Two notes:
1 - I never thought of David Byrne as funky.
2 - They don’t explain the meaning of “funk,” and why it was applied to this type of music.
The Heads were definitely funky, for white art-school grads. And check out Tom Tom Club - serious funk.
And they surrounded themselves with musicians with serious funk cred, like Lynn Mabry, Alex Weir, and Bernie Worrell.
Not that I don’t like it, but I can’t imagine a whitest sound than Byrne, TBH. Even Rei Momo (which I love) is clearly a white man’s idea of afro-cuban sounds
Having said that, clearly he is inspired by african-american rythms, so I can see him taking a page from funk and applying to his songs.
Will watch the video once I get out of work
ETA:

You had your chance 40 years ago
I think about this video every so often. No, not the “long version” that was posted, but the extended 10 minute “long long version” version:
I remember the week this debuted on MTV. I was 14, I think. It was a several days’ long marathon of all Michael Jackson, all the time. Every single video was played including the long versions of Bad and Thriller. They even broadcast Moonwalker. This was all to culminate in the world debut of the Black or White video (which was played twice in a row for some reason). I was a huge MJ fan back then and watched it all – I still have hours of it on VHS tapes somewhere.
Even at 14, I found the latter half of the video to be deeply disturbing even though I couldn’t really tell you why at the time. Looking back, I’m guessing it’s some combination of these things: the sudden 180 degree turn from the poppy positivity and light comedy of the first 6 minutes into the bleakness of the following 4 minutes, the random destruction and violence, the many many scenes of lingering crotch grabbing, and then a just as sudden 180 degree turn back into an animated Simpsons cameo. It was very disturbing and I really didn’t understand it at all.
I guess I wasn’t the only one who felt confused by all of this. After the initial airings, I never saw the full version on MTV again. I recently discovered that this video was later given the George Lucas treatment where the car and buildings were digitally altered to add racist grafitti. See, MJ wasn’t randomly wrecking shit, he was making an anti-racist statement! (Crotch grabbing still left unexplained.)
Anyway, thanks for reminding me of all of this.
Over on the youtubes, Fantano has been making videos about spotify recently, based on some of this research.
Hence, this is the best way to listen to Spotify: not relying on its playlists, being less lazy when it comes to choosing real artists, rewarding risk and musical variety… and not letting just anything play for hours on end.
So if you have a party or something, you go to the trouble to hand pick all the music yourself. If only there were some sort of way you could turn over the selections to someone trustworthy…but even if you’re paying corporations are too greedy to help with that. You do everything yourself or you get slop, there is no middle ground in modern capitalism.
You’ll have to give me the cliffnotes
We may have found an actual use for ChatGPT!
I tried for shits and giggles through copilot and (understandably) it is unable to check the video itself, but if i were to give it a transcription it would be able to provide a summary
There is always listening at a faster speed, tho!
Watching/listening now… he’s starting with a history of Beyonce…
Early on…
Then he says, it’s not just about Queen Bey and internet debates…
He’s not wrong on that… he goes on about a couple of other aspects, but the point is that looking at art and culture more generally can open up a whole pathway of thinking about society in general.
But yeah, it’s kind of long… not as long as his video on Kendrick Lamar and Drake, but pretty long! But his videos are often worth investing the time, if you can carve it out. He’s thoughtful, well-informed, and pretty funny, too.
Today is the anniversary of Joy Division’s first gig (as Warsaw) in 1977, opening for the Buzzcock’s at the electric circus… Their first EP…
Oh no! I was only halfway through and it must have gotten a take down notice from an angry member of the Beyhive!!!
This is why we can’t have nice things