Get Down: Funk, Movement, and the End of the Great Migrations
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InVisible Culture • Issue 31: Black Studies Now and the Counter- Currents of Hazel Carby Get Down: Funk, Movement, and the End of the Great Migrations Patrick Sullivan1 1University of Rochester Published on: Nov 15, 2020 DOI: 10.47761/494a02f6.685234b4 License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0) InVisible Culture • Issue 31: Black Studies Now and the Counter-Currents of Hazel Get Down: Funk, Movement, and the End of the Great Migrations Carby Funk is neither an essence nor a Black metaphysics but rather should be seen as a complex musical and aesthetic form that was created by Black artists to respond to and mediate Black experience at the end of the Great Migrations (1916-1970). Beginning in the early twentieth century and lasting through the postwar period, waves of migrating Black people left the South to urban centers of the North and West Coast, fleeing racism and pursuing economic opportunities. Their movement changed the demographic landscape of the United States. By the 1960s, this social movement began to wane. The promises of mobility were short lived. Black Americans who had 2 InVisible Culture • Issue 31: Black Studies Now and the Counter-Currents of Hazel Get Down: Funk, Movement, and the End of the Great Migrations Carby come to northern and western cities faced racist economic structures: White flight, deindustrialization, limited community and educational resources, and the decimation of urban neighborhoods through expansion of the highway system. The decade’s series of riots index the social and economic disparity that Black Americans endured. Cities that once offered dreams of freedom became nightmares of social constraint. The end of the Great Migrations embodies a moment of spatial constriction. With the end of the Great Migrations, funk offered modes of aesthetic and imaginative movement. Funk was the music of a generation, a generation that as children took part in the migrations, and in their teen years had been part of prior Black musical genres: soul, blues, and jazz. In the middle of the 1960s, shortly after the Watts riots, funk erupted onto the national music scene with James Brown’s “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” Soon after, funk began to flood out of cities: Chicago, Dayton, Detroit, Memphis, San Francisco; it was an urban music (born in New Orleans) that fused prior Black musical genres to put emphasis on musical movement, movement often overtly referenced in the lyrics. By the late 1960s, other Black artists were leaning towards funk music: Sly and the Family Stone, The Isley Brothers, The Parliaments, and The Ohio Players, to name a few. Like James Brown, many funk bands started out in other musical genres and transitioned to the genre through the late 1960s. By the 1970s, funk’s characteristics began to dominate the music of Black popular culture. Historically, funk developed in tandem with the social structure of the end of the Great Migrations and, in many ways, should be seen as its sonic relief. It is a cultural form all about moving when social and economic mobility was winding down. It is the argument of this essay that funk’s aesthetic, one centered on the production of movement, registers the dwindling of movement in social life and that this registering is articulated around gender, that is, the figure of the Black woman occupies a central place in funk’s imaginative movement. This is unsurprising, for while Black women’s migration caught up to Black men’s migration during the 1960s, the economic reality existing at the end of the Great Migrations differed for men and women. The existence of Black women in urban spaces has long generated social and political anxiety.1 The end of the Great Migrations was no different. The body of the urban Black woman magnetizes fears around uncontrolled and unbridled Black female sexuality, social degradation, miscegenation, and women’s independence. A common figure of this constellation is the prostitute or streetwalker, who regularly appears in funk music. Funk vectored Black women and their sexuality towards an articulation of movement. 