“Funk to me, I’m going to say, funk is the deep rooted emotional feeling that you get when you hear… I can say anything can be funky. It’s all about how one perceives it.”

There’s no denying that Kool & The Gang drummer George Brown knows a thing or two about funk.

“It gives you this really emotional charge, deep rooted. It doesn’t matter what ethnicity you are, black, white, green, yellow, extraterrestrial, it doesn’t matter. When that type of emotion hits you because of all the rhythms going on, the really savory horn lines, and the explicit lyrics in whatever genre of lyrics they’re speaking in, that gives you that soulfulness. That’s funk!”

The drummer from Kool & The Gang recently got involved with The Floozies’ brothers Mark and Matt Hill, who requested that Brown remix their track “She Ain’t Yo Girlfriend.” While The Floozies and Kool & The Gang seemingly come from different camps of what “funk” should be, by working together, the two artists prove that music defies classification. It’s a feeling.

The project started when the Hill brothers reached out to George Brown, asking him to work on the track. Mark Hill said, “Matt and I grew up listening to Kool and the Gang. Still do all the time. It seemed wild but how you gonna do it if you really won’t take a chance? By standing on the wall?”

Once they made the connection, Brown found himself a little reluctant. That is, until he heard their song. 

“Then [I was] sent over the music and that really convinced me. It was funky it was fresh, and I love the title. That was the convincing point, which gave me the impetus to do it.” He continues, saying, “It gave me a thrill to work with Matt and Mark Hill because they use the talk box. It reminded me of Roger Troutman, and my assistant, Summer Gates, is his daughter. When we were listening, she said, ‘It sounds like my dad.’ That was also the impetus to go forward and make it happen.”

 

Brown tells us how he approached the new-age funk track in his own style.

“When they sent over the sessions, I said, ‘Well I have this idea…’ It was very organic. Not a lot of synth leads. I played the synth bass that actually chases the melodies. On the other little synth part, I’m doing some of the Kool and the Gang or Funkadelic-type synth lines, just to give the track a little flavor. We brought Ricky Rouse in. He’s played on Dr. Dre and Snoop tracks. Chaka Khan, he’s her music director. He’s out with George Clinton now. We’ve been working together for years. So Rouse came in and did the guitar work. [I played the] acoustic piano and the drums. You know, just snare and bass drum and then I did the high hat later, to just give it a nice separation. I brought in Louis Taylor, who plays with us, for the saxophone…

I brought in Tyler Collins. She had the big hit record “Girls’ Night Out” back in the 90s. Dominique Karen who sings background with Loose Ends, that English group. Dominique has that big gospel voices that you hear. We’ve worked together for many years. I thought she would be apropos on that track. Sha Sha Jones is on there as well. Sha Sha is an extraordinary writer and singer. She came in and did the second stanza to the second verse. She was in New York [when] we were in New York as well. I called her, she was right around the corner! She came down. She wrote the second stanza to the second verse backstage: ‘If you want her to stick around / You open up your pockets and shut your mouth.’”

The Floozies couldn’t have been happier with the work, as Mark Hill commented that it is “incredible. The whole group did an amazing job. It’s got its own soul as a re-work of the original and I appreciate that a lot. Musically it fulfills all my dreams. Party here, party there, everywhere! This is the remix, baby, you’ve got to hear.”

For fans of funk music, the mere fact that the legendary George Brown would completely work up a song by The Floozies is a significant moment. The word “funk” is ever-evolving, and Brown’s work is the old school approving the new.

Interestingly, with the blossoming of festival culture, funk bands have gotten prime national coverage in years past. Longtime followers of the genre have been delighted to see the music reaching new, youthful audiences, but for the musicians, funk has never left.

When asked whether funk music was on the rise, Brown said “Slightly, but funk has never really gone away.” He continues, “If you listen to hip-hop and rap, there’s a lot of funk and R&B on those tracks. It’s never really gone. If you listen to Bruno Mars’s “Uptown Funk,” that’s total funk.”

Meanwhile, Hill said, “Funk never left to my knowledge. I suppose it’s gotten pretty hip as of late, but what is hip? Tell me if you think you know. If you’re really hip the passing years would show. And sometimes hipness is what it ain’t! Ya dig?”

Oh, we dig.

For these players, it seems that funk is more of a feeling than a classification. It’s indescribable without an instrument in hand, and only truly makes sense during live sets. With the crowd dancing, the lights shining and the band playing, funk is as real as it ever was.

[The Floozies at Boulder Theatre, 10/23, via Sills Photography/Facebook]

Still, the whole process of music making has changed considerably, with the advent of the personal computer. The Floozies reign supreme in this fusion, as their patented brand of music lies somewhere in the electro-funk realms.

“Newer tunes have a lot of advantages with flashy computer tricks,” says Hill. “The way I like to describe what the computer does is… we basically have a giant funk orchestra that plays whatever Matt writes. But you know, the more things change, the more they stay the same… The snare is still on the 2 and 4, for example.” 

The Floozies drummer brings it all back to his drum kit in connecting the different generations. “I’ve been hearing his drums since the womb. It’s not hard to believe that’s where I got some of my rhythm and groove. I didn’t talk ‘till I was four but I heard all the people saying, get down on it!”

Meanwhile, George Brown just sees computers as a means to the same end. “The technology has changed by the way the fidelity sounds, but, overall, everybody is trying to still get that analog sound through Pro Tools and Logic. When you listen to “Uptown Funk,” it sounds like Kool and the Gang, Prince, and Rick James.”

 

Figuring out whether funk is one thing or the other is a listener’s job, as the artists are content to continue creating new music. The Floozies have an album coming out soon that they’re “really excited to share with the world,” and George Brown is working on an album featuring vocalist Sha Sha Jones, another project with Danish singer named Jonna, a jazz album with Tyler Collins, writing for a new Kool and the Gang album, and, for the first time, his own George Brown project.

“I’ve been asked to actually put my own album together after all these years. Something I’ve always wanted to do, but I’ve always pushed it aside for other people’s projects… I am really happy about that.”

Still, the remix of “She Ain’t Yo Girlfriend” may not be the last cross-over between these two groups yet. Brown left that door open, saying, “It was just fun to do it. I can see myself seriously getting more involved in doing work with them. It was just fun. No headaches, no angst, nothing.”

The ease of this generational gap speaks to the universal language of music. The production may have changed, but the essence of the art remains as vital as ever. Funk is just funky, and that’s all there is to it. 

So, what does funk mean to The Floozies, anyway? As Mark Hill explains it, funk is “being yourself, welcoming others into the same space and just being in a groove with the world. Funk is a little different for everybody, some folks like it fast and some folks like it slow. Some like it hot and some like it blue. Some like it old and some like it new.”

That’s what makes Brown’s remix of “She Ain’t Yo Girlfriend” all the more special. Listen to his masterful remix, featured on GRiZ’s label All Good Records, below: