Funk rock
Sung. Melodic singing throughout.
In short
Slap bass and funk grooves under rock guitars. Rap rock, and through it nu metal, start here.
How it sounds
- Slap bass or a very prominent bass tone as the lead instrument.
- Funk-style guitar with ninth chords and wah-wah, alternating with heavy riffs.
- Syncopated groove and drums full of ghost notes.
Hear what that means
- Slap bass as a lead from 32:00
Red Hot Chili Peppers - Blood Sugar Sex Magik
Thumb striking the string against the fretboard, fingers pulling it back - a percussion technique played melodically, and Rubin's production strips the reverb so it is naked.
Open on YouTube at 32:00 - Sixteenth-note scratching
Muted funk guitar high on the neck played with a rock guitarist's attack, alternating with power chords.
Open on YouTube - Where it gets political
Funk rhythm section, metal guitar and a lyric about power, from a band who spent their career arguing about who rock belongs to.
Open on YouTube
Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. 2 of 3 are cued to a second read from the upload's own tracklist.
The specifics
- Tempo
- 100-130 bpm
- Song length
- 3.5-5 min
- Tuning
- Standard, with the guitar playing sixteenth-note figures high on the neck rather than chords, and the bass tuned and set up for slap technique.
- Production
- Dry, punchy and rhythm-forward, with the bass mixed as a lead instrument. Rick Rubin's production on the defining record strips out reverb entirely so the groove is naked.
- Written about
- Sex, The body, Los Angeles, Politics, on the Living Colour and Fishbone side
What each part is doing
- Bass The lead instrument: slapped with the thumb and popped with the fingers, playing melodic sixteenth-note lines. Flea's parts are the songs as often as the guitar's are.
- Guitar Muted sixteenth-note scratching high on the neck — the funk technique, played with a rock guitarist's attack, alternating with power chords in the chorus.
- Drums Sitting deep in the pocket with a heavy backbeat and ghost notes on the snare, borrowed wholesale from funk rather than from rock.
- Vocals Rapped, sung and shouted, and the genre is where rock singers first started rapping in earnest.
What it isn't
That the slap bass is a novelty. It is a percussion technique — the thumb strikes the string against the fretboard and the fingers pull it back — and doing it cleanly at speed while playing melodic lines is among the harder things asked of a bass player in any genre here. It became a cliché through imitation, which is a fact about the imitators.
Told apart from
- Rap rock Rap rock puts an actual rapper over rock instrumentation. Funk rock keeps a singer and takes the rhythmic vocabulary rather than the vocal one.
- Nu metal Nu metal inherits the slapped bass, the rapping and the groove, and down-tunes everything by several semitones.
- Alternative rock Funk rock is the funk-derived wing of the alternative branch, and shares its labels and its audience.
- Alternative metal Faith No More appear on both lists. Alternative metal is heavier and stranger; funk rock is groove-first.
The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.
History
Red Hot Chili Peppers took the formula from Los Angeles clubs into the charts, while Faith No More added a layer of metal and theatricality. Living Colour proved, with a Grammy, that Black rock bands had not disappeared, merely been ignored. Rap rock and, through it, nu metal start here.
Descended from
Branches into
Siblings on this branch
Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree
- Post-hardcore identical ratings · meets it at Rock
- Deathrock 1.4 apart by rating · meets it at Rock
- Industrial rock 1.4 apart by rating · meets it at Rock
Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.