Freak Flag

By Crispin Sartwell

Funk. Few things are as fundamental or as trivial. None of us who didn't know him personally is going to miss Rick James, but all of us who didn't know him personally will remember him.

Funk - the dominant black pop form between the death of soul and the birth of hip hop - was invented by James Brown and his band, the JBs. Brown was a great churchy soul shouter, but as his career proceeded from the late fifties to the early seventies, he abandoned melody and the verse/chorus form, and began to construct songs out of repetitive verbal and musical phrases: "Cold Sweat," "I Feel Good," Sex Machine," and so on.

Never had American popular music so emphasized rhythm, and Brown's funk recordings are among the great treasures of American popular song, because they display a fundamental possibility: rhythm freed from melody: an atmosphere for dance, deeply simple and perfectly pleasurable.

Funk as purity of rhythm became a dominant pop style, and here one must mention such artists as Parliament-Funkadelic, Lakeside, Ohio Players, Cameo, the Gap Band, and Zapp. The music of these acts has been sampled unto death by a thousand hip hop artists, and stands as a foundation of world pop music ever since.

The style is powerful: it almost forces the body to move. It emphasizes the bass more than any previous style of American music, and hence vibrates the body in a distinctive way. The history of American popular music would be poorer without it, and everything that has happened since in black popular music depends on it.

Withal, it is tremendous fun, though there is barely a defensible lyric in the entire history of the form.

Funk is dedicated to sheer hedonism. In comparison, hip hop, particularly in its underground varieties, is studious and serious and important, even where the underlying rhythm is pure P-Funk.

On the other hand, hedonism itself can be liberatory, and the triviality of funk is identical with its appeal. No one embodied the appeal, the hedonism, or the stupidity, with quite the intensity of Rick James.

Obviously, when we recall at all, we will recall "Superfreak" and its classic version: "U Can't Touch This," by MC Hammer. It was James's moment of meaningless transcendence.

James ended up prosecuted for burning a woman with a crack pipe in the course of an orgy/binge, and though there were various comebacks after that, he never really rose again.

To be honest, that's just as well. Rick never really had anything to say except "she's superfreaky," and he managed to milk that for all the pleasure and pain, all the good and evil, that could be got out of it.

It's fun to be a superfreak, I guess, until it isn't any more. Too much fun is one of the fundamental ways to be evil. Happy hedonistic hijinks mutate into decades of abuse, addiction, abasement.

At any rate, last time I heard "Superfreak" it was spun by the dj at a bar mitvah. Everyone was dancing, and the moms seemed particularly enthusiastic. But I couldn't help hearing it almost as a warning to the bar mitvah boy.

Have fun, my man. But grow the hell up.

Crispin Sartwell teaches political science at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA.