“The purple glow of distant stars, The blue shine of black metal” — The Death and Rebirth of The Funk Guitar Hero

Part 1 : Back to Basics

“Locked Inside” by Janelle Monae is a pretty pointed homage to Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall-era. Specifically, I think it is an homage to “Rock With You”, one of the all time great dance songs and one of MJ’s shiniest moments (he is literally dressed as a disco ball in the music video). “Locked Inside” effectively kicks off with a drum fill that is almost identically to the one that begins “Rock With You”. You also have a pretty unmistakably Jacksonian song progression, dense vocal harmonies (peppered with Janelle’s wonderful improvisations), squelching synths and an unshakable groove that would not feel alien to late 70s dance floors. Janelle is one of our great musical historians, and she does some of her best work at capturing the era.

But before you have those drums, we have (other than Janelle’s vocals), guitars strumming along the verse’s chord progression. It is a simple progression, going up and up the neck and then coming back down at the end. We need simple beginnings for this story.

Much has been written about the death of the guitar hero. The story goes, society festered an ever growing society of rock guitar virtuosos for two decades, had its peak in the 80s with the explosion of Metal in the mainstream, and then Grunge in the 90s killed it entirely. That narrative is comfortable and makes a lot of sense, but I think it leaves out one very important side of guitar: every other genre in the sphere of pop music that uses the instrument.

For example, the funk guitar.

Funk guitar is no less iconic than Rock guitar. It has its staples in timbre and technique (phasing, wah wah, chords built out of the pentatonic scale, etc.) and its heroes (Eddie Hazel from Parliament-Funkadelic, Prince, Leo Nocentelli from The Meters, Nile Rodgers from Chic, Sly Stone, etc.) just like Rock music. But Funk had a very different narrative from Rock music in the sphere of pop music which makes its death very different. In the mid to late 70s Funk’s earthiness and grit got polished and chromed-up to become Disco. And in Disco we had the rise of the DJ, with Disco musicians getting more and more inhuman and anonymous. But then, by the early 80s, Disco had “died” out of sheer revolt from the listening public. Or at least, the public according to Rock fans. After disco, Funk had a weird decade where it got more and more inorganic (with the rise of Synth Funk), but also tried to distance itself from Disco. While Funk acts were still very much popular (Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”), it was still a bit of a traumatic development (just look at the queer underground and the rise of House music to see the unhappiness generated by the premature death of disco). So Funk did not die, and neither did the Funk guitar hero, it was more like Namor in the Marvel continuity: Amnesiac, vagrant, searching for a purpose in an unwelcoming world.

One other thing that the Funk mutation of the guitar hero presented was that the solo was a very different creature in the genre as it was in Rock music. Funk “only caring about rhythm” is a narrative that is a bit reductive for me, but it’s not one that is entirely incorrect. And Funk guitar got that. So while in 1969, The Beatles (who were not a particularly guitaristic band in the first place) were dropping “Something” to critical acclaim with its iconic guitar solo, “Funky Drummer” by James Brown comes out the next year with two guitars playing rhythm for 9 straight minutes. The organ gets a solo, the sax gets a solo, the drummer gets a solo, but not the guitar. Even the guitar panned to the left, playing more melodious lines, does not call attention to itself. It is the blueprint of how the Funk guitarist must behave.

That is not to say that Funk does not have guitar solos, that would be an absolute lie. Just look at the face melting performance in “Maggot Brain” by Funkadelic or the dramatic solo in “When Doves Cry” by Prince. But those are not so much the expected in the same way you expect a guitar solo in a, say, Iron Maiden song (in the case of “When Doves Cry”, the dangerous edge of Heavy Metal is palpable). Parliament-Funkadelic for example took the blueprint in Jimi Hendrix’s psychedelic soul revolution, but they stripped it down and built it from the ground up in the despotic influence of James Brown (it is no coincidence that the band’s legendary bass player Bootsy Collins was a runaway from JB’s Band). In Funk, the entire band is focused on hypnotic foundation building, it is not flashy, it is not egocentric, it is brutalistic and urbane to its core.

So back to “Locked Inside”.

At various points it is easy to lose track of the guitar; it is shuffled in with the string quartet, synths, marimbas, vocals, etc. But it is there. Strumming away at its chords, keeping with the time. As the song builds and builds, the melodies are all overtaken by these other instruments. Then you have the break in the latter half of the song, where the guitar is distorted, instrumentation drops out and it is free to play more menacing, tension building lines. It sounds like the perfect segue into a guitar solo… but then it doesn’t come. You get the final bridge over the guitar (now lower in volume) soloing in the background, and then the outro of the song. At no point the spotlight is shining in the guitars, and it is not necessarily missed either.

It is Namor snapping back to reality, reassessing its surroundings, getting its bearings, going back to basics as it were (a movement that is repeated in songs like “Mushrooms and Roses” and “Come Alive”). Janelle is more than happy to play along, by making this song a great showcase of her afrofuturistic vision of Art Pop and its inherent relationship to R&B. But while The Archandroid was Janelle’s exhilarating, sprawling, and surreal foot in the door, taking her R&B forebearers into the lysergic, chambery fields of progressive pop, her following record The Electric Lady is a look back, a love letter of sorts. But it is not one that does not advance our story.

Part 2 : I am become funk, destroyer of worlds

The Electric Lady is my personal favorite record of the entire decade. Just throwing it out there. I think it’s very cleverly written, refreshing in its irreverence, flows like a goddamn river and all around just an extremely bold album for Janelle to make. Essentially, it is a multifaceted walk down R&B’s memory lane. You go from the golden age of the girl groups of the 60s in “Dance Apocalyptic” to early 2000s Pop R&B in the title track. One of the reasons why I think it’s such a clever little record is because it tells the story of the genre completely out of order. It is a decades-long concept that is told entirely out of time, but by rearranging the pieces of the puzzle it is able to arrive at such an interesting sequence of events (not only in the story being told in the album, but on the songs itself). Let me put it this way: The album essentially begins (after the intro suite) with a song featuring Prince, then one featuring Erykah Badu to one featuring Solange. It roughly goes Eighties, Nineties and Oughts, and only in track 9 does it go back to the 60s.

And among its wonderful homages, you have the song “Ghetto Woman”.

It is very pointedly an homage to Stevie Wonder, not only in the hook which owes a lot to “Boogie On Reggae Woman”, but its various parts call back to Stevie’s instantly recognizable signature. And initially, the guitar does the same thing it did in “Locked Inside”, just strumming along, nothing much. It is a very beautiful take on Funk music, but it takes a while to show its hand. It lulls you into the false sense of security of revivalism.

And then it has its first break.

It is a tense bridge where a choir of Janelles tell us that “We say a woman came to change the face of each and every room,” finishing with a guitar playing ascending melodic lines that to me bring to mind afro-pop guitar, with its slinky, clean tone playing very dense but very fun sounds. Which leads us perfectly into Janelle’s breathtaking rap verse, which finishes up with the same guitar line and Janelle saying “Just let the spirit lead you” (Obviously directed at the women she talks about in the song, but also maybe her version of James Brown saying “Can the drummer have some?”).

Which then launches into the full breakdown.

A fiery blood boiling solo that harks back to Prince’s experimentation in mixing pop metal with synth funk, it thrashes, it rips, it slashes and cuts. It is not restrained in the slightest, if the guitars in Archandroid are ok with being left in the back, this one demands our attention. After Namor recovers his bearings, he becomes an antagonist to the earth that not only abandoned him, but also is slowly killing its home. So he lashes out against earth, one of the Avengers’ earliest foes. This solo is one of the angriest moments of the record, it is the bottled rage for the death and abandon of R&B’s history and weight. “I’m gonna show you all,” it says, and it does.

But this is not simply a revenge story, and a moment as jarring as the solo in “Ghetto Woman” (which is not isolated to this one song, you also have the phenomenal, crashing-waves-flowing-long-hair-open-chest solo in “Primetime”) is all the more interesting when you consider where it leads us: redemption.

Part 3 : It’s too Late, You’re Hypnotized

The album is, as I said, heavily indebted to the history of R&B. And, knowing its history, the makers of this history know that in the trajectory of the genre, the anger and fire showcased in “Ghetto Woman” is not hard to come by, but also not necessarily the rule. But, it is also an album that is very comfortable shaking up the structures of funk. And really, an adequate retelling of Funk’s history should remind us more of Parliament-Funkadelic’s alien mothership connection than Christian idolatry. It understands Funk as this expression of Black reality, but it does not miss the mark that it became an expression of the Black imaginary.

We did not quite talk about the guitar hero in Disco, and that needs to be remedied. Nile Rodgers is, I think, the great blueprint for this. Wanting to equal influences from Kiss and Roxy Music as he did from his R&B ancestors, he was no stranger for the power of melody, but that came mostly through Chic’s catchy vocals and bass lines more so than his guitar. He is a very clever guitarist in the Funk sense, but his chords are a lot flashier than most, and adds the bite it needs to punch through (like in the ending of their classic “Everybody Dance”, where it kinda has a solo, but not exactly). If Heavy Metal is menacing, the Disco guitarist is sly and mischievous, more so clever than he is aggressive.

So thrashing around is no stranger to the genre, but Janelle knows that the funk guitar is as multifaceted as they come. So at the same time she subverts tradition, she also honors it. Instead of retracing the line of chronology, she sways, dances and waltzes with her robotic lover around it.

Enter “Dorothy Dandridge Eyes”, the second to last song of the album.

It is a song as lush as they come. It brings to me the smooth operating of Sade, sophisticated, but in this case it is transformed by the slinky synths, the faster pace, all recontextualizing Sade-like harmony and melody. It features Jazz Fusion extraordinaire Esperanza Spalding, which I think indicates the direction the song goes. It is cocktail sipping music for candle light encounters with an otherworldly woman (“She’s from another space and time”), symbolized by the name of Dorothy Dandridge, the Black singer/actress/model who was the first African American woman to be nominated for an academy award.

And this song also closes out with a guitar solo.

It is just as impressive as the one in “Ghetto Woman”, but as mentioned, it is a lot more devious. It sneaks up on you with a clean, subdued but flashy intro, and then slides right into the music with the distortion, playing far more methodical lines. And this time, the rest of the band actually joins in. Instead of strictly providing the backbeat, as any well attuned Funk band does, it will stop and start again at important moments of the solo, creating a more visible dramatic arc with it. When Janelle says “Who knew heaven could kiss just like this?” right before the solo, the solo sounds like the representation of this intense passionate kiss. While “Ghetto Woman” leads into the solo with a James Brown —in order to release the emotions from the bottom of the soul, “Dorothy Dandridge Eyes” has the solo as a dramatic descriptor. It is the ambiance that shows us the emotions of the song. But, the ambiance of the disco dancefloor was a lightshow, wasn’t it?

And that’s part of the beauty in this finishing chapter to our arc: Much like Janelle’s narrative, it actively screws with our order of events. The song is Sade and it is Chic, placed right near the end of history of R&B, after she decided to give us background for her debut in the music industry. “It is a story told through the eyes of a madwoman, who unlike all of us, knows for a fact that she is insane.” Alpha and omega, beginning, end and middle.

Namor has rested his anger. It is now at peace with the people who sought to destroy him and his home, after being united by a common goal. But being at peace does not mean being defenseless. A sly, unpredictable, devious hero. Our story ends where it had first left off, but leaving off in the case of funk does not mean it ended. Again, after Disco “died,” we had Synth Funk, we had house music, and even later we’ve had the revivalism of people like Bruno Mars and Daft Punk. In this sense, the use of a Marvel character makes a lot of sense: unlike its counterpart DC, Marvel has never gone through major company-wide reboots. That means that every single character gets to be alive since the 50s, without aging, and experiencing the shifts in the “real world”. Peter Parker has existed for 58 years (and even then he was created as a teen), but he does not look a day over his thirties. He commented on 9/11, participated in allegory for The War On Terror, but also in 1971 broke new ground by portraying drug abuse in its pages.

And it makes sense. Much like Janelle’s oeuvre, one needs not be confined by our silly sequential view of time to make sense. It works on its own terms. So the trans-alivedead funk guitarist of Schrodinger gets to live on and have its tribute at the same time.