Too many music documentaries don’t do enough to illuminate the music. They can be fun, sure, but if you’re wanting something that goes beyond a surface-level celebration, you can often feel a little deflated as you realize you’re just not going to learn a whole lot about why the music is so good.
This is not the case with We Want the Funk! Because it’s simply astounding how well directors Stanley Nelson and Nicole London put funk music into its social, cultural, political, and historical context, how well they actually explain why it works musically—and even neuroscientifically—and how they’re able to do all of that in a breezy 80 minutes.
The movie’s form is as conventional as can be, all archival footage and talking heads, but as with Nelson’s riveting 2021 Oscar-nominee Attica, we see that there’s no real need for reinventing the wheel when someone puts their movie together this well. The luminaries interviewed describe the value of funk music’s reliance on creating a groove and staying with it, developing a kind of transcendent space. We learn about James Brown’s insistence on hammering “the one,” the first beat of every measure, and how it creates that groove. And we understand funk music’s place in Black social movements and how it drew from and influenced the cultural change around it, including how Black migration to Midwest industrial cities and arts funding in schools gave an entire generation the opportunity to create real, meaningful social and musical shifts.
I once saw George Clinton in concert, and I was amazed that he could play for four hours straight, with constant elation on stage and in the crowd, only playing about six different songs in total, including one that was essentially just everyone in the building chanting the word “booty” for a solid 20 minutes. And I’d never understood just exactly how that was all possible. But now, I do understand, and I also realize that, as one musician says, funk is, indeed, forever stanky.
We Want the Funk! is available at PBS.org or through the PBS app.
