The worst thing I’ve learned at college so far is that all I really want to do with myself is dance. Studying the funk for this essay hasn’t helped. It’s such an issue because it’s a realization I haven’t been able to come back from, or turn off in any lasting way. An irreversible change in my brain chemistry, blunt force trauma to the rational mind. Now that it's truly sunk in that I would always rather be moving in time among a crowd, it's all over.
I think it started a long time ago. Maybe while I was in high school, after hours, when I realized people took interest in me because I could dance better than any of the other white kids. Or maybe it was after my first school dance, in third grade, still nodding my head in time as Gangnam Style echoed in my ringing ears, a song I wasn’t sure if we all actually liked or not, but whose power I witnessed could move bodies like nothing else. Maybe it was one of my first memories, at a grownups dinner party, able to get everybody excited just by flailing around like crazy to Madonna on the slippery tiled floor of our kitchen.
Whenever it started, I finally got wise to the shape my life was taking much more recently. I started taking piano lessons my family won in a raffle when I was five or six years old and it took until my second year of college to take the idea of playing with anyone seriously. I’d tried a few times as a younger person but my playing always just made people a little sad, and never provoked movement. I liked the blues, and had a hard time playing very fast. But there I was, perched on a stool, eking out diminished chords on a wobbly old Casio for a vaguely gothic group my friend had assembled, when our bandmate routed me into my amp through a looping effects pedal.
He said, “Now that we don’t have a guitar player, you should try this,” and a pink light flicked on as the held pedal listened to what I was playing. It caught the tail end of a chord I was arpeggiating and repeated the lurching phrase in quick, perfect time. Ba da-da, ba da-da. It was a little bit of a groove. My head nodded. Our pedalmaster/drummer coiled around the loop in response, buoyed by a buttery heartbeat from our guy on bass. My left and right hands free, I harmonized with my mechanized past self up and down that 50 keyed Casio’s skinny black and white neck. I had found a new beat that was all mine.
I’m not placing us in the same league, or even the same dimension as Miles Davis, half a century ago, but I can imagine how he must have felt chasing the jazz fusion beat into new territory. Influenced by what was going on in the black popular music of the late sixties, music people could dance to, made by other geniuses like James Brown and Sly Stone, Miles began to embrace electronic, genre-bending funk in his work. He felt the magnetic force this new sound exerted on big bands, jazz, and young people alike, and leaned into it hard, which ended him up with 1970’s Bitches Brew, the pioneering artist’s second platinum record, over a decade after Kind of Blue, his first. Clearly he was tapping into something.
In a way, Miles was still recoiling from bebop; the fast, high brow, jazz music of yesteryear you couldn’t really dance to. Musical values ebb and flow with the culture, but people always need to move, and there’s one thing that tends to make that happen: a groove, funk. You can fake everything else. Sometimes, jazz and electronics are a means to an end. Miles stopped fighting it, and then he couldn’t go back. In fact, he brought jazz with him. It’s a little scary.
I’m not entirely sure what about that moment with the loop pedal made it the true point of no return. All I know is afterward, everything felt like it needed that beat. I’m at school making cartoons, and I've started to feel the constant pull, up, out of the desk chair in my studio space, wishing I was following a rhythm, not a character sheet. All I could hope to make my animations do was dance. I felt lighter when my professor lectured about Greg Tate, and like a bag of bones reading Clement Greenberg. It was bad. It’s still bad. I feel like I’m trying to trap a wild animal, writing an essay about ‘70s fusion, instead of putting together a mix. I can’t write and listen to music at the same time. Sometimes that just means I can’t write.
Now, everything’s this hedonistic feast of funk. It can be a little tricky going back to music from before the ‘60s and ‘70s. That’s most of musical history, and there’s so much to hear, but man, it just doesn’t have that beat. You start to hear it with James Brown, (although he heard it from Africa first) and the sound expands and contracts, but that same beat keeps on going till today. It’s funk, it’s jazz fusion, it’s the new soul, it’s even the blues, crying at a party because it’s the only time you can see the big picture. It’s a psychedelic thing, the way the ‘60s and the ‘70s turned tears of sorrow into tears of joy and back again. Sometimes you can’t tell the difference, but the feeling picks you up anyway.
If ‘60s soul was a relief from the times, ‘70s soul was a declaration that these were the times. “Leave your cares behind,” said Chic’s “Good Times.” The ‘70s bubble just feels bigger, and it had the sweeping live productions, full bands, and all the lessons learned from jazz to blow things up further. But the ‘60s were where the momentum started. Again, you had James Brown turning understandings of black music on their heads as people danced en masse to hits like “Say It Loud – I’m Black And I’m Proud.” Everything was connecting.
It got so connected that structural integrities began to show themselves. One big, writhing, sweaty, genre got tired and people started to go home. Some had taken a little too much coke. Disco happened. Miles Davis moved on to hip hop.
It’s a little bit of a blurry period now because of how many fast things were moving all at once, but the music itself just blurred into something new, like it always does. We’re still listening, and we’re still dancing. We can’t stop.
So when I go back out and blow out my brain on electronic music, I know I’m really screwed because the forces at play are way bigger than I’ve even begun to understand. They swallow me whole and the best I can do is ride the wave, tapping along in time. And I can only stop moving long enough to write this down. My ears are still ringing, ba da-da, ba da-da.
Have I learned anything?
Keep going...
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