Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - Give Up the Funk Edition Part 2
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Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 28 October 2022
⏱️ 48 minutes
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Summary
In the ’70s, funk was pop—the cutting edge of Black music and the way listeners got their groove on, before disco and hip-hop. After James Brown taught a generation a new way to hear rhythm, and George Clinton tore the roof off with his P-Funk axis, nothing would be the same.
Rising alongside blaxploitation at the movies, funk took many forms: Curtis Mayfield’s superfly storytelling. War’s low-riding grooves. Kool & the Gang’s jungle boogie. Earth, Wind and Fire’s jazzy crescendos. But when funk began fusing with rock and disco took over the charts, would these acts have to give up the funk?
Join Chris Molanphy as he traces the history of funk’s first big decade. You’ll ride the mighty, mighty love rollercoaster and get down just for the funk of it.
Podcast production by Kevin Bendis.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening Ad-Free on Amazon Music. |
| 0:12.9 | Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine, about the hits from coast to coast. I'm Chris |
| 0:22.6 | Malanfe, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series? |
| 0:28.8 | On our last episode, we talked about the rise of funk in the first half of the 1970s, when the |
| 0:36.9 | 60s innovations of James Brown, Sly Stone, Isaac Hayes, |
| 0:42.4 | and Parliament Funkadelic were taken up by a rising generation of syncopated bands and soulful |
| 0:50.1 | singers. These acts, from war to Cool in the Gang, to the Ohio players, saw their funky |
| 0:57.8 | recordings rise not just on the singles charts, but also the album chart, as listeners across |
| 1:05.4 | the musical spectrum enjoyed the tight rhythms and the sprawling jams. We are now in the mid-70s when an eclectic |
| 1:14.9 | combo called Earth, Wind, and Fire, is about to take over the charts and usher funk into |
| 1:23.3 | the disco era. A fun footnote about Earth, Wind, and Fire. |
| 1:31.4 | They recorded a Blacksploitation movie soundtrack |
| 1:34.7 | even before Isaac Hayes or Curtis Mayfield. |
| 1:39.7 | They were the uncredited backing band to Melvin Van Peebles on the 1971 soundtrack to the director's seminal film Sweet Sweetback's Badass Song, Ground Zero for Blacksploitation. |
| 1:57.5 | Frankly, you can barely tell Earth, Wind, and Fire are playing on that soundtrack, |
| 2:04.3 | which all music calls, quote, serviceable period funk soul. |
| 2:10.1 | About the only telltale sign is when EWF leader Maurice White plays the Colimba, the African-style thumb piano. |
| 2:21.6 | White was probably the most famous Calimba player of all time. |
| 2:43.1 | Maurice White started as a session musician, playing drums on countless recordings for chess records. |
| 2:55.8 | But he had greater ambitions. Founding his own band in Chicago in 1969, White named them Earth, Wind, and Fire after his astrological chart, which had no water signs. The group signed to Warner Brothers Records, |
| 3:03.2 | and two EWF albums came and went, along with that sweepback soundtrack, to only modest success. |
| 3:14.3 | White disbanded the group, retaining only the Earth, Wind, and Fire name, and his brother, bassist Verdeen White, Signed to a New Deal with Columbia Records in 1973, |
... |
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