Funk

9 works, in the order the book names them

• 001/Album/1971

  Maggot Brain

  Funkadelic

  It is Hazel’s solo that dominates the mostly instrumental ten-minute title track that opens Funkadelic’s 1971 album Maggot Brain.

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• 002/Album/1973

  Cosmic Slop

  Funkadelic

  Cosmic Slop (1973) is another heavy Funkadelic album, featuring the helter-skeltering riffs of ‘Trash A Go-Go’ and its raucously soulful title track.

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• 003/Album

  T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M.

  George Clinton & the P-Funk All Stars

  These credentials are acknowledged on ‘Hard as Steel’, from 1996’s T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M. by George Clinton & The P-Funk All-Stars, on which, despite the song mimicking the G-funk sound developed by Dr Dre in light of Funkadelic and Parliament, Clinton is credited with brandishing a ‘heavy metal hard-on’.

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• 004/Album/1998

  Heavy Metal Funkason

  Michael Hampton

  It was called Heavy Metal Funkason, rocked as hard as Bad Brains meeting Hendrix in heaven, and boasted song titles including ‘Sloppy Metal’, ‘Heavy Metal Funkadelic’ and ‘Club Metalfunkadelamack’ (it also featured ‘Chronic Reggae’).

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• 005/Album/1972

  America Eats Its Young

  Funkadelic

  ‘It was about the heroin in Vietnam,’ Clinton said of Funkadelic’s 1972 double-LP concept album of soulful, progressive funk, the indignantly titled America Eats Its Young.

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• 006/Album

  Ball-Hog or Tugboat?

  Mike Watt

  As an obvious exemplar of Funkadelic’s influence on the latter category, check out the searing version of ‘Maggot Brain’ on which Dinosaur Jr’s J Mascis performs Hazel’s part for ex-Minutemen bassist Mike Watt’s 1995 album Ball-Hog or Tugboat?

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• 007/Compilation

  Complete Fun House Sessions

  The Stooges

  Defending this so-called ‘sell-out to funk’ period, Julian Cope compared the outlandish recordings made by Miles Davis to experimental krautrock, improvised rock music from Japan, space rock, heavy metal and the sound you’d get if you played all the discs from The Stooges’ seven-CD Complete Fun House Sessions at the same time on different budget ghetto blasters.

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• 008/Album/1975

  Agharta

  Miles Davis

  In 2009 the drone metal act Sunn O))) named a track after Davis’s 1975 double album Agharta (another of theirs is named after Alice Coltrane).

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• 009/Album

  Interstellar Space

  John Coltrane

  Mika Vainio of the Finnish electronic act Pan Sonic called Davis’s funk-derived material – along with John Coltrane’s Interstellar Space and similarly intense works by Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Don Cherry, Pharoah Sanders and Albert Ayler – a ‘kind of grindcore jazz’.

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