Abstract

This thesis is concerned with popular music's working of time. It takes the experience of time as crucial to the negotiation of social, political or, more simply, existential, conditions. The key example analysed is the funk style invented by legendary musician James Brown. I argue that James Brown's funk might be understood as an apprehension of a minor temporality or the musical expression of a particular form of negotiation of time by a minor culture. Precursors to this idea are found in the literature of the stream of consciousness style and, more significantly for this thesis, in the work of philosopher Gilles Deleuze on the cinema in his books Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. These examples are all concerned with the indeterminate unfolding of lived time and where the reality of temporal indeterminacy will take precedence over the more linear conventions of traditional narrative. Deleuze’s Cinema books account for such a shift in emphasis from the narrative depiction of movement through time the movement-image to a more direct experience of the temporal the time-image, and I will trace a similar shift in the history of popular music. For Deleuze, the change in the relation of images to time is catalysed by the intolerable events of World War II. In this thesis, the evolution of funk will be seen to reflect the existential change experienced by a generation of African-Americans in the wake of the civil-rights movement. The funk groove associated with the music of James Brown is discussed as an aesthetic strategy that responds to the existential conditions that grew out of the often perceived failure of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Funk provided an aesthetic strategy that allowed for the constitution of a minor temporality, involving a series of temporal negotiations that eschew more hegemonic, common sense, compositions of time and space. This has implications for the understanding of much of the popular music that has followed funk. I argue that the understanding of the emergence of funk, and of the contemporary electronic dance music styles which followed, would be enhanced by taking this ontological consideration of the experiential time of minorities into account. I will argue that funk and the electronic dance musics that followed might be seen as articulations of minority expression, where the time-image style of their musical compositions reflect the post-soul eschewing of a narratively driven, common sense view of historical time