Funk

Greasy as a bucket of bacon fat, funk lays down a groove as dense as the Okefenokee swamp and drags its beatmeisters from the back of the stage into the spotlight. On 1970's "(Get Up I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine (Parts 1 & 2)," James Brown drafts every player in his band into the rhythm section, flaunting his ever-escalating hunnnnh intensity, until — with a "hit it!" — he slams the song to a halt. With his outrageous rainbow wig, and a massive, diaper-wearing backing band, George Clinton (and Parliament) blasts out funk's national anthem with "Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof off the Sucker)." And in "Superfly," Curtis Mayfield twists rhythm and melody into a complex, menacing weave while his falsetto vocal floats like a butterfly…and stings like a bee. In Next Steps, even the Scots can't escape the funk.

The Isley Brothers' "It's Your Thing" jams the '70s live-and-let-live philosophy up against a laid-back, Funky Chicken strut, ably assisted by Wilson Pickett's band (and a horn chart that blares out an steaming riff underneath). With its vocals and horns locked in a call-and-response tighter than a drum head, Kool and the Gang's "Jungle Boogie" explodes from the speakers, catapulted to the only place it can possibly go — the dance floor. And seized by funk's grip 4,000 miles from Memphis in the Scots' town of Dundee, the Average White Band lift a page from the J.B.'s songbook for "Cut the Cake," picking up the pieces where their earlier "Pick Up the Pieces" had left off. In Deep Cuts, a legend serves up funk…Motown style.

Motown legend Stevie Wonder had been showing signs of funk going back to the days of the teasing, blue-note harmonica solo in "Fingertips," but in Talking Book's "Maybe Your Baby," it's strutting like a peacock with Wonder's voice sliding and swooping over a growling synth riff. Midnight Star's poppin' and lockin' "Freak-A-Zoid" spurs the funk out under the lights of a mirrored disco ball, with a bassline that thunders and thumps to the rhythm of a bumpin' booty. And Roger Troutman's trademark funk-from-another-planet processed vocals in Zapp & Roger's "So Ruff, So Tuff" blast off on the mothership to a new dimension, dishing up a slammin' side of cosmic slop.

Like soul, funk is something you either have or you don't. But unlike soul, you don't wanna — no, you don't dare — let your funk loose in polite company. If soul can be found in a Baptist choir loft, then funk lurks in the juke joint around the corner, down at the dark end of the street. Greasy, sweaty, nasty, and flat-out stanky, funk isn't the musical equivalent of lipstick on your collar — it's lipstick on your trousers. With a bucketful of bass, rump-shaking rhythm, and a yow! ripped straight from the gut, funk carves a groove that proves that black isn't just beautiful, it's baaaad. Swaggering and strutting, it gets us up on the good foot and blasts open the hatch to the mothership's cosmic party: Like George Clinton told us so many years ago, "Free your mind, and your a** will follow."