Bootsy Collins
World Wide Funk
Mascot Records
Not
content to take Sounds and Melody Maker as the only Gospels of
music, I also bought Black Echoes in
my teenage years influenced by my sister’s Songs
in the Key of Life, Stevie Wonder and Shining
Star by Earth, Wind & Fire (a song covered by Stryper!)
Trying
to flip through the second-hand albums without losing my fingertips or my
patience, at the outdoor market in Wakefield, I pulled out a sleeve that
combined science fiction, adolescent humour and risqué cartoons, that being a
teenager, I bought. My mother’s knitted
eyebrows of disapproval completed the feel-good factor. It was called One Nation Under a Groove by Funkadelic and featured Bootsy Collins
on bass. I wasn’t to know that it became
a funk classic but I also enjoyed the rock of Maggot Brain and Lunchmeataphobia
just as much.
Funk
was an expression of open-mindedness, happiness, love, dance, but also of
day-to-day struggles which included a rejection of negative black stereotyping. James Brown was the Master of Funk and Bootsy
(named by his mum) became a player in his band The J.B’s.
Funk
is a combination of Blues and Soul with a heavy bass line that stresses the
first beat in the bar, often called the ‘one’.
The
fifteen tracks on World Wide Funk provide great variety and good sequencing and
whilst they employ the ‘one’ and jangly short guitar chords, the material
doesn’t dwell in the past but updates it, especially through the vocals. The musicians Bootsy gathers around him, which includes several big names, are too
many to mention here, but each song delights whether the groove is fast or
slow. I can’t remember enjoying this
genre so much since Diamond & Pearls,
Prince and Phenomenon, by LL Cool J.
World
Wide Funk recaptures the fun of the dance and the beat, provides Bootsy with a
return to form, and concluding with a description that will appeal to the man
himself, he manages to pop out a career best.
NE
