‘You know it when you feel it’: A new documentary explores the roots of funk

We Want the Funk!, an expansive, emotive, celebratory documentary looking at one of history’s most important musical genres, begins simply.

Legendary studio musician Marcus Miller picks up his bass guitar and thumps out a funky, percussive rhythm. Which then builds into a full-on groove by James Brown, leading to an existential question – asked over the course of the film to people like Miller, Parliament-Funkadelic leader George Clinton, The Roots’ Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson and Talking Heads’ David Byrne.

What exactly is the funk?

“Well, it’s funky,” says Todd Boyd, a professor at the University of Southern California known for his expertise in race studies, cultural politics and hip hop culture. “But beyond that, I don’t know if I can describe it. But when you hear it, you know what it is. And, perhaps more importantly, you know it when you feel it.”

That’s the sentiment expressed early and often in We Want the Funk!, a loving and detailed new documentary from PBS’ Independent Lens series, now available on PBS’ app and YouTube.

Seeing how tough it was for some subjects to answer the film’s opening question, I asked George Clinton and co-director Stanley Nelson something slightly different: Why is it so hard to define the funk?

“I know why you’re confused … because it’s like, it’s an attitude,” says Clinton, whose 1976 single with Parliament, “Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker),” has a chorus chant which gives the documentary its name. “Funk is anything it needs to be, in the moment it needs to be that.”

It’s true that funk, a danceable blend of R&B, gospel, jazz, blues and more, rooted in Black culture, defies easy definition. In fact, Nelson says one reason it took five years to craft the film is because there wasn’t an obvious path for a story about a style of music with such range.

Once you get the funk out there, it’s not going back. You can’t put it back in the box.

Filmmaker Stanley Nelson

“We spent a lot of time in the edit room, because we had to kind of make up a story,” adds the co-director, an Emmy winner and National Humanities Medal recipient whose past work includes the PBS documentaries Freedom Riders and Miles Davis: The Birth of the Cool.

“When we did Miles Davis … he was born in a certain year, he picked up the trumpet in a certain year … so there was a story,” Nelson adds. “But with funk [we wondered] ‘what are we going to do?’ … We wanted it to be funky. We wanted it to reflect the funk.”

Music for a bolder style of Black identity

With co-director and co-producer Nicole London, Nelson crafted a story that reaches back to the 1950s and ’60s, when pop music was more buttoned up and white-centered. Motown Records built an empire on offering soul and R&B performers who were smooth, apolitical and inoffensive to white consumers.

But as the 1960s rolled on, through the Vietnam War, the struggle for civil rights, desegregation and the rise of the Black Power movement, an opening appeared for music that offered a bolder identity for Black people.

Along came James Brown in 1968 with a game-changing single — the powerfully funky anthem, “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.” In the film, trombonist Fred Wesley describes how Brown brought a bunch of schoolchildren into the studio to shout out the chorus, creating a classic sound.

“Until the day I die, it will be the most significant song ever for me,” longtime DJ and TV personality Donnie Simpson says in the film. “Because it taught me Black pride.”

In the mid-1960s, George Clinton was working as a staff songwriter at Motown and had a vocal group called The Parliaments. They had a Motown-style R&B hit in 1967, called “(I Wanna) Testify,” but another game-changing record pushed them further towards the funk.

“Soon as we got a hit record, was the same year that [The Beatles’ album] Sgt. Pepper came out,” Clinton tells me. “All of that rock stuff came out … I could see it was getting ready to make one of those paradigm shifts.”

Clinton and his bandmates decided to forge a new path, different than the rock of the moment or the blues and soul their parents loved. “We was going to do funky rock ‘n’ roll,” he adds. “And we wasn’t going to change the word. We made sure we wasn’t going to let them change [the genre name] to rock like they did in the ’50s with rock and blues. All of a sudden, that wasn’t our music anymore.”

Highlighting funk’s joyful nature

Funk’s status as a joyful, unapologetically Black musical form is emphasized again and again in We Want the Funk!. But the documentary also shows how funk both borrowed from and inspired other types of music – with guitarist Carlos Alomar demonstrating how funky rhythms inspired interlocking guitar parts in the hit song he co-wrote with and for David Bowie, “Fame.”

In an inspired sequence, Clinton admits that “Fame” inspired parts of “Give Up the Funk.” Both songs emphasize “the one” – the first beat of key measures in a song that lends a driving beat.

Later, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne notes the title of their hit “Burning Down the House” was inspired by a chant Parliament started with the crowd during a show. Byrne says, because Parliament never put the phrase on a record, it seemed “up for grabs.”

“I knew that,” Clinton says when I ask if he was aware that the Talking Heads hit came from their phrase. “I thought we did put it in a song on a record, though. We did it for so long … I didn’t even realize we had never put it on a record until they put it out.”

Through it all, We Want the Funk! presents the music as a primary expression of Black culture that endures — just like Black people have endured.

“We’re not looking at the funk like [a trend that dies out], like disco,” Nelson says. “Once you get the funk out there, it’s not going back. You can’t put it back in the box.”

Allowing musicians to explain the funk

We Want the Funk! covers a lot of ground, from Sly and the Family Stone to Prince, African artists like Fela Kuti, hip hop pioneers like De la Soul and more. It also explores how bands like Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic fed Black-centered science fiction trends like Afrofuturism — evoking a world where Black people were cavorting with aliens among the stars at a time when mainstream movies, TV and film were still pretty white.

It was about being interesting enough to have a story you can tell.

George Clinton

Clinton says he always anticipated talking more about the thinking behind what Parliament-Funkadelic did while building its unique brand of funk – and elaborate on-stage antics – many years ago.

“I knew I was going to have explain a lot of that stuff later,” he adds, noting that the idea to wear diapers onstage came from watching the musical, Hair. “We knew we was doing theater, and I was going to have the explain that … it was about being interesting enough to have a story you can tell. My job was to be here … [survive] long enough to tell the story.”

And, given his bands’ many songs about science fiction, Clinton says, if he ever does get to meet an alien, he wants to make sure of one thing.

“I just want to make sure they can dance,” he adds, laughing. “That’s the main thing.”