![]() ![]() The eight bars of drumming that followed on this day in 1969 went on to become the mother of all breakbeats. When he gets to Stubblefield, Brown lets it be known that he doesn't want a fancy solo, but more of the incredibly funky underlying beat: ""Don't turn it loose," he can be heard saying, "'cause it's a mother." Instead of "lyrics," "Funky Drummer" features Brown sitting back and letting the groove hold center stage while interjecting the occasional bit of shouted encouragement to one of his individual band members. Like many of the James Brown records on which Stubblefield played, "Funky Drummer" had its beginnings in an ad-libbed jam before a planned recording session - a jam that Brown walked in on and declared ready to record. "The Funky Drummer" wasn't so much a song as it was an extended groove. ![]() could call it out by name in "Fight The Power" as shorthand for hip-hop itself: "1989! The number, another summer/Sound of 'The Funky Drummer.'" It is impossible to know who first employed "The Funky Drummer" in this fashion, but it was so heavily entrenched in hip-hop's DNA by 1989 that Public Enemy's Chuck D. Hip hop was born when DJs began rapping over dance records, and no dance records were better suited to rapping than those that included a "breakbeat" - a drum break that could be repeated almost endlessly as an accompaniment to rapping. Original Gangster" (1991).Īlong with literally hundreds of other hip-hop songs, each of those classics is set to a beat drawn directly from an eight-bar drum break played by Stubblefield on “The Funky Drummer,” widely believed to be the most sampled record in music history. ![]() Yet you'll hear Stubblefield's drumming on many of those artists' most famous tracks: Eric B & Rakim's "Lyrics Of Fury" (1988) N.W.A.'s "**** Tha Police" (1988) Public Enemy's "Fight The Power" (1989) LL Cool J's "Mama Said Knock You Out" (1990) and Ice T's "O.G. 18, 2017) and came of age long before that form of music even existed, so if you look for his name in the credits of albums by some of hip-hop's most important artists, you will come up empty. ![]() On this day in 1969 - 51 years ago - James Brown’s "Funky Drummer" was recorded at King Studios in Cincinnati, Ohio.ĭrummer Clyde Stubblefield was not a hip-hop musician. ![]()
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