Cold Technology, Hot Beats

The most-sampled recording in history is probably “The Funky Drummer Parts One And Two” by  James Brown and the JBs. Like many James Brown songs of the time, “The Funky Drummer” doesn’t have verses or choruses as in a normal pop song. It’s an open-ended one-chord jazz-funk groove, with extended solos by James Brown on organ and Maceo Parker on tenor sax. Four and a half minutes into the recording, James Brown tells the band: “Fellas, one more time I want to give the drummer some of this funky soul we got going here.” He tells drummer Clyde Stubblefield, “You don’t have to do no soloing, brother, just keep what you got… Don’t turn it loose, ’cause it’s a mother.”  That last word will turn out to be prophetic.

Here’s a loop of Clyde Stubblefield’s drum break:

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Clyde Stubblefield is only eighteen on this recording, but he’s already a master drummer. James Brown tells him not to cut loose and solo because it might break up the groove and let all the air out of the balloon. So when his cue comes, he continues to play the main rhythm pattern, with more emphasis but not a lot of variation.

James Brown does a short rap over the beat and then counts the band back into the original vamp. While the band plays, he names the tune on the spot:

The name of this tune is the Funky Drummer, the Funky Drummer, the Funky Drummer, the Funky Drummer, the Funky Drummer, the Funky Drummer… Maceo!

The Funky Drummer break was much-loved by the first generation of hip-hop producers, and they sampled it and sampled it. In 1986, Polydor capitalized on James Brown’s new-found cachet and put out a compilation record of the hard-edged, open-ended funk grooves that hip-hop was bringing back into style. The compilation includes the first album release of “The Funky Drummer Parts One And Two.” It also includes a remix, the “Funky Drummer Bonus Beat Reprise.”

The remix is a loop of the drum break for three minutes with James Brown’s sampled raps coming in once in a while on top. It was a tremendous gift to the music world. The Bonus Beat Reprise is a perfect hip-hop track right out of the box. You could build your track around it as is. If you wanted to remix it further, its  gridlike structure makes it effortless.

Here’s a screenshot of the Funky Drummer break in Recycle, the program I use for most of my sampling.

The Funky Drummer break is two measures of 4/4 time. Each blue blob is a drum hit. The bigger they are, the louder they are. The two biggest ones are the snare drum hits on beat three of each measure, the backbeats. The vertical lines are metadata I added with Recycle’s help. They’re slices in the audio file, defining the important rhythmic events are. In the Funky Drummer break, every slice point is on an eighth note.

Here’s how you experience the loop when it’s played over and over. Read clockwise:

Clyde Stubblefield doesn’t play his eighth notes with total metronome steadiness. He deliberately lays behind the beat in places, and he stretches the time a little for swing. There’s some further slight unintended deviation from those deviations. The tension between the perfect eighth note grid implied by the loop and the asymmetry of the actual drum hits is a puzzle for the brain. It’s gratifying to pay attention to the loop, and the gratification gets deeper the more you listen to it.

The Funky Drummer break has been sampled in thousands of other songs, from hip-hop to pop to rock to every flavor of electronica. The break has also been duplicated countless times by studio drummers. This diagram includes only the commercial releases that I’ve heard of.

Public Enemy loves the Funky Drummer so much they use it on seven different tracks. They namecheck it in the first verse of “Fight The Power”:

1989, the number, another summer
Sound of the Funky Drummer

The original “Funky Drummer” is a great recording, suitable for dancing or close listening. But it doesn’t get around the way the Bonus Beat Reprise does. When you listen to the original, you’re witnessing a performance. You’re free to dance, but there’s not much space in the musical conversation for you. The remix, on the other hand, is an invitation to perform. All that open musical space is like a bare stage, all lit up for you.

You can think of the Funky Drummer remix as a game with a few simple, inflexible rules. You can add your own sounds on top, but they have to be in slightly swung 4/4 time at ninety-nine beats per minute. Your phrases have to fit in repetitive sequences of four, with phrases beginning and ending predictably every sixteen bars. The intermittent guitar stab weakly establishes the key of A, but you’re free to use whatever pitches you want otherwise, or none at all. As long as your ideas are repetitive and to the beat, you can’t really do anything wrong. You can play on top of the Funky Drummer Bonus Beat Reprise out loud or in your head, in front of an audience, with a few friends or by yourself. You can rap, or sing, or improvise jazz solos, or lay down electronic squiggles and samples, or just chant, as James Brown’s sampled voice does:

Ain’t it funky now. Ain’t it funky now.
Ain’t it funky now. Ain’t it funky now.
Ain’t it funky now. Ain’t it funky now.
Ain’t it funky now. Ain’t it funky now.

The answer unquestionably is yes, yes it ain’t.

See an incredible video of Mos Def, Black Thought and Eminem freestyling over the Bonus Beat Reprise:

Aside from Apache and the Amen break, the Funky Drummer break is probably the most influential breakbeat in electronic music history. James Brown even sampled it himself, on “She Looks All Types A’ Good.” The Funky Drummer break is a literal sex machine, a powerful replicator, a successful meme. As a digital audio file, the break is small, compact, lightweight, durable, modular and easily passed around. Even at CD quality, the break is a small enough file to send in an email, post on the web, and distribute on any disk or thumb drive format.

Samples like the Funky Drummer break are like the rapidly evolving, stripped-down genomes of microbes. They spread themselves in concert with other replicators, as guests, parasites or even the basis of new, more complex organisms. The original “Funky Drummer” is a long snaky organism that requires a very particular context to replicate itself, but the drum break can make itself at home in the musical genomes of a seemingly limitless variety of new songs. You could find a way to set just about any piece of American popular music of the past two hundred years to the Funky Drummer beat.

Like successful genes, successful memes don’t always benefit their human hosts. Clyde Stubblefield got paid a one-time fee, musicians’ union scale, for the “Funky Drummer” session. James Brown is officially the song’s composer, and his estate receives all royalties people have been paying, those that have been paying them. Clyde Stubblefield isn’t entitled to any of that money. He has the undying admiration of musicians, but that doesn’t pay as well as owning a copyright.

Update: see a followup post about resequencing the Funky Drummer loop using the magic of software.

Tags: algorithms, audio editing, black thought, cold tech hot beats, computer evolution, copyright, eminem, freestyle, funk, funky drummer, godel, hip-hop, james brown, looping, memes, mos def, music, programming, recursion, rnb, sampling, soul, susan blackmore

This entry was posted on Monday, May 25th, 2009 at 11:34 am and is filed under music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.