- [Evan] If you want to understand why at weddings across America and the world this year
thousands, probably millions of people will be lunging their pinky fingers over their heads,
you have to go back to 1967.
67 was the year that James brown recorded a song called
Cold Sweat, a watershed moment in the history of music because it ushered in the era
of funk.
Now of course you could go back earlier than this. Music styles are always being born out of what came before.
But James brown in the 1960s was funk. And Cold Sweat is the record where he first solidified this new sound.
What makes Cold Sweat so funky is that all of the instruments making it up work toward enhancing
the rhythm. Gone are the melodic chord progressions of R&B and Soul which Mark Browns earlier career.
Everything in Cold Sweat; the guitars, the horns, the bass, even Brown's voice were used like drums.
You can hear it. The harmonics are static, the rhythm is everything and the drums themselves are doing something
even more interesting.
- [Clyde Stubblefield] I just start playin...
- [Evan] That's Clyde Stubblefield, drummer for James Brown and probably the most
influential musician of the 20th century that you've never heard of. The drumbeat from Cold Sweat takes the classic
4/4 beat of popular music which sounds like this:
and adds syncopation or unexpected emphasis at different moments that make it sound more like this:
This signature syncopation of Clyde Stubblefield define the sound of Funk for decades to come,
but it had a far greater impact than that.
This drum solo you're hearing right now from a 1968 live performance is the most sampled beat in the history of music appearing in over
1300 tracks, including:
There's a reason Stubblefield's drumming and the cadence of funk is so danceable.
The study out of Denmark in 2014 showed that people were most likely to want to dance
when the rhythm of a song was moderately syncopated,
to uniform and it can get boring to complex like jazz music for example,
and people can't keep up. The rhythmic complexity of funk, hip hop which is an outgrowth of funk and EDM
is just enough that your brain wants to fill in the gaps
with Dancing.
In other words funk music is in the Goldilocks zone for making people wanna move.
You can draw a straight line from Cold Sweat to Bruno Mars's 24- Karat Magic
It inherits and refines the same lessons that James Brown learned exactly 50 years ago.
Just listen to the syncopation in the drumbeat:
24-Karat Magic is essentially made up of that drum plus a number of
synthesizers that play the role of guitar bass and horn sections from Brown's music.
They have the same percussive quality, the signature of Funk.
Here, listen.
To me Bruno Mars is a vessel and 24-karat Magic is a time machine.
It travels back to James Brown, but it makes some important stops in the history of Funk along the way.
It'so secret that Mars is pulling most aggressively from the early 1980s,
an era that many see is marking the decline of Funk music
before it's major resurgence in the samples of hip hop a few years later.
By 1980 Sly Stone, Bootsy Collins
and George Clinton had largely finished taking Funk on its cosmic trip across the universe.
But the sounds of 24-karat Magic come right out of the 80s, when Funk came back to Earth,
sort of, and fully embraced the synthesizer.
Everybody knows Rick James
- Cocaine's a hell of a drug.
- [Evan] But there are a lot of great acts that have been largely forgotten by pop culture,
like Midnight Star.
Those high-pitched synth plucks, sound familiar?
There are other great groups from this period, ike Cameo and The Gap Band,
but for my money the artist Mars is most indebted to here is Roger Troutman.
- Every time I would use the voice box people will be dancing until I use it,
and when I started using it, they would look up like
and it would seeme to hypnotize them in a way.
And it really works watch this.
♫Ladies and gentlemen you're watching Video Show♫
- [Evan] This vocoder part at the beginning of 24-Karat Magic is a direct nod to Troutman in his band Zapp,
who took the voice box further artistically than any other artist.
Roger Troutman was the best at 80's Electro-Funk using the same repertoire of glittering shining synthesizers,
that give 24-Karat Magic all it's color.
This is what Bruno mars and his producers have done.
They've channeled a long tradition in the instruments and the beats and the energy of this music.
A part of that tradition is iconic,
part of it is forgotten.
But the good news is that 24-Karat Magic doesn't discriminate.
It remembers the complete history,
and hopefully when you're dancing to it at parties this year
you do too.
I love Funk music so much.
That was so much fun to make. Thank you guys for watching that. There's a new Nerdwriter video every Wednesday,
so if you click that box right over there, you can get more videos like this.
Thank you for that
and thank you to VRV for sponsoring this video.
VRV is a great service that pulls together a lot of great content channels like
Crunchyroll, Funimation
Roosterteeth, Tested
Mondo, Cartoon Hangover.
Pretty cool that Crunchyroll and Funimation are in the same place by the way.
You can download the VRV app on your Playstation, Xbox, Ios, or Androind
and if you get the VRV combo pack at this link, you can get a seven day free trial.
And once you get that combo pack I'd recommend that you watch
Hunter x Hunter, which is a Shounen Battle Anime that kind of
deconstruct that genre, really cool.
Also on Tested Adam Savage's One Day Builds is awesome.
The guy from Mythbusters, really really cool.
All the shows are in HD and ad-free. Definitely recommend checking out the VRV app.
Thank you guys so much again for watching me indulge my love of funk music. I'll see you all- Oh!
I got this motherfucker!
It was heavier than I thought. Thank you.