I looked up the word funky in the OED, and it turns out that there are some remarkably different definitions for what I thought was a pretty precise word: http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/findword?query_type=word&queryword=funky&find.x=0&find.y=0&find=Find+word
Wikipedia tells me that the word "funk" got its origins describing the smell of intercourse - not sure how true that is, but I'd be interested in seeing if this was the reason it was applied to the form of music most associated with it today.
Echoing and extending upon what Nupur's said above - 'funk' and 'jazz' have frequently been used as sexual terms, and it's clearly intertwined with racialized discourses claiming hypersexuality, many of which spring up in the 1920's: see headlines and articles such as "Black Scourge in Europe: Sexual Horror Let Loose by France on the Rhine" (1920, I think). It enters the French consciousness early, however: in Symbolism, Alfred Jarry's doing it as early as the 1890's, especially with his musical piece 'Tatane' (commonly translated as 'Nookie'), which weaves together music, sex, and racial epithet to deliberately offensive effect.
You could also consider the arguments which have raged regarding indie rock over the last year; there's been quite a polemic engagement raging, regarding the racial politics of (to mangle a term, or is it a neologism?) 'de-funked' music. See 'A Paler Shade of White: How Indie Rock Lost Its Soul', which you'll find at http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2007/10/22/071022crmu_music_frerejones, for one of the participants in this debate.
The big song of the kindof mythical jazz hero, buddy bolden (who Michael Ondaatje wrote "coming through slaughter" about) was called the "funky butt", and has all kinds of lyrics about smelly asses in tight quarters.
Here's a great video of some old british guys "recreating" the song, who are arguably, themselves, not the most apparently funky people.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5tZcwmw8M4
I think it's pretty interesting, too, separate from music or smell, how the aesthetics of funk clothes and the like came about. Not that I know, but it'd be interesting to find out.
Also, with funky as a smell thing, there's the freud on smell sublimation, right? Those funky feet fetishes. And Swift, with the Yahoos in G's Ts, I think, has a whole bunch of theories about how we got all confused about ourselves once we stopped smelling our own shit. He had Freud covered 200 years early.
Commodities, fetishes, souvenirs, relics, rubbish. What theories help us think about things? In this course we will read Victorian travelers on West African "fetish," Michael Taussig on his imagined cocaine museum, Susan Stewart on longing and souvenirs, Freud on shiny noses, Marx on tables, Annette Weiner on the similarities between gift and commodity exchange, Mary Douglas on dirt, D.W. Winnicott on string, and Arjun Appadurai on the idea of the social lives of things. The singularization of things, the ways in which history and memory are stored in real and imagined objects, the commodification of the human body, the animation of the inanimate, utopian recycling, gleaning, found objects as art and craft: we will consider a broad range of theoretical issues in our readings and in projects that put them to quirky use.
3 comments:
I looked up the word funky in the OED, and it turns out that there are some remarkably different definitions for what I thought was a pretty precise word: http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/findword?query_type=word&queryword=funky&find.x=0&find.y=0&find=Find+word
Wikipedia tells me that the word "funk" got its origins describing the smell of intercourse - not sure how true that is, but I'd be interested in seeing if this was the reason it was applied to the form of music most associated with it today.
Nupur
Echoing and extending upon what Nupur's said above - 'funk' and 'jazz' have frequently been used as sexual terms, and it's clearly intertwined with racialized discourses claiming hypersexuality, many of which spring up in the 1920's: see headlines and articles such as "Black Scourge in Europe: Sexual Horror Let Loose by France on the Rhine" (1920, I think). It enters the French consciousness early, however: in Symbolism, Alfred Jarry's doing it as early as the 1890's, especially with his musical piece 'Tatane' (commonly translated as 'Nookie'), which weaves together music, sex, and racial epithet to deliberately offensive effect.
You could also consider the arguments which have raged regarding indie rock over the last year; there's been quite a polemic engagement raging, regarding the racial politics of (to mangle a term, or is it a neologism?) 'de-funked' music. See 'A Paler Shade of White: How Indie Rock Lost Its Soul', which you'll find at http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2007/10/22/071022crmu_music_frerejones, for one of the participants in this debate.
Ryan
The big song of the kindof mythical jazz hero, buddy bolden (who Michael Ondaatje wrote "coming through slaughter" about) was called the "funky butt", and has all kinds of lyrics about smelly asses in tight quarters.
Here's a great video of some old british guys "recreating" the song, who are arguably, themselves, not the most apparently funky people.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5tZcwmw8M4
I think it's pretty interesting, too, separate from music or smell, how the aesthetics of funk clothes and the like came about. Not that I know, but it'd be interesting to find out.
Also, with funky as a smell thing, there's the freud on smell sublimation, right? Those funky feet fetishes. And Swift, with the Yahoos in G's Ts, I think, has a whole bunch of theories about how we got all confused about ourselves once we stopped smelling our own shit. He had Freud covered 200 years early.
-Sam
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