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OWING TO THE PREVALENCE OF AFRICAN-diaspora musical characteristics in funk, this genre of popular music was uniquely suited to express black nationalism in the 1970s.(1) For this reason, perhaps, funk frequently failed to achieve crossover success from the R&B charts to the mainstream pop charts. As a ghettoized genre, however, funk music was free to address separatist social issues in its lyrics in a way that more mainstream African American genres were not.(2) Judging from their lyrical content and images, pop musicians such as the Supremes, who performed for Motown in the 1960s, or Donna Summer, who sang disco in the 1970s, seemed to have little interest in uniquely African American concerns. While the lyrics of soul songs from the 1960s did address civil rights issues, a more radical separatist stance was not heard in popular music until the rise of funk.(3)
Since black nationalism in the United States had a strong affiliation with the Nation of Islam and the Five Percent Nation in the 1960s, the role of women in black nationalism was inherently one of subservience (Decker 1994, 107).(4) The absence of women from the frontlines of black nationalism in the 1960s was subsequently reproduced in funk music in the 1970s. Despite their success in other popular music genres of the time, funk had virtually no female composers or performers.(5)
This unusual dominance of the music by men is played out in the lyrics of funk, which address a plethora of topics and issues but most frequently highlight masculinity. Lyrics such as "Sex Machine" or "Hot Pants" by James Brown and "Up for the Downstroke" by Parliament emphasize male heterosexual prowess. This boasting in funk lyrics comes in part from the African-diaspora tradition of toasting.(6) The same funk artists known for toasting, however, also often made black power sociopolitical comments, as in, for example, James Brown's "Get Up, Get into It, and Get Involved" or "Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud" and Parliament's "Chocolate City."
Since the patriarchal nature of black nationalism from the 1960s was often replicated in subsequent black nationalist styles such as funk (and later hip-hop), pro-black stances frequently became tied up in machismo posturing (Decker 1994, 107). For instance, the verse of James Brown's "Funky President (People...