Innovative Syncopation: Funk Ain’t Went Nowhere
Someone just alerted me that I’ve been quoted and linked to in the Sunday New York Times. Of course it’s about funk music and Afrofuturism (several blog posts later). It’s actually not the first time I’ve seen this quote. Last October, Nate Sloan was on NPR and said this about me:
I’ll cite a writer — an artist named Nettrice Gaskins. Afrofuturism is about recognizing the past, present and future of blackness as one entity that can be expressed forward and backwards. And what this allows you to do is create this continuum of African American life and imagine both new possibilities and sort of re-inscribe some of the more painful history of that experience.
When I wrote the chapter for Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astroblackness I was thinking about technology and not just the Western aspects of it. I was writing about how race was being used as a tool and I was reading James A. Snead’s “Repetition as a figure of black culture,” which holds a key to understanding how funk came to be a technology. In the essay, Snead references music genres such as jazz and funk, as well as literature. He examines James Brown’s “Cold Sweat,” which has been credited as the first funk song.
Recently, I gave a presentation at Northeastern University and watched as people in the audience started moving in their chairs to “Cold Sweat.” I wrote an essay titled “Glitched: Spacetime, Repetition & The Cut.” I quoted Snead who describes improvisation — the spontaneous and inventive use of things — as foundational and at the heart of black cultural and creative production. Improvisation is the tool that acts upon a thing (i.e., a sequence), or changes it. Repetition and cutting are the methods. Without these organizing principles, improvisation would not be possible.
For those of us who tapped into rap/hip-hop in the late 80s and 90s we know where funk music went. Writing Glitched, I immediately thought of “Welcome to the Terrordome,” not being fully conscious that “Cold Sweat” was a primary sample used to create the song. Fast forward to 2019 and I kept hearing Bruno Mars and Lizzo and thinking, sure I can hear the funk but it’s more diluted (mainstream) than P.E. I prefer my funk harder.
The major thing I took from the Sunday NYT feature was the video, especially when Sloan talks about “innovative syncopation,” or placing rhythmic accents in between established beats/notes. I’m interested in the ‘in betweening’ aspect of the production because it brings us back to Snead (improvisation and repetition). Of course it’s not just funk or James Brown. Jazz musician Thelonious Monk had a talent for creating space inside different arrangements and between the notes. Monk made sure he was the only one playing “weird notes,” demanding that musicians “play the melody!” “Don’t play the piano part,” he says, “I am playing that.”
This brings me to my discovery of NSynth (Neural Synthesizer), a new approach to music synthesis designed to aid the creative process. NSynth uses deep neural networks (artificial intelligence) to generate sounds at the level of individual samples. In other words, the NSynth algorithm learns the core elements of individual sounds and then is able to combine sounds to create something completely new. I recently built my own NSynth Super box and plan to explore this more in-depth soon. My hypothesis is that the result will support my idea of funk being a technology, as well as a feeling/groove.