Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The reason I started dancing in the first place was my dad took me to see 'Bring In 'da Noise, Bring In 'da Funk' when I was 9.
I worked with the Neville Brothers for 40-some years on the highway, and up and down since I can remember - funk from New Orleans.
I go to Milwaukee, I get cut, that really put a funk in me. I'm like, 'Man, it's over for me. I can't even make it in training camp now?'
I think the Flecktones are a mixture of acoustic and electronic music with a lot of roots in folk and bluegrass as well as funk and jazz.
I've always gravitated towards the beats, obviously. And when I was growing up, I always loved funk music or even - dare I say it - disco.
If you listen to a lot of old funk records, the drums are really small. But you don't perceive it like that because the groove is so heavy.
I like New York because you're kind of forced to smell everybody else's funk. So it keeps you biologically attached to the world around you.
I'm somebody who listens to a lot of funk, a lot of James Brown, and I want to be somebody who contributes all that energy to the mainstream.
I've determined my style - I like to call it elegant funk. You'll see me in some really beautiful gowns but I'll still have my septum piercing in.
When I'm just tryna funk, it's gonna be the Staple Singers, man - Pop Staples. And Ray Charles. Ray could take 'Eleanor Rigby' and make that funky.
My dad and I used to play Prince, Lauryn Hill, Stevie Wonder, The Parliaments, and a lot of older funk bands while cooking breakfast in the morning.
Novelists tend to go off at 70, and I'm in a funk about it, I've got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body.
My favorite bands were Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Jethro Tull, Uriah Heep, Grand Funk Railroad. If you listen to some of my early music, you can hear it.
I still go on YouTube and watch the old performances and the 'Soul Train' lines. I'm still amazed by how much soul and funk the music and dancers had.
I was a choreographer in the '80s and I was doing these videos. I did an Extreme video, which was really weird having them here. I did "Get the Funk Out".
Every problem seems like a mountain to me, and when I'm fit, I feel like I can conquer anything. When the opposite happens, I go into a funk. A real, real funk.
The Rat Pack was the piece that really kicked me out of that little funk that I was in and then Ted called me up and asked me if I wanted to be the dad in Blow.
You know, in the 1970's, when I was in high school, I belonged to a band called the Happy Funk Band. Until an unfortunate typo caused us to be expelled from school.
The bottom line with a lot of bands that funk is being applied to is that they don't really listen to funk and aren't versed in funk. Like, you know, Gordon Lightfoot.
I started buying records in the '80s. I listened to everything new wave, disco, funk synth-pop, rock, but in my house we were listening to bossa nova, tango, and folk.
One of the greatest matches I ever saw was Jerry Lawler against Terry Funk in the Memphis Midsouth Coliseum, but there was Flair vs. Steamboat in Nashville back in '89.
But that kind of falls in line; when you think about it, James Brown was a funk minimalist. All of those parts create a sum that's larger than than the individual parts.
But the idea of taking things and mixing them together is what I do in my music. I take hip-hop, R&B, pop, dance, funk and soul and mix it all together to get my own sound.
I started playing with this band, the Polyester Players. It was my introduction into funk. So I went and got a James Brown record. 'Black Caesar' is a film score, but it's so dope.
I like mixing things up. That makes it more interesting. I love mixing in slower funk with what I do. I'll add drum and bass and put my foot to the gas pedal and press it to the floor.
To me, if you're going to talk about funk, you have to go back to George Clinton and Bernie Worrell. Those guys are the giants. I've played with Bernie, and it was unreal. He's the master.
I like the New York style of funk, the California style of funk, but the South I never felt like - and Atlanta particularly - got the credit for taking their lessons and progressing on it.
For about three or four years, I was in a lot more physical pain and stress than anybody knew. When I would meet people, I was kind of standoffish. That was because I was in a bit of a funk.
I had a band called Infectious Grooves back in the Nineties. That music was really a mixture of styles, and we had some stuff that was punk rock, ska, but then we had a lot of funk in there.
When I was younger, I was listening to a lot of Armenian music, you know, revolutionary music about freedom and protest. In the 70s I was listening to soul and the Bee Gees and ABBA, and funk.
When I discovered Gil Scott-Heron, I discovered a musical hero, a man who spoke baritone truth to power over jazzy funk at a time when funky music was primarily about shake, shake, shaking your booty.
One of my strongest memories is my father playing bongos in the living room in Detroit listening to Motown radio. He was this skinny white bald guy, but he was really moved by blues and Motown and funk.
In the U.K., we always had a special relationship with the audiences because it wasn't 'More Than Words' that broke us: it was 'Get The Funk Out' that broke first. That was what we had always dreamed of.
I didn't grow up with Broadway music. My mother played Perry Como, while I listened to Andy Williams records. Later on it was Cream, Grand Funk Railroad and lots of R&B like the Isley Bros. and Parliament.
I had this idea for a while to do mix this Al Green vibe with a samba thing. I tried to do that in many different ways. Peter added his own modern notion of funk and his own deep background in classical music.
If you listen to 'Electric,' 'Entourage,' and 'Been With A Star,' all those records are records that I dug into the crates for to help me create that feeling of old funk. No one makes records like that anymore.
I was a huge fan of '90s hip-hop, and a lot of what they got their music from was funk and soul records. They just, like, take a clip of that and rap over it because, you know, that was just kind of what was up.
There's a lot of people over time who have brought out all these funky records that everybody has started jumping on like a catch phrase... When Planet Rock came out, then you had all of the electro funk records.
Funk could very easily be called jazz, but you call it funk. Does that really matter? People dig that they associate themselves with certain genres, but the genres to me are made up things, like an imaginary world.
It's easy to fall into a funk and not want to exercise, or to really want that second piece of chocolate cake. I have to say, I fight against those feelings all year. But I try not to let myself sit in a rut like that.
Working with the brothers can put pressure on my voice, so I choose to do my own solo thing so I can save my voice. I couldn't do both now. The Neville Brothers is a funk band; they play loud, and I have a strong voice.
I love listening to old records. Stuff from the '70s, even disco and funk records and a lot of early rock albums - what's great about those recordings is that you can actually hear the true tones of the drums themselves.
But we got up there and decided to stick to this mix of power chords and funk and that's where it really started for us. In having the courage to take that decision. To take a gamble not just with our music but our lives.
The tapes we were making would jump around with different styles, just quick parts of different songs. Hip-hop to jazz to funk to whatever else. And in a way, 'Check Your Head' ended up being like one of those pause-tapes.
All music is dance music. But when people think of dance music, they think of techno or just house. Anything you can dance to is dance music. I don't care if it's classical, funk, salsa, reggae, calypso; it's all dance music.
Styles move too fast to be partial to anything. If it's funk, that's enough for me. I don't care how fast or slow it is. I got my grandkids up front rapping and doing the new thing. They're teaching each other, bringing us up to date.
I had a few DJs in my neighbourhood that would play music in the streets. There was no hip-hop yet; there were just DJs that were playing disco, funk, and pop music, and we would gather round, go to the parks, and dance and enjoy ourselves.
My plays are for the kind of black people who relate to funk music, to Parliament-Funkadelic. When those guys get out of a spaceship - the idea that black people are from outer space, there's a poetic truth to that. We are this vast people.
My folks have played everything from rock, disco, pop, funk, and blues. My dad has always brought and played different genres like jazz, classical, and Latin. With all this in my pocket, I feel I have a taste of everything for my influences.
Mars is really different, into art. Lydia Lunch is more energy. James Chance is more commercial in a different way, in funk and jazz. They were all doing original things, trying to create their own sound and music. I think they're all great.