The 10 best Funk tracks of all time
Funk
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.
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James Brown / Cold Sweat
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.
Sly & the Family Stone / Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)
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.
James Brown / Funky Drummer
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.
Stevie Wonder / Superstition
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.
Herbie Hancock / Chameleon
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.
Parliament / Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof off the Sucker)
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.
Kool & the Gang / Jungle Boogie
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.
Average White Band / Pick Up the Pieces
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.
Incredible Bongo Band / Apache
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.
Funkadelic / One Nation Under a Groove
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.