By Sylvia W. Chan

" What is funk?" the buttery baritone blaring from my boom box asks over a driving James Brown beat. "Where does it come from? Why does everybody want to rap on it? Sample it? Dance to it? Make love to it? Eat biscuits with it? Take on the system with it? Who are these people?"

Quickly I finish glossing my lips, grab the car keys, and head out so I can get some answers. Tonight I'm going right to the source, getting up close and personal with the man behind the radio show that's always soothed my soul, unclenched my jaw, and invoked a majority of my numerous spastic car-dance marathons.

It's 10 o'clock on a Friday night, and DJ-writer-scholar-professor-funkateer Rickey Vincent, 38, otherwise known as the Uhuru Maggot, has taken over the airwaves of local radio station KPFA, 94.1 FM. His two-hour show, The History of Funk, is a celebration of all things funky, from James to Jimi, the Bar-kays to the Rubber Band, the Mothership to Dr. Dre, and everything in between. On KPFA since 1993, when it moved from Berkeley's KALX, 90.7 FM (where Vincent started the show in 1985), the hours are dedicated to exploring funkiness from new and unexplored perspectives. Vincent and his on-air crew Ð longtime colleague Ashem "the Funky Man" Neru-Mesit and relative newcomer Grizzly Ð provide running commentary (oftentimes humorous, always insightful) on the tracks at hand and prefer to play tracks that aren't on the greatest-hits packages, opting for rare B-sides, imports, and as Vincent puts it, "all the twisted out-tha-box lunatic fringe funk anthems." Some shows are dedicated to a single artist, like the all-Bill Withers program a few weeks back, which included an extensive interview with the reclusive artist and little-known tracks Vincent hunted down by pouring through lists of imports online.

Tonight at the station Vincent and company have been joined by Rob Kowal, a.k.a. DJ Motion Potion Ð the man behind Nickie's BBQ's WhatDaFunk Thursday nights Ð and Rob's girlfriend, Sabrina, who, like me, have come by to watch a master at work. You never know who's gonna stop by around here, and earlier in the evening Johnny Spain of the Black Panther Party (one of the wrongly accused San Quentin Six) comes through, telling Vincent on air that he listens to the show every week and asking folks to keep supporting the funk. With the spirit of revolution still present, the sound booth bumps with an exhilarating, house-party vibe. Standing over a crate of albums, a grinning Vincent waves his hands in the air to the grooves of Digital Underground, while Funky Man bops around like an overcaffeinated child, handing out plates and telling us there's pizza in the lobby. Vincent says The History of Funk "is the foundation of all the funky business that [he and his crew] do," and it shows. Their energy is infectious, and later, when Vincent spins Tower of Power's classic "You Ought to Be Havin' Fun," I do just that, joining in on the booty shaking.

Besides being one of the funkiest DJs around, Vincent is also, by all accounts, one of the world's premier scholars on the subject. His book, Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One, was published by St. Martin's Griffin Press in 1996 and won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards for outstanding print and media coverage of music that same year. The most extensive book of its kind, the volume examines funk's roots in jazz, blues, and the rhythms of Africa, provides an almost blow-by-blow account of its evolution from the mid '60s through the '90s, and includes an incredibly comprehensive 20-page list of "Essential Funk Recordings," each of which Vincent rates and briefly describes.

His knowledge is encyclopedic, but it's this funky professor's approach to the subject that makes his scholarship so vital. Looking through a sociopolitical lens, Vincent delves deep into the political nature of the funk, addressing, among other things, its role as a protest music, its impact on African American culture, and the ways in which funk has transformed the American consciousness by altering the rhythms by which we live. This transformation occurred, Vincent asserts, through the emergence of "the One": the unifying downbeat at the start of each musical bar in funk, a locked-in groove that displaced the standard two-four emphasis in all Western music and introduced a rhythmic pattern deeply rooted in African tradition. Consequently, as funky rhythms proliferated throughout all aspects of American music, from rock to jazz to techno, listeners absorbed a sound that flew in the face of the powers that be and integrated those grooves into their day-to-day lives.

Vincent sees recognizing the funkiness within as a path toward transcendence and says that if you allow it, funk's power can be a "life-saving and life-enriching force," a source of strength the soul can draw on for growth, sustenance, and transformation. And though this may sound crazy to the uninitiated, those who have funked know exactly what he's talking about Ð you just gotta funk to get out of a funk.

Vincent's dedicated his life to spreading funk's message, and in addition to doing the radio show, he teaches two classes at S.F. State University. Earning his master's degree in ethnic studies from SFSU in 1993 (where he began work on his book), he returned to the campus in 1994 to teach one of the school's "critical thinking" courses, a requirement for all undergraduates.

