If history has taught us anything about the funk, it’s that the funk is a cyclical thing. Its powers and influence ebb and flow in waves; over the years, funk has ridden out these changes with an easygoing grace, confident in the fact that any low period will be inevitably followed by a swing back up. Right now we’re living in an especially strong time for funk–in fact, it should go down as one of the highest points in funk history. And like the other times like this in the past, we have California to thank for it.
Funk’s current comeback has been rumbling out of L.A. since the end of the last decade. There was the Brainfeeder crew breaking hip-hop’s increasingly mechanized mold in order to reconnect it with the cosmic slop that helped birth it. A generation of young rappers that grew up during the city’s gangsta-rap heyday (many of them aligned with Black Hippy and TDE) began preparing for the return of g-funk 20 years after it first developed. Somewhere off to the side, Dâm-Funk began creating massive beats whose invocations of past masters like Roger Troutman and Egyptian Lover underlined Cali’s prominent place in funk’s lineage.
Only in the past year or so has it become entirely clear that these aren’t isolated cases, but one immense upswell, as artists from across these different scenes released a string of records that reflected a new level of skill, including Flying Lotus’ You’re Dead!, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, and Thundercat’s The Beyond / Where the Giants Roam. With Invite the Light, Dâm-Funk’s joined them.
Dâm’s always been one of the spacier of funk’s new prophets, which, considering how far-out that whole scene is, is a major accomplishment. He’s always seemed uninterested in making his creative impulses fit in any kind of box, so his records tend to range from relatively straightforward, pop-compatible stuff into more abstract territory hovering in an ambiguous space between funk, electro, and experimental electronic music.
Invite the Light is proof that Dâm-Funk’s leveled up on both sides of the equation–the pop stuff’s poppier, and the weird stuff’s more intriguingly weird. On the opening track, former Ohio Player Junie Morrison delivers a staticky distress call from some dystopian time where the funk’s been extinguished and humanity suffers because of it. What follows is a megaton funk bomb that would be more than sufficient to set this alternate universe straight.
In his intro, Morrison says that he "cannot tell you the exact time, day, or year" that he’s broadcasting from, because humankind’s given up keeping track. Invite the Light’s got the same kind of temporal ambiguity running through it. Dâm-Funk has a particular soft spot for the peak of funk’s analog electronic era (bookended roughly by "More Bounce to the Ounce" and "Egypt, Egypt"), but he seems to be drawing his inspiration here from funk in its entirety.
Some of these songs are the catchiest and most direct Dâm’s ever produced, and they all go about it in distinctly different ways. "We Continue" has a Zapp-ish electro bass bump, but the synth pads, twinkling pianos, and multitracked vocals layered on top impart a breezy disco buoyancy that suggests matching satin outfits and choreographed dance moves. "Somewhere, Someday", meanwhile, has the same sparkle as the soulful midtempo bubblegum Prince makes when he’s not feeling tortured.
Even when Dâm gets further out, the album holds together. "The Hunt and Murder of Lucifer", as the title suggests, is a deeply tripped out, bloody-sounding instrumental with leads shared by a nastily buzzing bass part and an icier, pitch-bent synth that throws off all kinds of unsettling discordant frequencies when the two combine. And his Ariel Pink collaboration "Acting" is such potently blissed-out psychedelia that you’re likely to catch a contact high just listening to it.
At its best, Invite the Light manages to bring together Dâm-Funk’s wilder, more experimental side with his newly refined pop side to produce not just some of the strongest material he’s ever made, but some of the strongest material to arise out of the current funk boom. "HowUGonFu*kAroundAndChooseABusta'?" comes near the middle of the album, and it feels like the track that everything else revolves around. From different angles, it resembles Snoop when he was trying to sound like George Clinton, or Prince when he was trying to sound like a rapper, or Outkast when they were trying to sound like Prince. Taken as a whole, though, it’s unmistakably new and unique, and it'll make you thankful that we get to live in a world where funk exists.
