funky house sceptics, let me draw your attention to this

(long time reader, first time poster)

like "katy on a mission" isn't foremost a benga production with anyone on vocals, it's a katy b song produced by benga.

i don't think that's quite right. it started off as an instrumental way back last year and only recently got the vocal treatment precisely because the beat was so popular. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOKTC9tboKs

"the "problem with a lot of funky diva vocals" IMO is simply that the songwriting is inconsistent and not all of the vocalists are actually any good. I don't know that it needs accusations of secret pedophiliac tendencies on the part of listeners to explain it."

i think this is the first time tim f has ever agreed with people on this.

still dont know how man on a mission ever got popular in the first place though. it was better when it was produced by bless beats and called wearing my rolex.

The Ministry of Sound and Rinse FM funky compilations are probably your best starting point if you want an overview of the genre and the main players with the aid of actually knowing what the tracks are.

― Matt DC, Friday, 30 July 2010 13:11 (3 hours ago)
Thanks, Matt. I'll check those out.

check this out, too, it was posted upthread but its beneath the fold

i think this is the first time tim f has ever agreed with people on this.

It's a fairly uncontroversial point really. Not all vocal tunes are amazing. OH MY GOD. Indict uk funky now. But not all the tunes in any of funky's strands are amazing. Not all the tunes in any genre are amazing. (I don't go out of my way to identify for them everyone here because, well, why would I waste my time and yours?)

It's like saying "I'd listen to more house but not every house tune i've heard rocks my world, seriously this genre has real probs."

In a year that has produced so many fantastic vocal tunes I don't think some duff ones or middling ones are a serious cause for concern.

But this is the structure of complaint that everyone adopts when they want to explain their lack of greater engagement with a genre, creating this fantasy of endless parades of indistinguishable sub-standard product, but when pressed they find it difficult to name more than one or two examples.

And then, of course, when they do want to congratulate something, it's in comparison to this fantasy of indentikit bad product.

the trouble with referring to a genre's "standards" is that everyone seems to have different ones (some like the r&b vox, some don't, some like radio MCs, some don't &c &c).

I'm going back to this because again it was a misreading of what I wrote that kinda can help me tease out my position on all of this: I didn't refer to the term "standard" in the sense of benchmark of quality, but rather "standard" as a put-down, i.e. typical, generic, unadventurous. My issue with this approach to thinking about genre (that is, setting up some notion of what is generic and then measuring the distance of any particular track from the generic in order to assess its worth) is, in line with my point above, the fact that it involves setting up a notion of the generic before you've examined it enough to work out what actually is generic in the negative sense rather than "generic" in the sense of "it sounds like its genre". e.g. when Martin talks about "the worst end of R&B", this is premised on the assumption that you simply can dismiss a significant minority of R&B without examination.

Like, I think Miss Fire is far and away the best diva in funky at this point - Farah might beat her ultimately but hasn't done enough - because of the way in which she always manages to make a certain softness and restraint sound like restraint, like she's brushing the tips of your ears with her vocals rather than unleashing the full onslaught so that you the listener will go to her. There's a beckoning, "come hither" vibe to her vocals which I think is pretty intoxicating. Meanwhile that slightly nasal quality to her vocals gives them a very personable quality, letting her sound unrehearsed (in a good sense) even when she's deploying laser-precision micro-melisma.

Youtube links:

Miss Fire - It's You

Miss Fire - Falling (DJ Naughty Remix)

Miss Fire - Take Off Your Clothes

Barber Bizzle ft. Miss Fire - Do You Feel The Same

Digital Dubstar ft. Miss Fire - Can't Say No

But Miss Fire's attractions simply won't emerge if you're framing this in terms of "generic R&B vocals vs Cooly G." Those kinda contrasts are gonna prevent you from getting to the heart of what is interesting about Cooly G as much as any R&B-influenced funky.

miss fire is hilariously grumpy on twitter. one of my fav things by her is that random "writer's block" tune she uploaded a while back. i don't think any of her songs really work as songs though.

