I want my funk un-cut.

I was going through my CD collection awhile ago, trying to pull all the funk-influenced tracks I could find. Sadly, not much. So I have determined to learn more about funk.

A Maceo Parker track gave me the term P-Funk, and the Digital Underground (best known for the early 90s “Humpty Dance”) clued me into the existance of a “funk mob,” both of which led me to Wilson & Alroy’s Record Review P-Funk page. There I discovered Parliament…

I downloaded Parliment’s Mothership Connection from iTunes because it was highly recommended and WARR calls it a “a goldmine for future generations of samplers.”

I picked it up thinking there might be some stuff in it I recognized. Hoo-boy. For starters, both the Maceo Parker track “Pass the Peas” (from Live on Planet Groove) and Dr. Dre’s “Let Me Ride” (The Chronic) quote significant portions of songs from the album. Furthermore, Digital Underground relied very heavily on Funk Mob samples, as have dozens of other rap artists.

In fact, just about everything I thought was compelling and exciting in the Chronic turns out to have been pulled wholesale—not “influenced by” but literally copied to such an extent it can hardly be called sampling—from P-Funk. Which means if I’m in the mood for funk but not exactly in the mood to hear Dre rant about “a nigger with a Tec-9 trying to take mine” I can go straight to the source.

Speaking of the source, here’s what WARR has to say about Dre’s the Chronic. Which, having now discovered the real thing, I tend to agree with:

I just found a copy of Dr. Dre’s The Chronic in my price range – free – and it’s even weaker than I remembered, just an endless string of slow P-Funk samples with Snoop Doggy Dogg padding out his lines by stretching his second-favorite word “bitch” into two syllables (“beeyotch”), and inserting the nonsense syllable “izz” whenever his lines don’t scan (often). These techniques led straight to the worst in current hip hop, e.g. Jay-Z’s “H To The Izzo.” Even Dre’s high squeaky synth isn’t an innovation: it comes straight from Bernie Worrell’s work on Mothership Connection. [ Over Our Dead Bodies ]