William “Bootsy” Collins is back, and he’s bringing the funk – with a little help from his friends.
“Tha Funk Capital of The World,” released last Tuesday, is Collins’ first CD in five years, and it isn’t just funk for funk’s sake – there’s a message in the music. And to help deliver it, Collins enlisted the oratory skills of The Rev. Al Sharpton, Professor Cornel West, actor Samuel L. Jackson, and one Tom Joyner.
“Back when I was coming up, we had voices. We had people that pretty much gave us hope in the community,” Collins told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “Nowadays, you don’t hear that anymore. I wanted to go and grab songs and concepts that would give people inspiration, hope.”
“It was pretty amazing for me to see these guys of this caliber that’re not necessarily musicians, but have the knowledge and the voice to speak and people will listen,” Collins continued.
But don’t think “Funk Capital” is just a spoken-word record with Bootsy thumping his famous bass in the background. He serves up the funk with assists from musical friends like Public Enemy’s Chuck D, Sheila E., Snoop Dogg, Parliament-Funkadelic ringmaster George Clinton, Ice Cube, jazz banjo player Bela Fleck and the late Catfish Collins, Bootsy’s brother.
“The thing is raising hope like dope,” he said. “You’ve got the music there, and then you have inspiring messages there. It’s kind of a party, but it ain’t the same kind of party we had back in the day. It’s more of an education thing, a musical biography of sorts, for me to point people in the direction from where I came from and how I got to where I’m at now in hopes that they start realizing where they’re at.”
That’s why Sharpton speaks to the sound of the beat on “JB – Still the Man,” a tribute to the late James Brown. Sharpton was a Brown protégé, and Collins played bass in Brown’s band.
“The Rev. Al Sharpton was the only one I could think of who could do what I wanted the song to do for James Brown,” Collins said. “He was more happy to do it than I was. Same thing with Dr. West and Samuel L. Jackson.”
West, a Princeton University professor and, most recently, a prominent black voice critical of President Barack Obama, imparts knowledge with Collins on “Freedumb.”
“Straighten your back up. When you straighten your back up, you’re going somewhere ‘cause folk can’t ride your back unless it’s bent,” West implores on the song.
“You say you got a Smart phone,” Bootsy croons. “But you’re still making dumb decisions.”
And Joyner goes old school as only he can on the “Quiet Storm”-inspired, bedroom music-tinged “Yummy, I Got the Munchies.”
Collins invited Joyner to be on the CD during a “Tom Joyner Morning Show” Sky Show visit to Collins’s hometown Cincinnati.
“I told him I was doing my record, and it would be great if he could come out and jump on it,” Collins recalled. “He thought it was a great idea. From Day One, 1975, in Chicago, when he worked at the radio station there, he was one of the first ones that grooved the funk back in the day. He was really excited to do something in the studio with me, especially when he heard the song. It brought back memories for him and for me as well.”
In addition to hoping that folks will open their minds and shake their booties to the CD, Collins hopes “Tha Funk Capital of the World” will help preserve funk, a genre he says is “hanging by a thread.”
A lot of the pioneers of funk have passed away recently
….. Rick James in 2004, Brown in 2006, songstress Teena Marie last December, P-Funk All Stars musical director Garry Shider last June and Phelps “Catfish” Collins last August.
“It’s hanging by a thread, but at the same time, I think it’s about a re-awakening,” Collins said. “I think it’s about making people aware that the funk is still here. We just may call it different things. Funk is always here. It just needs somebody to speak on it, to say ‘Hey, look, it ain’t going nowhere.’ And in hopes that the kids pick it up and realize ‘Oh, this is the same like right off the streets, just like the rap scenario.’ Once they realize that, they’ll embrace it even more.”
Like most artists from the 1970s and 1980s, Collins’s career has ebbed and flowed. He got a bit of a comeback boost in the 1990s when his bass and vocals helped power Deee-Lite’s hit “Groove is in the Heart.”
Collins got another bump when TV One’s “Unsung” aired a show in 2009 in which he candidly spoke about his career rise and his near personal destruction because of drug abuse and a free-wheeling lifestyle during his days with Parliament-Funkadelic and his own Bootsy’s Rubber Band.
“’Unsung’ really broke everything down for everybody to hear it and then make their own opinion about who the funk I am and what the funk is all about,” said Collins, now a clean-living pillar of the Cincinnati community.
“I think it was great, right on time up to this very moment,” he said. “Right after that, I started to think about actually doing a record.”