falling is good. the rest though are alright enough but have the same problems as a lot of funky vocals - the melodies just sound too tightly squeezed into the beats and barely have room to breathe. or maybe theyre just not that strong to begin with. sound like they were made up and recorded in about 30 mins. (was gonna say 10 but that would be a bit harsh).

dear titchy

http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f14/snouts/stfu.gif

like i mean sorry to be militarizing tim's subconscious here but the self-produced 'take off your clothes' knocks any cooly g into a cocked hat all day long. deal with it cloth ears.

oh choke on a fucking testicle you dumb fuck. where have i been bigging up cooly g?

oh yeah "take off your clothes" is brilliant.

this is another great miss fire vocal (and one of the best songs she's done) -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7rql3ihGtk

thats her best one.

"i don't really see the point in engaging with jon."

this is a smart approach. not just for jon either.

i'll concede it's a nice bit of trolling but you guys are aware 'part time lover' isn't particularly relevant to this discussion right.

remarkably self-aware of you to say so btw titch.

i would ask why "part time lover" isn't relevant but i'm not sure i care what the funky police are finding fault with this time

i prefer it to pretty much all her other stuff, which i just like

i knew you'd say that. at this point i'm not sure if i have the strength to chalk it up to anything more than a "lady if you have to ask" sitch tbh.

hey guys i just checked dissensus btw and it seems we are all devaluing this thread as a useful resource ;_;

rtc just shut that cakehole. youre fucking insufferable.

lex, its its more like acoustic funky, like funky gone live. kind of like an mj cole-y version of it. either way, who cares, its still her best song.

like they'd know about useful resources

relistening to those miss fires, "can't say no" is wicked too (and also seems to have been quietly slipped on to itunes), the "my honey honey, my baby boo" hook of "falling" is fab but the rest of the track spends too much time futzing around doing nothing, "do you feel the same" is totally underdone, it feels ad libbed. "part time lover" is better than all except perhaps "can't say no".

actually "do you feel the same" her vocal strategy is a lot closer to cooly g than anything else.

explain that last one for the people please lex.

the vocal seems more of a vaguely floating ad-libbed decoration than a song

ah yes of course the jazzy scat of the dub auteurette, how did i not see that.

You lot!!!!
What is 'Roska is suppressing a more colourful blah blah in favour money making lieu' all about?
Hang on I get you I saw Roska chartering a helicopter to take him to his latest festival show, he's hanging out with Jay Z and Timbaland now.....comparing tracks such as Redlight and Roses Gabors 'Stupid' to tunes by Miss Fire is also plain 'STUPID'. Redlight's sound is honed and slick and is the sound of an experienced music maker, Miss Fire's tracks are basically raw demos with a lot of potential - can't you hear this? Some of the songwriting on UK Funky tracks is poor? Of course it is, some of it is so raw, they are probably recording half the vocal into the laptop via the laptop mic....
As for the constant quest to to define what UK Funky is, this makes me laugh no end. UK Funky is straight up underground, UK music. For some i.e Lil Silva/Marcus Nasty it's the sound of grime kids discovering the house music of Kenny Dope, Karizma and beyond, it's a phrase coined when these people heard stuff like Bugz In The Attic's remix of Amy Winehouse, In My Bed and starting saying stuff like 'this is like some kind of funky house music'......it's real simple folks, it's certainly not a science...

so anwyay i was thinking if jess got to wield the banhammer then i'm totally due a go by now right...?

Tim F is very impressive at objectifying his own taste. We could all learn from him.

His lapdogs rtc and titchy however!! jeeez - amusing to see them scrapping to see who gets to snuggle into Tim's warm, and well argued embrace.

Also, rtc, you have the most insufferable, smug demeanour I've ever witnessed online. Wow!

