A brand new Impartial Lens PBS documentary titled WE WANT THE FUNK! explores the lifespan of funk and its persevering with cultural affect.The movie explores funk’s early roots in jazz and soul, relating trailblazers like James Brown, Sly and the Household Stone, and George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic. It additionally examines how funk turned a type of joyful resistance to the racial and political repression of the time. WE WANT THE FUNK! premieres April 8 and shall be out there to stream on PBS, PBS app and YouTube.
Among the many matters explored in WE WANT THE FUNK! are the music’s relationship with gospel, Black expression, and the affect of TV dance reveals like Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, which ran from 1956 to 1989 and elevated the visibility of pop music and dance strikes for a nationwide viewers. The film additionally explores funk’s affect on totally different genres, from Afrobeat to hip-hop to new wave, and options interviews with P-Funk’s George Clinton, gospel artist Kirk Franklin, The Roots’ Questlove, guitarist and David Bowie collaborator Carlos Alomar, former James Brown trombone participant Fred Wesley, David Byrne of the Speaking Heads, and Prince Paul, DJ and producer for De La Soul.
The movie was directed and produced by the Emmy Award-winning filmmakers Stanley Nelson and Nicole London. “Funk music—and the larger aesthetic culture that surrounds it—is of course vital cultural history and it is important to look back at the historical record and the archival footage that tracks its wildly entertaining evolution,” Nelson wrote in an accompanying information. “But funk is no cultural artifact. It is a living and breathing art form that continues to transcend the concepts of genre and of time itself. Now and forever funk is always going to fulfill its ultimate purpose for the people: to make us dance.”
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