Egypt - In The Morning

One of the great things about following UK funky for the past year or so has been the amazing number of tracks that poured out of such a seemingly small scene. By the time my overpriced import vinyl copy of the "Do You Mind (Crazy Cousinz Remix)" had arrived last summer -- the first & still best introduction I had to the genre -- i already had about fifteen new favorite tracks. The video above, for Egypt's beautiful "In the Morning," just dropped a day or two ago.

One of the best ways to keep up with it has been through mixes, which really gives the best idea of how this genre 'works.' Much like the world of cosmic/balearic/nu-disco, a single track might suggest the genre is one thing, while in fact it's a lot more helpful to hear the genre as a constellation of impulses, musical concepts that revolve around certain trends & aesthetic approaches. At one level, funky is simply house music with more syncopated rhythms of soca & dancehall, tied to a specific geographic locale. But it's also a petri dish of how popular music develops & flexes between trends as a whole, playing with the internal tensions of a genre that appeals to a comprehensively diverse array of people.

Tim Finney follows the genre better than most people I've read, and always seems to do a really great job of explaining how certain tracks function in relation to others & the genre as a whole. He's just revived his blog to start running through a bunch of funky tracks that grabbed him this year. I particularly like this quote where he explains the appeal of funky as a genre:

People talk about funky like it’s a swing back to femininity from grime and/or dubstep. This is true only to the extent that funky harks back to garage’s particular arc of development at times. Even then, that’s only half the story: funky sounds crude or robotic as easily it does fluid, sexy and, well, funky. As with dancehall, funky’s flexible beat structure and hormone-balanced aren’t tied to any particular strategy of affect, but (especially in good DJ sets) create a sense of such questions being suspended.

One of my favorite mixes so far has been DJ One Drop's Kingston Flavour, which is a predominantly UK Funky mix, but explores the various commonalities between the genre & dancehall; this is no accident, as many of the UK's black immigrants (a core group of funky listeners, as is my understanding) are of Jamaican origin. Mostly, it's a really great document (and in good sound quality) of a fun, relatively new dance genre.

The only song that really falls on its face in the mix is Boy Better Know's absurd "Too Many Men." It's a song about the dance floor being too full of dudes, and I'm not really sure who that would really appeal to on the dancefloor. It doesn't even work at the level of "It's Raining Men," because 'too many' is already implied by the title. I doubt playing this song is gonna get girls running to the floor. Until this is ironically co-opted by a gay UK funky subculture I can't really say I have a use for that track.

Its failure, however, does work as a nice microcosm of what NOT to do in UK Funky, where the most interesting music is about tensions and balance between gendered aesthetics, a lack of resolution, the idea of possibility.