"Funk! Funk! What it is! What is it?
Is it fun with a k? Is it straight gone hip?
Can anyone tell when the funk hit the fan?
Can anyone help me
to understand ...
the meaning of FUNK ? "

( from 'The Meaning of Funk' by Doctor Deltadelic)

Well Tim, perhaps I can help. My name's Deltadelic, and I'm a doctor. I write the songs, but today I'm talkin language, baaad language. I like sayin it cos I like doin it. Funk! Funk! It's a bad word. But what the fuck does it mean? Oh brother, what's the mothership connection?

Follow me then now into the Garden of Groove Grammar,
We gonna dig up the roots ...

Disco is easy ... disco as in 'disc' and 'discotheque'. Easy as in Sunday morning hangovers, and listening. But Oh Father, where's the funk? To the library, young man, where we can consult one of the Deltadelic Foundation's extensive collection of dictionaries with their covers missing. In Odhams Modern Standard Dictionary of 1936, the word 'funk' is defined as 'Great fear and shrinking back ; panic ; to be in great fear and shrink back.'

Collins Concise, 1990, has a similar definition, with an extra 'to avoid or make a mess of something' . It also has an entirely new second meaning for the word 'funk' ... 'A type of polyrhythmic Black dance music with heavy syncopation.' Now we be gettin somewhere! Now we be gettin into the 21st century with the Oxford English Dictionary, 2001 edition, where we find the previous two meanings and a third : to be funky in the new millenium is to be 'Modern and stylish in an unconventional or striking way.' Language, like music and monkies, evolves.

And the question has always been "How do we get from shrinking back in panic to steppin out in style?" In this case, via the seventeenth century, perchance. Back in the day, so the best books say, the word 'funk' probably originated from a French or Flemish root and was used to refer to 'a musty smell, particularly of tobacco'. That would probably be tobacco grown in America on plantations owned by Europeans and worked by African slaves. Four hundred years later that stale odour still lingers. And though the smell of cigarette smoke has finally faded from the pre-club alehouses of England, it still clings to the pre-faded flares of a new dance generation. A generation (or three) whose attitudes to music, to language, and to style have been terminally affected by their former tobacco growing colony, and whose use of the word 'funky' derives exclusively from its use by the descendents of African slaves. That's pretty funked up aint it!

African-Americans are first recorded using the word in the early 20th century, in the context of earthy, natural smells. By extension, it was applied to their environment, and to the most natural and earthy of human inter-gender activities. Y'all know what I'm talkin about now dontcha? Any negative connotations present in the European understanding of the word soon wafted away. By the 1950's, it was being applied by Black musicians to the music they created, whether soul, rhythm and blues or hard bop. Describing these sounds as 'funky' was a celebratory way of asserting their 'Blackness', their links with African-American tradition.

Here in England, our use of the words 'funk' and 'funky' is all about the next generation of African-American musicians, artists like Sly Stone, Funkadelic and James Brown. The term 'funk' is now used to refer specifically to the music these artists created in the 1960's and early 70's, and the adjective 'funky' is all too freely applied to its many derivitive forms and reworkings.

Is there anyone left out there who has ears but still doesn't know that funk music is what happened when Mr. Brown invited soul and gospel and rhythm'n blues up to his hotel room for a little four-way action? Everyone cool is hip to the insistent, hypnotic, superheavy groove thang, are they not? Sex Machine and Family Affair and One Nation Under a Groove ... funk music was specifically designed to make you dance. And is it earthy and natural to want to dance your way out of your constriction? I should say so. Were the pioneers of funk music stylish in an unconventional or striking way? Was 7 up?? Their music, their hiptalk-bullshittin word games, and their flamboyant dress codes are the source of our current use and understanding of the words 'funk' and 'funky'. They are the meaning of funk

And if you wanna sell to the now-crowd, your product better be funky. If you dream of being part of the in-scene, you better buy that funky product. And we know who put the funk in the music, and who took the music out of the funk. It's still a bad word, thank fuck for that. It's a word that still manages to deliver the excitement and style of the party in the past, with the promise that the party this weekend will be just as good. Maybe it will be too. The past is always gonna be that great party you weren't old enough to go to, and colours were brighter back then before the ozone split and everything faded. The funk is still out there, that's the main thang, and it's about smells and panic and style and syncopation on a Saturday night. That's what's happening. It's the funk is what it is.

Funk! Funk! What it is! What is it?
It's fun with a k! It's straight gone hip!
Sure feel fine when the funk hit the fan
Everybody happy now
they understand ...
the meaning of FUNK.

Next ...

What is DISCO? Dr. D explains

What is FUNKWEED? YouTube explains

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