The notion of titchy as my lapdog makes me feel kinda bad for him. Animal cruelty.

man how does that old judge a man by his foes thing work again. think i mightve racked up a high score today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCB7aBKuq7k

hurts to see u so bitter about the game now dude :(

i would ask why "part time lover" isn't relevant but i'm not sure i care what the funky police are finding fault with this time

As with "Katy On A Mission" it's not a funky beat (though in this case it's more of a live R&B vibe, and is closer to funky than Benga's constipated production) . I quite like "Part Time Lover" though and mainly didn't include it because I'm not as familiar with it, it's not a funky DJ set staple for the obvious reason.

Funkystepz' "Holiday Blues" (or something along those lines) with the singer from "For You" is very similar, and I feel the same way: nice song, but its conservative "live" R&B production makes it feel on a different tip.

Although in general I'm in favour of R&B-ish vocals in funky, where I probably differ from you on this issue Lex is that fundamentally I'm not interested in funky developing a repertoire of "great songs" or star vocalists. If it does these things that's fine but I don't consider it to be a particularly important goal. In fact I'm not sure that it's actually possible for funky to make this a core aim without sliding straight back into R&B proper, and as the career of Craig David demonstrates I'm not sure if this achieves much (Mis-Teeq are are an argument for the defence, but then as much as I love Mis-Teeq I would never choose them over and above the acres of dancefloor-focused 2-step I was intoxicated with at about the same time).

We already have US R&B to fill this function. At the end of the day, funky is not about pop songs, and nor was 2-step, as much as some people might want to pretend otherwise. It's about deploying ideas from pop (in the broad sense - more specifically R&B, rap, vocal house etc) in the service of great dance music - a high "sing along" quotient is a dance music weapon as much as any other rhythmic or sonic trick.

Most of the songs I love from 2-step - "My Desire", "Flowers", "Straight From The Heart", "Moving Too Fast" - are really great songs by accident; and most of what we think of as "great songs" in the genre are remixes - it goes without saying almost that the form of the remix already devalues the kinda issues that go into the consideration of R&B proper - is this singer a personality you can get behind? Are they a decent songwriter? Can they "sell" the performance?

"Fill Me In" probably was the first time 2-step actually did attempt to tackle producing a great song qua song, and encoded in its very DNA is the instability and unreproducability of the experiment - and of course Craig didn't even attempt another stab at the form on the rest of his album.

tbh it might be worth considering if the kind of personality-centric r&b lex seems to be hoping for has ever really been a systemic part of the uk's nature.

Yeah listening to a lot of Smith & Mighty this past week or so has gotten me thinking about this stuff more generally. Seems like the last twenty years or so has been characterised by a succession of movements or trends in the UK taking elements of R&B and then deploying them in a context which is much more producer-driven, where vocals and songfulness become sonic/historical fetishes as much as anything else.

yeah, precisely. in its broadest sense i tend to corral it as a kinda internal reggae logic i think - as opposed to the nuum's embarrassingly glib and myopic "dread bass"/ dub auteur cartography, funnily enough - like a general, i dunno, ever-osmotic interpretive musicality that manifests itself through juxtaposition as well as or in addition to your simpler genre paraphrasology. and wrt to vocals this can easily range from full-figured emotive roots to the "girls off the street" everyday fragility of brit lovers rock that ppl here seem to look down on but really is so crucial to everything.

dj naughty's 'love lockdown' is a fantastic example of all this i feel.

Yeah reggae logic not dub logic is a really succinct way to capture it, it gets at how the song can still have a place while understanding what that place is.

And "Love Lockdown" is precisely it, totally anony-motive vocals b/c you wouldn't want it any other way.

I love how you're all being super-pissy to one another and then some Dissensus dude has a pop and suddenly you all pull rank. Excellent work.

At risk of labouring this point for the nth million time, funky without a proper funky beat just doesn't work, it loses the one distinctive element that makes it funky. Don't even see why this is a controversial concept, it's the same as almost every other style of club-oriented dance music - house can encompass almost anything sonically but take the 4/4 kick out and suddenly it's not house any more.

