from how things felt in that year... and how things feel in a year are related to how they felt in the preceding years.... 1975 would have felt like an inertial, winding- down sort of year after the previous big excitement, glam.
Also there can be a kind of suffocating, "decadence-ahoy" feeling about a surfeit of good, quality music, especially if it's a kind of directionless bounty.
I think the punks craved fanaticism and focus above all.
McKinnon probably just needed a set up for his review - as journalists do. And possibly didn't much care for the "Saturday Night, let's dress up and party" side of the funk on offer. But if you reject stuff for those reasons - its supposed escapism, not grappling with Serious Issues - you're going to miss most of what's musically exciting in pop at any given moment.
DeleteWell how things felt is very subjective, I mean in 1975 you had pretty much full employment, nationalised industries, strong labour organisations and affordable housing. They even gave free milk to school kids!
DeleteI was looking recently at footage of the Queen's Silver Jubilee, and it's pretty clear that at the time it was a very popular event with strong public support. It was far from the case that everyone was discontented, really just a fairly small tranche of bohemians, and a cadre of monetarist economists with influential links to the Conservative party.
Of course both those latter groups got to distort our perceptions of the era.
There was a survey in 1976 that revealed that happiness levels in the UK were at their highest - despite the crisis talk in the newspapers, the IMF's humiliation of the government etc.
DeleteI remember long ago time reading an essay that argued that Reaganism - mass unemployment etc - was a punishment that Americans brought on themselves, because they unconsciously felt bad about having too good a time, enjoying the economic fruits, peace and plenty etc. It was some kind of mass psychology reversion to sacrificial logic.
DeleteDuring Jimmy Carter's presidency he gave that famous address to the nation in which he referred to "a crisis of confidence". (There's a scene in 20th Century Women where they sit around watching it). I believe at the time he had read Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism. Lasch was on the left, I think, but very much of the mindset that "too much individualized pursuit of pleasure and self-realisation is bad". Very much "we must reinforce the super-ego".
"distort our perceptions of the era" - the classic move here is the use in Punk Docs of footage from the winter of 78/79 to backdrop events of 1976-7 - the mounds of garbage piled up in Leicester Square etc etc. 1976-7 was relatively calm and settled. The motivations for punk largely came from within rock, rather than external things to do with the economy or politics.
ReplyDeleteI like Lasch a lot, and think "Revolt of The Elites", old as it is, explains phenomena like Trumpism, or at least the conditions that gave rise to Trumpism, better than any other book.
ReplyDeleteBut I think the general understanding of history is always distorted by who gets to write it. Reaganism and Thatcherism largely punished people outside influential media and cultural circles, and although there was definite cultural pushback against them, it wasn't enough to overcome the narrative that they were somehow saviours, deliverers of harsh but necessary renewal.
But then I think that if the Labour Party had made Denis Healey their leader in for the 1983 election, Thatcher would have been a historical blip. Healey was hardly ideal, being bi-curious about monetarism himself, but I think enough of the post-war consensus would have survived.
Also I seem to remember that the need to call in the IMF was because the Treasury had screwed up their calculations on the UK's economic performance. That the whole thing needn't have happened.
ReplyDeleteMust look that up sometime....