Funk

Jamiroquai

The floor was not moving

In "Virtual Insanity" the floor never moved: it was grey and smooth, and what turned was the whole set on wheels, pushed by stagehands with the camera bolted to one wall. Jonathan Glazer directed it on 12 August 1996 in four takes, for half the 280,000 pounds that moving the floor for real would have cost. It won four VMAs out of ten nominations, including Video of the Year.

Rick James

The Grammy came out of a lawsuit

The only Grammy of his life he won for a song he did not record: Best R&B Song on 20 February 1991 for "U Can't Touch This", after suing MC Hammer over the riff of "Super Freak" and settling out of court. Before all that he had a band in Toronto with Neil Young and Bruce Palmer, and Motown cancelled their single in 1966 on discovering that its singer was a fugitive from the Naval Reserve.

Red Hot Chili Peppers

The four from Fairfax High

Red Hot Chili Peppers formed in Los Angeles in 1982 with four classmates from Fairfax High: Kiedis, Flea, Hillel Slovak and Jack Irons. Slovak died of a heroin overdose on 25 June 1988, Irons left because of it and John Frusciante joined that same year, aged eighteen, to replace him. Then came his three spells, two departures and Josh Klinghoffer's ten years.

Sly Stone

Who gets on stage with you

He perfected the funk James Brown had invented, and in 1966 he put together a band of men and women, Black and white, when that was a political act.

Pharrell Williams

The man who made two whole decades sound the way they did from behind, and then stepped out front

Through the two-thousands he produced, with Chad Hugo and under the name of the Neptunes, a good part of what played on the radio without hardly anyone knowing his face. In 2013 he stepped out front, and with "Happy" he became the star he had spent a decade manufacturing for others.

James Brown

The night Boston didn't burn

He invented funk by pushing the melody back and the rhythm forward. And the night after Martin Luther King was killed, his televised concert kept a whole city indoors.

Earth, Wind & Fire

The date did mean something

For forty years the answer was that 21 September meant nothing, that it simply sounded good. In 2019 Maurice White's widow revealed it was their son's due date.

Joe Vasconcellos

Footprints, and Alive

Joe Vasconcellos, or how the most Chilean thing can come from someone made of the whole world. He grew up between Italy, Japan and Brazil, studied at a Genoa conservatoire, and of all the countries he could have chosen, he chose Chile. His two most famous words sum up his career.

Cristián Cuturrufo

The Trumpet and the Port

Cristián Cuturrufo, or how to marry two worlds that in Chile almost never spoke: conservatoire jazz and the music of the northern fondas. He worked cueca and cumbia into bebop, invented the "swing nacional", and did it from Coquimbo rather than Santiago.

Nile Rodgers

The hand you'd recognise

He is on so many hits it is hard to believe it is one person, and almost nobody would recognise his face. The invisible architect of the groove.

Prince

The Vault Beneath the House

Prince, or what it means to make more music than the world will ever get to hear. He played every instrument, wrote and produced everything, and locked away thousands of songs nobody ever heard. He changed his name to a symbol rather than let a company own him.

A History of Funk: The Music That Bet Everything on Rhythm

From James Brown to today: how a single drum accent changed popular music forever. The discovery of "the one", Sly Stone's explosion, George Clinton's cosmic mythology, and why almost everything you dance to —from hip-hop to pop— owes funk something.