Been listening to Bowie's Station to Station lots, which has got me thinking about funkiness, "whiteness" and "blackness":
- Everything sounds incredibly dry -- in the title track particularly, the sounds are made of the most plodding, airless stuff -- and yet this is marshalled into an uncanny kind of funkiness;
- This leads to thoughts of "floppy ('white') funkiness", perhaps best illustrated by Flyboy's fantastic Rock Your Body dance instructions -- where the almost detached, matter-of-fact placement of body-parts in a rhythm, rather than some essentialist idea of organic and innate groove, is the path to super-cool... yet this stuff is usually seen as "inauthentically funky";
- I then realise that in lots of disco and funk, an arid sonic treatment (rather than a squelchy, organicist presence) is really necessary for some parts, particularly guitar; rhythm guitar in disco is often reduced to a robotic, disembodied scratch, as if one was DI'd straight into the console instead of plugged into an amp;
- The nexus between Africa Bambaataa and Kraftwerk is interesting in this regard: abstract electro-ness becomes funky when it is appropriated in a certain context; at Sonics/Synergies, Tommy made the really cool observation that it's the handclaps and ambient "room noises" in "Planet Rock", when added to the Kraftwerk, that imply a call to sociality that becomes groovy;
- In Station to Station, Bowie stands at the crossroads between his dalliance with soul and his abstract Berlin period, and cuts it all up into something that is totally ambivalent, both extremely "white" and "black", both detached and intense, full of theatricality that is tightly controlled; how does this relate to this thread about Kylie on Barbelith?
- What was Prince doing in the '80s, especially when he had no bass in some of his funkiest songs?
- Following Prince's best impulses, how did R&B convert its super-polished roboticism into such a deadly weapon? It turned itself inside out, so that what was a set of flavouring techniques -- at its worst, a sterile, rolled-up-shirtsleeve sessioneering in the context of much late '80s R&B -- somehow in the '90s became an aerodynamic exoskeleton for a stealth bomber.