In 1997 he approached the administration about teaching a course on the funk. "Surprisingly," he says with a grin, "they thought it was a great idea." That year he began teaching Black Studies 222, Black Protest Music since 1965: Funk, Rap, and the Black Revolution, and continued to do so until last spring, when Oba T’shaka, head of Black Studies at SFSU, asked Vincent if he would be interested in creating a course on hip-hop culture. The funkateer was well qualified for the job: he'd run with Bay Area rappers, such as the guys from Digital Underground, and had written about hip-hop for magazines such as Vibe and Mondo 2000. Knowing it would be a popular class, Vincent jumped at the offer, seeing it as "an opportunity to show a new generation of people the work [he] was doing with the funk."

He was right. While the enrollment for the funk class had ranged from 35 to 60 students, more than 130 students signed up for the hip-hop class, making it the most popular course in the Black Studies department. Called the Hip Hop Workshop, the class explores "the basic issues surrounding the cultural phenomenon known as Hip Hop," according to its syllabus, and exposes students to the "four central aspects of Hip Hop: Deejaying, Emceeing, B-Boying, and Graffiti." The reading list includes David Toop's The Rap Attack 3: African Rap to Global Hip Hop and a reader that Vincent compiled, which contains material by hip-hop writers such as Greg Tate and Vanessa May, articles from popular hip-hop magazines, and works by the Last Poets and Vincent himself. With Vincent's connections throughout the hip-hop community the class draws guest speakers such as Boots Riley from the Coup, KPFA and KMEL DJ Davey D, and Money B from Digital Underground. Last week's session found the Godfather of Hip-Hop himself, Afrika Bambaataa, addressing the students.

"I think that hip-hop is the strongest, most grassroots phenomenon around," Vincent says as we talk over coffee at Berkeley's Au Coquelet Cafe on a Saturday afternoon. "In this class I'm giving the students a real strong sense of how hip-hop is connected to music that comes from Africa, because it's something that's now but connected to something that's been there forever. That grounds them, and it opens their spirits. A lot of hip-hoppers feel disconnected, ignored, invisible, or close to the edge. Hip-hop is their outlet, and it's just important to get young people to recognize that the things they do are valid."

When asked if he feels any ambivalence about teaching hip-hop instead of funk, he says no, because in many ways hip-hop itself is proof of its generation's need for funkiness. "When [hip-hop] started to get deep, they started getting into James Brown samples," he explains, referring to the years in the late '80s when hip-hop experienced a surge of creativity, with acts such as Public Enemy, N.W.A., and De La Soul arriving on the scene. "And when it got real deep," he continues, "they started fucking with George Clinton and P-Funk" Ð like on Dr. Dre's The Chronic, the most popular rap album of 1993. "Youngsters who had been digging through their parents' record crates and finding this stuff were telling the story of funk. That played a role in the rise in African consciousness that happened in the late '80s."

Vincent's own consciousness developed in an upbringing he describes as "very, very '70s." Born in San Francisco and brought up in Berkeley, Vincent was raised in a single-parent family run by a mother who wrote for the Black Panther Party newspaper. During his childhood, Vincent says, folks such as Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver were often around the house. His father, whom he saw often and describes as a "white radical," is author Ted Vincent, who's written volumes on Marcus Garvey and the politics of jazz, as well as a recently published work on Black Mexico. Vincent Ð who still lives in Berkeley with his wife, Tess, and two young sons, age four and six Ð says, "I came up with a sense of history and a sense of the struggle. But I was also a kid, and I wanted to party."

Enter Vincent's older brother, Barry, two years older and a funk keyboardist who called himself "the next Bernie Worrell" (the legendary P-Funk keyboard player). Barry let his younger brother hang out when his boys would come over for band rehearsal, and for a while Vincent, who was 12 at the time, thought they were "very intimidating." One day, however, one of his brother's friends came up and hugged him, saying, "Hey, you're Barry's brother! What's up?" It was then, Vincent says, that he understood what it was all about. "All of a sudden," he explains, "my whole notion of who these guys were Ð that they were thugs, and that they smoked weed Ð all that vanished. I saw that this was something divine, something very magical. That these people were getting together and playing music for the love of it."

That same year Vincent heard the album that would alter him inexorably and introduce him to the Atomic Dog himself, George Clinton. "In 1974, I heard Parliament's Up for the Down Stroke, and it changed my life. I didn't know what to do after I heard it," Vincent says with reverence. Clinton, the man behind the P-Funk crew who, Vincent says, "elevated funk into an ideology," has become one of Vincent's mentors over the years, often reading drafts of the funk scholar's writing while he works on it. When Vincent completed his tome, Clinton agreed to pen the foreword for it, in which the funkanaut supreme writes, "This literary piece is of such insight and projection as to pose quite an argument for a funk aesthetic."

Quite an argument indeed. It's an aesthetic that Vincent lives out each and every day, and one that he's passing on to his sons, who, he says, "are already extremely funky," often demanding that dad play "Jungle Boogie" and "Everyday People" so they can get their funk on. He encourages others to do the same, reminding me that the ultimate goal is to "utilize the divine power of the Funk to bring all the generations together, all the classes, and all the races on the One as a groovalistic whole."

"Just remember," he says assuredly in that low-down, gravelly voice of his, a voice that could only belong to a true funk prophet, "every booty is funky."

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