3 InVisible Culture • Issue 31: Black Studies Now and the Counter-Currents of Hazel Get Down: Funk, Movement, and the End of the Great Migrations Carby In taking up funk as an aesthetic mediation of a historical period of Black experience in the United States, I am pushing back against notions of funk as related to essence, authenticity, or any other verbiage that might trace its core back to ontology.2 Tony Bolden, a funk music scholar, criticizes such localizations of funk and Black aesthetics in innate-ness. For Bolden, the positioning of Black performance as innate rather than learned (that is, as a product of craft, discipline, technē, and ultimately, intelligence, even if claiming to be liberatory) places Black people as underdeveloped.3 Instead of offering metaphysical/mythical origin for funk, he suggests that it is an aesthetic inflection of cultural-economic life of Black Americans in the postwar era. He characterizes the aesthetic of funk as “speed, self-reflexivity, asymmetry, dissonance, and repetition.” Indeed, drawing out the energetic valences of these qualities that he prescribes to funk, Bolden calls funk a “kinetic epistemology.” Funk music was all about movement, producing a dynamism that prompted people to get down, groove, and dance. It erupted onto the national stage at the moment the promises of movement embodied in the Great Migrations were beginning to ring false. Funk’s Cosmology Funk music explicitly reflected on the economic and social constraint that Black life was experiencing at the end of the Great Migrations. For instance, in 1972, War released the single “The World is a Ghetto.” The title invokes the ghetto as a symbol of economic and social stagnation wrought by race in US urban locales. The first verse expresses a man’s dissatisfaction with his current life: “Walkin’ down the street, smoggy-eyed, Looking at the sky, starry-eyed, Searchin’ for the place, weary-eyed, Crying in the night, teary-eyed.” From this bluesy-rock verse, the song switches to a funk chorus with the lyrics, “Don’t you know that it’s true, That for me and for you, The world is a ghetto.” The song then switches back to the bluesy-rock verse and expresses a desire for paradise: “Wonder when I’ll find paradise, Somewhere there’s a home sweet and nice, Wonder if I’ll find happiness, Never give it up now I guess.” The funk picks up and meets the desire of the verse with the chorus: “The world is a ghetto.” On the final verse, the singer has come to think “There’s no need to search anywhere, Happiness is here, have your share, If you know you’re loved, be secure, Paradise is love to be sure.” In a perfect pop cop-out, love serves as paradise in the ghetto. This funk song’s lyrics directly sublimate political change into vaguely romantic satisfaction. But this is hardly notable. After all, funk is pop, and one should not expect a pop song to address the structural oppression of what the ghetto is in any sustained meaningful way—can pop’s form even handle such ideological work?4 What is of note here is the juxtaposition between the music of the verse and chorus and the lyrics that 4 InVisible Culture • Issue 31: Black Studies Now and the Counter-Currents of Hazel Get Down: Funk, Movement, and the End of the Great Migrations Carby accompany each section. The narrative of the blues-rock verses tells a story of dissatisfaction, a longing for paradise, and acceptance of one’s position. Conversely, the funk section asserts the conditions Black Americans were experiencing, life in the ghetto and the economic and social immobility it expresses. This assertion is accompanied by the rhythmic and tonal complexity of funk music. The funk chorus energizes the song and produces a tension with lyrics that signal social and economic stasis. While the blues-rock verses offer a trajectory, the chorus does not offer such synthesis. Lyrical and musical expressions of movement conflict and are held in tension. Such tension is noteworthy, for often in funk music and lyrics work in tandem to produce movement, conveying a sense of economic, sexual, political, and/or spatial freedom. This desire for movement might reach its zenith in the commercially successful and critically praised funk of George Clinton and his brand of funk known as P-Funk. The brainchild of Clinton, P-Funk blends funk with rock and psychedelic music. This musical concoction is accompanied by lyrics that mix afro-futurism, nonsense, and cultural references. The P-Funk collective was made up of the bands Parliament, Funkadelic, and various side projects of the members. Clinton’s engagement with music began during his teen years in Newark and Plainfield, New Jersey. He formed a doo-wop group, The Parliaments, in the mid-1950s. The group traveled to Detroit, where Clinton got hired as a songwriter for Motown Records. 1967 saw The Parliaments release a single through a Detroit-based label before they dropped the article and became singular. With the subtle name change to Parliament, the band would switch to a harder, more psychedelic sound, as heard on their debut album Osmium in 1970. Yet due to contractual complications, Clinton put Parliament on hold, rebranding the group “Funkadelic.” A nomenclature shift provided creative freedom; or, to put it another way, economic constraint produced the collective structure that would become central to P-Funk mythology. Given the function renaming (Parliament to Funkadelic) played in escaping economic realities (contracts), it is unsurprising that wordplay in Clinton’s lyrics play such an important role in the construction of P-Funk’s mythology of spatial freedom—a desire for spatial freedom emerging at the end of the Great Migrations.