Future Funk, as a thriving musical genre, has been going strong for a whole ten years now! It’s exciting to know that this music we love so much has been around long enough that we can start seeing it turn the corner. When we look back at the twentieth century and see how the entire musical movement came and went with the decades it makes me all the more giddy to look back at our first turning point. While we as a community have not been the best at recording our findings about our cultural progress we eventually did get around to talking about it as a community; what we felt are the greatest triumphs of the year…. This retrospective is not about that. It’s about the time before future. A proto future. The music that made mood music into disoc hits for your car and bedroom only to paved the way for the first official list in 2015. I’m Mariemaia: gynoid funk crusader, love-pusher. Let me take you back in time for a moment to experience when the boogie was only just but a groove.
There are several names that come to mind when talking about the foundations of the genre, what some have called the Mount Rushmore of Future Funk: Yung Bae, マクロスMACROSS 82–99 and of course, SAINT PEPSI. Their album “Hit Vibes” is generally considered to be not only the most important album to listen to as a fan, but as THE FIRST full length Future Funk album. This is all true, but only partially. Future Funk started to grow legs in the Vaporwave subgenre called “Hypnogogic”, a style that utilizes slowed-down funk, jazz and muzak beats to create a droning you can bob your head to. In this hotbed of beats someone began to cook. Without spending too much time on them, it cannot be understated how important SAINT PEPSI is to Future Funk as a pioneer in the genre, playing with the sound as we know it as early as December 29th, 2012 with the appropriately named “New Generation”. Though this album is not all the way Future Funk, there are a good number of tracks that are undeniable. Followed by “WORLD TOUR” and next year “Studio 54”, they teamed up with SHOPPING WORLD JP on “Winner’s Circle” and then Luxury Elite on the infamous “Late Night Delight” complete with legendary fast food moon god in every crepuscular happy meal. Finally came Future Funk with the likes of マクロスMACROSS 82–99, changing the rules of the game with “Sailorwave” as well as YUNG BAE, touching down like he has been doing this forever with debut album, “BAE”. Both these artists may not have been the first to use City Pop as part of their repertoire, but they were certainly the most successful up to this point while everyone else, including SAINT PEPSI were still using Funk, Soul and Disco sample. Unknowingly with marriage between Disco and City Pop, it would later create a great divide. One that battles for the trademark of the Future Funk sound while both inextricably not being able to be divorced from one another. They stay married for the kid. Disco begat City Pop and City Pop breaks up the monotony of Disco. With only 1 the sound is stagnant. With both we have stumbled onto something truly unique. These three artists set the groundwork for other who would soon become household names lin the scene like Flamingosis, スーパーセックス永遠にSUPERSEX420 and Rollergirl! as well as faithfully great contributors like Mike Tenya and classic MAITRO with “Dragonball Wave”. The sound during this time was more laid back than it is today and more preoccupied with capturing a moment in time with thoughtful samples, clearly drawing heavy influence from Hypnogogic Vaporwave. Songs that were a clash of Saturday Night Fever and Ranma 1/2, funky grooves with swooning melodies of a past most fans only knew vicariously (or like myself, nostalgically wax rhapsodical) . Unlike Vaporwave the music was uplifting and infectious. Like an earworm that targeted your inhibitions. Unsurprisingly at the same time popular music was also having its own funky revolution with a movement they also considered to be called “Future Funk”, later re-coined as Electro Soul with acts like Martin Solveig, Calvin Harris and Pretty Lights. The fever to dance was in the air. Only real difference was that we danced to remember while the rest of the world danced to forget. It wouldn’t be till much later that we would begin to see the revolution of sound laid out by the big three, but they wouldn’t be outdone. The fight for the right to the neo disco ball had only just begun.
I love the irony that even when listening to new music that originates from taking older music decades past and breathes new life into them I still find myself going back and listening to older songs of this new plunderphonic genre. It brings me back to the feeling I had when I first fell in love with the it all. That specific sound brings me even further back to the feeling I had when I read my first mangas at a local library when they didn’t even have their own little corner, just a small group in “Teens” (“Planet Ladder”, “Oh, My Goddess!” and “Pet Shop of Horrors”). When I got my first transparent purple Gameboy Color along with the newly minted Yellow Version and fresh pair of AA batteries in the middle of hot, urban 90’s July, running on sizzling city concrete to my grandmother’s apartment complex to show my uncle who was cruising on his battle cycle on XG2 for the Nintendo 64 (or was if Tomba on PlayStation?). Waking up to the sounds of “SICK SAD WORLD!” on MTV only to have my parents change the channel to the sounds of “IT’S MORPHIN TIME!” on Fox Kids, playing on our big, bulky SONY Triniton CTR TV set and newly bought RCA VCR. I would later steal the batteries out of the controller to keep playing my GameBoy, getting a feed of a sound I never could have dreamed would come back to haunt me in the best way possible more than a decade later.
What I love about Future Funk beyond that of Vaporwave is that I don’t feel anemoia, at least not in the most pure way. There’s a strange mix of anemoia and nostalgia, where I don’t know where the historical past ends and my personal past begins. Yet it all comes crashing together in one sonic celebration like some sort of romantic fever dream. A dream that leaves me wistful, aching, longing, anxious with childish anticipation the likes of which I haven’t felt in a long time since. Pad Channington talked about this a couple years ago in one of his YouTube videos, but the music of Future Funk has since moved on from hitting that anemoiaic nostalgia and now, like pop music of today, is more efficient at making just great music anyone can listen to. It more accessible, but I guess they just don’t make them like they used to. “#billyocean” by Rollergirl!, “SNAKE WAY” by MAITRO and my all time favorite, “Private Caller” by SAINT PEPSI. That song just internally brings me to tears, the warm hug of nostalgia that is so crushing. It hurts to listen to it, but you can just take a deep breathe and sign, remembering when you discovered “Outlaw Star” and “Tenchi Muyo”, feeling a peace wash over you. I look backwards so I never forget the music that never lets me forget the feeling of the happiest days of my life. And don’t want our community to forget it either. Before “Hit Vibes” was THE groove, we constructed a new generation of sound.
- Hit Vibes by SAINT PEPSI
- Sailorwave by マクロスMACROSS 82–99
- love from soundcloud by スーパーセックス永遠にSUPERSEX420
- BAE by YUNG BAE
- Rollergirl by Rollergirl!
- Tenya in Tokyo by Mike Tenya
- Last Summer by Lancaster_
- Flamingosis by Flamingosis
- Love & Future Funk Sessions by Sage Starkiller
- Winner’s Circle by SHOPPING WORLD JP and SAINT PEPSI
- Late Night Delight by Luxury Elite and SAINT PEPSI
- Studio 54 by SAINT PEPSI
- WORLD TOUR by SAINT PEPSI
- New Generation by SAINT PEPSI
- Dragonball Wave by MAITRO
- Yaper by Amherst
- Jacuzzi by Mike Tenya
- Press Play by Lancaster_
- Together by VentureX
- LATE TO BE REAL by .CASTING
- Flight Wave by Innerϟpeaker
- Literature | Prose ザ•リズム EP by Literature
