From 1968 to 1978; from 'Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud' to Off The Wall; from the Third Harlem Cultural Festival to the P-Funk Earth Tour: Funk Is Its Own Reward plots the journey of an African American cultural movement that was always about far more than simply music.
With roots in the poetry, art, theatre, intellectualism and jazz of the celebrated 1960s Black Arts Movement, and made possible by the shifts in thinking brought about by the Black Panthers, the rise of HBSUs and black political involvement, funk was the Second Great Black Renaissance. Funk Is Its Own Reward makes the connections between the literature, films, television, black arts collectives, theatre groups and media and analyses how they fed into a cultural wave that made a music confident enough to embrace the likes of Barry White, Bill Withers, 24 Carat Black, Bootsy, Mandrill, the O'Jays, the Fatback Band, Miles Davis, and the Brides of Funkenstein not just possible but inevitable. It looks at how, once African American popular music reconnected with and fully expressed the culture that created it, it had to freedom to express itself in any way it saw fit and still be funky. The music gave itself to the scope to be acoustic, to be vocal harmony, to be brassy, to make social comment, to be orchestral, to be headed for the bedroom, to be all about the rhythm, to be electronic . . . and still be funky. It was never about where a piece of music hoped to end up, but where, to coin a phrase, it be coming from.
By putting the music firmly in the context of the movement, Funk Is Its Own Reward drags a vibrant art from out from under the notion it only existed to help white people dance, and shines a light on the skill, experimentation, sense of community, humour, formal training, black pride, self-celebration and intellectual and musical freedoms that went into it.
In doing so, it uncovers the importance of black radio, how the wah-wah pedal was a happy accident, Motown's corporate role in the Dawn of Funk, why jazz not R&B is funk's nearest living relative, how life in a hippie commune changed George Clinton, why Sesame Street was the funkiest programme on television, what blaxploitation actually meant to its intended audience, why Kool & the Gang stand apart from the pack, the immediate connection of James brown's record to his audience, what was in Barry White's mother's record collection, how the self-contained band changed everything and where Maurice White first brushed up against the cosmic pyramid.
Joining author Lloyd Bradley on Funk Is Its Own Reward's epic journey are a host of I-was-there contributors including Fatback Band's Bill Curtis, Bootsy Collins, Maurice White, Lynn Mabry of the Brides of Funkenstein, Larry Mizell, Isaac Hayes, Larry Graham, Melvin Van Peebles, Overton Loyd, the Last Poets, War's Harold Brown, George Clinton, Fred Wesley, Steve Arrington, Carrie Lucas and Dexter Wansell.