At risk of labouring this point for the nth million time, funky without a proper funky beat just doesn't work, it loses the one distinctive element that makes it funky. Don't even see why this is a controversial concept, it's the same as almost every other style of club-oriented dance music - house can encompass almost anything sonically but take the 4/4 kick out and suddenly it's not house any more.

Agree with this (assuming you don't mean funky requires a 4X4 kick). I'm surprised lex says he thinks it doesn't feel right "intuitively" (scare-quoting this not to mock but to be precise); the feel of the funky beat really leaps out at me, for all the diversity in funky it's the element that provides actual unity.

xxp and yeah like you say the line from 'love lockdown' back to something like fresh 4 'wishing on a star' then draws itself i think.

"Wishing On A Star" is totally a slowed down funky tune.

Love how S&M's ideas really imprinted themselves on the uk dance culture psyche as a kind of modern lover's rock repository - not a coincidence that Urban Takeover's remix of "Wishing On A Star" and Steve Gurley's "Walk On By" are such highpoints of jungle and 2-step respectively. (nearly wrote "Urbane Takeover" - new bandname right there)

Sadly post Professor Green no-one will be able to cover "Just Be Good To Me" and get away with it. For a few years at least.

Kinda hearing a funky version of "Wishing On A Star" in my head now. It's got skipping 5 beat soca patterns, no kick (like something Ill Blu might do, but the production is sparser). Starts with three bars of just the rhythm, and then the vocal comes in on the third beat of the fourth bar. I've come up with a new bassline for it too.

Funny thing with talking about S&M in this context is that ever since about 2000 I've been sentimentally attached to the idea of early S&M though at that stage I'd heard only a handful of their material. It's always seemed like an aesthetic I could really get behind. Must be that updated Compass Point session band vibe of reggaematic pop-experimentalism, a rooted futurism that neither runs with nor against pop but sort of diagonally across it. Even then I sensed a certain aesthetic union with 2-step though i would have struggled to articulate what it was I was sensing at the time, I suspect.

still not super-connecting with a lot of this stuff, but really like Roska - i need love

<a href="http://pitchfork.com/features/grime-dubstep/7842-grime-dubstep/";>house</a>, but not UK funky.

http://pitchfork.com/features/grime-dubstep/7842-grime-dubstep/

i check in on that lot every so often (most recently the kismet rinse 12) and though i love all their scene anthems in a funky context the dubbage insistence on depth and texture etc for the sake of it still just comes off as very tedious after a while. i know this is a lame accusation generally but i really do think part of them relishes and thrives on their cultivating an in-the-know fine dining kinda thing.

in the case of stuff like 'klambu' and 'pandemonium' i'd argue they contextually confer an "intelligence" that isn't even there to begin with - it's wonky noises from wonky euros and the funky lot understand this

Yeah it's interesting how the same tunes are kinda received differently by the different (sub)scenes, as if they're hearing them through very specific filters.

The Circle "filter" is not one which I can remain captivated by for a long stretch, unless it's, like, a really good set (ironically that set Cooly G did for Rinse FM last year remains my favourite inadvertent example of this sound, though it intermittently goes more dark/percussive than Circle would).

I kinda feel like a lot of the piety towards deep/dubby house one sees in UK listeners currently - not just fans of circle but a lot of what I guess you'd call the post-dubstep crowd - is only possible because they were listening to other things circa 2006-2007 when this sorta sound was absolutely huge in Europe. I burnt myself out on Sebo K's Resident Advisor mix 3 years ago and don't have a huge amount of reserves left to put towards scrutinising UK reproductions of same.

However I kinda like the idea of circle so probably will keep checking sets in the hope that it'll all suddenly click and a unique sensibility will emerge out of the music like a magic eye image.

f what I guess you'd call the post-dubstep crowd

i think it's "global bass" now, which is dreadful but at least acknowledges that it has little to do with dubstep any more