Sparks are taking the first of their well-deserved breaks during the concert series and I’m currently embracing my Billy Mackenzie fetish once more, so better instead to read Tim’s latest piece over at Idolator on funky house. As ever, the man sums up both the appeal of what’s going on, with a couple of links to boot, as well as actualizes the dilemma of describing a scene and style that is evolving without restraint of expectation even as he types. A quick sample:
In an odd way, it’s the relative conservatism of the music’s starting premises that allow this to happen. House always seems so timeless and perfected that it’s easy to assume it’s also creatively exhausted; and admittedly the specific appeals of this brand of “funky house” are clustered around the style’s gross distortions of its original house template. But, as with speed garage in 1997 or so, it’s precisely that obvious, unthreatening universality that is key here: the phrase “funky house” acts a reset button, opening up a musical space that is shorn of the biases, pretensions and presumptions that inevitably grow up around any established genre and narrow its field of possibility. Few people expect anything in particular of funky house, beyond vague notions of good times and female-friendly singalong tunes; it’s even lost the veneer of glamour it might have once had. Freed from the weight of expectation, producers can get away with a great deal more.
Read, listen, enjoy the present before it becomes the retrospective future.
Ned Raggett Ponders It All 