[Robert Crumb]

III. To Funk or Not to Funk...

Now, as tempted as I am to get into Funk, I’m not going to. Ain’t that fucked up?

Funk is something that I think could take up its own feature. Funk and soul are fruit part of the same tree, yeah. But in the end, soul proved to be much more than that. So I’m going to skip over artists like George Clinton and Sly for the most part, even though their influence is undoubtedly important to soul. Would add another page anyway. I’ve probably lost you by now, so just imagine that.

I’m sorry and you’re welcome.

But don’t be sad! We’ve still got Isaac Hayes on the set! That’s right, the original big black bald Don Juan, Isaac Hayes. You might know Hayes from “Salty Chocolate Balls” and the Shaft soundtrack but man, Hot Buttered Soul is where it’s at. With the release of the album in ‘69, Hayes arguably dropped the first album statement by a soul artist, that is, an album unconcerned with hit singles, accessibility, driven by a tight artistic vision. There are four fucking songs and only one of them clocks in under 9 minutes.

So I direct you to Exhibit A, his version of the Bacharach-David classic, “Walk on By.” Just listen, that’s all. His murky vision was elaborate like the work of uptown soulsters, yet held on to the immediacy of his label mates on Stax. But it was twice more experimental than either. It profoundly affected a great many Soul musicians, most apparently, Willie Mitchell, founder of Hi-Records, producer to Al Green.

The presence of guys like Hayes, Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder, as well as collaborative give-and-take writing duos like Al Green/Willie Mitchell, and Gil Scott-Heron/Brian Jackson, lead to a sort of archetypical character, soul auteurs if you will. Guys who not only performed, but jumped all the way into the creative process head first and left a unique artistic fingerprint behind. They wrote their own songs, picked their own material, experimented, simply had creative control. Wasn’t really so much a brand new thing, but the development of a great many artists during this period pushed soul in a series of new directions.

At the same time, these artists embraced a social-awareness that, until then, was less prevalent. They promoted the civil rights movement, which had taken a turn into dire straights after the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

So there’s this big Laundromat, and all these different elemental ideas are being stuffed into the washer: politics, psychedelia, experimentalism. And then you’ve got all these different styles coming together in a soapy mixture: funk, reggae, exquisite pop, jazz, early electronic music. The result was... the result was...

The result was still sensuous, as Al Green declared. As the “last great southern soul singer,” Green’s output during the seventies is immaculately superb, both in terms of popular and artistic success. Guy could rock the fucking microphone. There was a tenderness about him, a sensitivity that found a midway point between God and Sex that perhaps no other artist ever found. At least, not quite so well.

The result was filled with impassioned fervor, as Gil Scott-Heron displayed. No one will ever confuse him with the great vocalists, but his poetic vision is nearly unmatched. “Home is Where the Hatred Is” is certainly a more poignant look at drug-use than Gaye’s “Flying High (In the Friendly Skies),” even if it’s not as beautiful. His fiery diatribes, along with the beat monologues of Hayes and the early raps of guys like Joe Tex became the foundation of the hip hop MC.

The result was, most of all, versatile, as Stevie Wonder envisioned. Wonder was the greatest cross-over artist that Motown ever produced, but the fact is, Motown had very little do with his success. With a voice that was one part primal growl, one part gentle falsetto, he created some of the best soul albums as he expanded the artistic breadth of the genre. They were funky, synthy, mellow, agitprop, jazzy, danceable, and obviously, incredibly soulful.

The misconception at this point, I suppose, would be that Soul was purely black music since its inception. And while its true, black folk spurred the creation on throughout, it’s a sort of an exaggeration. Music knows no race, creed, religion, yadda, yadda. After all, bands like Booker T. and the MGs and Sly’s Family Stone testified to this fact, multiracial groups with the funkiest white dudes you’d ever meet. Steve Cropper, anyone?

So a sub-genre like Blue-eyed Soul is kind of inaccurate, as though this was the only chance people with less melanin had to get into the game. However, blue-eyed soul is still a noteworthy divergence in the soul continuum. Blue-eyed soul is just soul sung by a white singer. Dusty Springfield might have cut some of the best tracks of the style but there were plenty of artists who dabbled. Cult-fave Big Star’s frontman Alex Chilton got his start as a blue-eyed soul singer with the group The Box Tops. Some David Bowie and Van Morrison material is considered blue-eyed soul. You knew that, right?

The best cuts of blue-eyed soul capture the same intensity of... I don’t know, brown-eyed soul. Many familiar southern session musicians worked blue-eyed soul, which made songs like “Natchez Trace” sound so strong and authentic, as hard-edged as anything the Meters could do. But a lot of songs ended up the kind of MOR stuff that evolved into Hall & Oates.

Sad thing is, middle-of-the-road crap became a permanent fixture in soul music.