Funk
The 10 Best Funk
Tracks of All Time
The rhythmic reorganisation of American popular music around the first beat of the bar. From 1967 onward, melody and harmony give way to interlocking parts, and the groove itself becomes the subject of the song.
- Origin
- Cincinnati, Ohio, 1967
- Tempo
- 90–120 BPM
- Also known as
- funk music, the one, p-funk
- Tracks
- 10
- Updated
- 2026-08-29
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Curators on Funk
This ranking is the whole scene arguing. These are individuals who gave us their own Funk list, and a reason for every record on it.
Number 1: James Brown / Cold Sweat
1967 · King
The year zero record. Brown moves the accent to the first beat and stops changing chord, and everything in this list plus most of what follows it on this site is downstream of that one instruction to the band.
Also on Roots, The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred, The Waxonia Desk — Where the Accent Moved
Number 2: Sly & the Family Stone / Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)
1969 · Epic
Larry Graham slaps and pops a bass because his band had no drummer, and invents an entire technique by accident. The most cheerful record ever written about being ground down.
Also on The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred, The Waxonia Desk — Where the Accent Moved
Number 3: James Brown / Funky Drummer
1970 · King
Twenty seconds of Clyde Stubblefield alone became the most sampled bar of music in existence. Hip-hop, jungle and big beat are all, at some level, arguments about what to do with this loop.
Also on The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred, The Waxonia Desk — The Soulquarians Room
Number 4: Stevie Wonder / Superstition
1972 · Tamla
A clavinet riff so complete it barely needs the rest of the arrangement. Wonder played almost everything on it himself, which is the point: funk here becomes composition rather than a band's collective accident.
Also on The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred, The Waxonia Desk — Where the Accent Moved
Number 5: Herbie Hancock / Chameleon
1973 · Columbia
Fifteen minutes built on two chords and an ARP bassline. A jazz pianist of the first rank decides the groove is the interesting problem, and takes a generation of musicians with him.
Also on The Waxonia Desk — One Subject, The Waxonia Desk — Where the Accent Moved, Twice Over
Number 6: Parliament / Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof off the Sucker)
1975 · Casablanca
Clinton turns funk into cosmology — a mythology with its own spacecraft, villains and liturgy. Underneath the theatre is Bootsy Collins playing the most disciplined bass line on this list.
Number 7: Kool & the Gang / Jungle Boogie
1973 · De-Lite
Horn stabs, a grunted vocal, and no other ideas whatsoever. Proof that funk at its most functional is not a lesser thing than funk at its most ambitious — it just has less to say between the hits.
Number 8: Average White Band / Pick Up the Pieces
1974 · Atlantic
Six Scotsmen out-funk most of America and go to number one doing it. The arrangement is a masterclass in leaving gaps, and the gaps are why it still cuts through on a big system.
Number 9: Incredible Bongo Band / Apache
1973 · Pride
A session-band cover of a Shadows instrumental, and the single most important break in the history of the block party. Its middle eight is where hip-hop was physically assembled.
Also on The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
Number 10: Funkadelic / One Nation Under a Groove
1978 · Warner Bros.
The last great statement of funk as a mass movement rather than a set of techniques. It is a manifesto you can dance to, and it knows disco is already at the door.