There's nu-disco and boogie funk, nodding back to disco bands with soaring vocals and dance floor-designed instrumentation. Today, funk lives in many places, with its heavy bass and syncopated grooves finding way into many nooks and crannies of music. The sound influenced contemporaneous hip-hop, funk and electronica, along with acts around the globe, while current acts like Chromeo, DJ Stingray, and even Egyptian Lover himself keep electro-funk alive and well. A key distinguishing factor of electro-funk is a de-emphasis on vocals, with more phrases than choruses and verses. In the 1980s, electro-funk was born when artists like Afrika Bambaataa, Man Parrish, and Egyptian Lover began making futuristic beats with the Roland TR-808 drum machine - often with robotic vocals distorted through a talk box. Both Collins and Clinton remain active and funkin', and have offered their timeless grooves to collabs with younger artists, including Kali Uchis, Silk Sonic, and Omar Apollo and Kendrick Lamar, Flying Lotus, and Thundercat, respectively.
Legendary funk bassist Bootsy Collins learned the power of the one from playing in Brown's band, and brought it to George Clinton, who created P-funk, an expansive, Afrofuturistic, psychedelic exploration of funk with his various bands and projects, including Parliament-Funkadelic. Of course, many other funk acts followed in the '60s, and the genre thrived in the '70s and '80s as the disco craze came and went, and the originators of hip-hop and house music created new music from funk and disco's strong, flexible bones built for dancing. As David Cheal eloquently explains, playing on the one "left space for phrases and riffs, often syncopated around the beat, creating an intricate, interlocking grid which could go on and on." You know a funky bassline when you hear it its fat chords beg your body to get up and groove.īrown's 1965 classic, "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag," became one of the first funk hits, and has been endlessly sampled and covered over the years, along with his other groovy tracks. The Godfather of Soul coined the phrase and style of playing known as "on the one," where the first downbeat is emphasized, instead of the typical second and fourth beats in pop, soul and other styles. All rights reserved.It's rare that a genre can be traced back to a single artist or group, but for funk, that was James Brown. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, honored him by naming a new pavilion in the city’s Lakeside Park after him in June 2020.Ĭopyright © 2021, ABC Audio. Rush called it quits after mounting a 40th anniversary trek that wrapped up in August 2015.įollowing Peart’s death, his hometown of St. Rush continued to record and tour into the 2010s, and in 2015, the band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He got remarried to American photographer Carrie Nuttall in 2000, and the couple had a daughter, Olivia, in 2009. Neil took a sabbatical from the band for a few years, and he eventually wrote a book about his healing process. Among the many memorable songs Neil co-wrote are “Fly by Night,” “Closer to the Heart,” “The Spirit of Radio,” “Limelight,” “Tom Sawyer,” “Freewill,” “New World Man” and “Subdivisions.”ĭuring the late 1990s, tragedy struck Peart: His 19-year-old daughter Selena was killed in a single-car accident in 1997, and his common-law wife, Jacqueline, died of cancer the following year. By Rush’s third studio album, Caress of Steel, Peart took over from Lee as the group’s main lyricist.ĭriven by Peart’s powerful and complex drumming, Rush became one of the world’s most popular rock acts by the 1980s.
The first album Neil played on was Rush’s sophomore record, 1975’s Fly by Night. Peart joined Rush in 1974, replacing the Canadian prog-rock trio’s original drummer, John Rutsey. Peart passed away at age 67 of brain cancer, and his death was announced on January 10, 2020, in a joint message from band mates Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson. Today, January 7, marks the one-year anniversary of the death of Rush‘s Neil Peart, one of the most lauded rock drummers of all time, as well as the band’s primary lyricist.
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