Brian 'balistic' Prince wrote: > Funk is bop guns and atomic dogs, Well, that was George Clinton's take on it. You don't hear that kind of stuff coming from hardly anyone else in funk, save maybe Afrika Bambaataa.
'Funky' really seems to be the most overloaded word in electronic music. I was cringing when I read the start of this thread. Techno is 'funky'? Well it sure isn't funky the way The Meters, James Brown, Prince or Red Hot Chili Peppers are funky. Most techno doesn't even have a funk-derived bass line. It 'has soul'? Pick out some of the most soulful techno records and hold them up to a soulful house or r&b record. Splat. It's machine soul: synthetic sounds and mechanical rhythms, moody and thematic, more often than not revealing its heritage in some manner, but almost always in a subtle, not overt, way. The things that make funk funky and soul soulful are generally only hinted at in techno. 'Techno city' and 'Praise' are the most soulful techno records I own, but I can't imagine without their vocals that I'd categorize them as such. > Anyhow, musical definitions fail as often as artistic ones too . > . . I was only outlining a way to describe techno, and had no > intention of trying to corral it into a verbal mold. I gave up trying to find the right words to describe electronic music genres. Without a musicology degree, I don't have the vocabulary necessary to provide the precise structural breakdown as if it were a just some mathematical exercise. Every description I try falls into the same traps of every rule having a million exceptions, playlists that defy boundaries, and, most importantly, people not really being able to get a sense of what something sounds like, no matter how thoroughly you explain it. So I decided to let the music speak for itself. Play someone 5 techno records and tell them "this is techno", 5 house records "this is house", and they'll start to get the idea. If you are asked "what is techno" and can't play something right then, give them some historical background but then say "I'll have to play some for you sometime." :) - Mike ____________________________________________________________________________ mike j. brown, fourthought.com | xml/xslt: http://skew.org/xml/ denver/boulder, colorado, usa | personal: http://hyperreal.org/~mike/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
