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This chapter focuses on the appointment of Albert Speer as dictator of the German economy and the Reich Minister of Economics Walther Funk as a member of the Central Planning Board. Both appointments were made by Adolf Hitler as part of a decree he issued on September 2, 1943, which put the Reich Minister for Armaments and Munitions in control of total German production for the duration of the war, while the Reich Minister of Economics was to be responsible for the general economic policy, among other functions. The chapter first provides a background on the careers of Funk and Speer before discussing the relative position of Funk, Speer, Hermann Göring, and certain commissioners in the German war economy. It also considers the organizational meaning of Hitler's decree, along with the possibility that the new measure will deepen the antagonism between industry and the Nazi Party.

Groove Theory traces the concept of funk from the beginning of the blues era around 1890 to its manifestation as a full-fledged genre in the 1970s. This chapter provides an introduction. In the chapters, Bolden examines the development of blue funk in a multidimensional discussion that engages songs, fiction, memoirs, interviews, scholarship, and more. The discussion proceeds in two parts. Side A presents a conceptual introduction to funk aesthetics, an historical overview of funk during the blues era, and a chapter on Sly Stone that examines his foundational role as an architect of funk. Side B includes chapters on Chaka Khan, Gil Scott-Heron, and Betty Davis, whose recordings and aesthetics exemplify distinct variations of blue funk and the black fantastic.

This chapter explains the meaning of funk as a concept and introduces readers to salient precepts and characteristics. The chief argument is that (a) the phenomenon known as the funk/spirit—or, more simply, the funk—operates as a distinct form of black vernacular epistemology, and that (b) funk comprises the secular counterpart of “the spirit”—what Albert Murray calls “paroxysms of ecstasy”—in black church worship. This sensation, which is usually generated by the interplay between motion and emotion, has been a vital aspect of the production of knowledge in music-making within African American working-class performance venues. Funk foregrounds the body and sensuality as indispensable aspects of a musician’s ability to play certain notes and to create desired timbres and soundscapes. This sort of psychosomatic epistemological modality calls into question the normative mind-body split; and, as such, it stands at variance with the prototypical notions of knowledge in the Western tradition. It points up the limits of reason, and constitutes a recognition of other ways of knowing, multiple ways of knowing. Combining musicology, literary scholarship, and elements of philosophy, the chapter examines song lyrics in conjunction with musicians’ memoirs, fiction, and interviews. In doing so, Bolden creates a philosophical approach to funk as he examines recordings by James Brown, Parliament-Funkadelic, Stevie Wonder, and others.

This chapter examines the development of funk as a distinct concept in black vernacular culture, and explains how blues artists, modern jazz musicians, and political attitudes during the civil rights movement combined to establish the foundation for the musical genre of funk as well as the non-conformist aesthetics and attitudes the music expressed. The central argument is therefore two-fold: that blues artists formulated the concept now known as funk, and that funk became the epistemic centerpiece of a broader cultural aesthetics in black working-class environments. As with the previous chapter, “Blue Funk: The Ugly Beauty of Stank ” foregrounds the central role of kinesthesia in blues-oriented approaches to music-making. Using insights and methods from multiple areas of scholarship, including musicology, ethnomusicology, philosophy, literary criticism, dance criticism, and art history, Bolden explains how the concept of funk and/or precepts associated with funk were not only exemplified in several black musical genres but also dancing, literature, and visual art as well. In this way, black artists working in several mediums contributed to the transformation of “funky” from a stigmatizing signification, that is, a negative, stereotypical expression into a metaphor of black cultural affirmation.

This chapter examines Sly Stone as an organic intellectual, that is, a poet-songwriter, imaginative thinker, and visionary artist whose band, Sly and the Family Stone, played a foundational role in creating funk music and the broader cultural aesthetic that exemplified funk. In this regard, the chapter demonstrates how Stone’s approach to music-making, which was largely determined by his extensive background in gospel, played a vital role in his construction of funk. Combining gospel, blues, jazz, and rock, the Family Stone created a new sound that not only fascinated listeners of rock and rhythm and blues but such acclaimed musicians as Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock as well. In addition, the chapter provides biographical information that contextualizes the artists’ development and illuminates the band’s aesthetic. Finally, the chapter provides key information on groundbreaking bass player Larry Graham and trumpeter Cynthia Robinson as well as detailed commentary on momentous recordings and live performances.

This chapter examines Khan’s development into a powerhouse singer and talented songwriter as the frontwoman of Rufus. Drawing Khan’s childhood experiences described in her memoir, as well as musicologist Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr.’s notion of black community theater, the chapter demonstrates how she transposed her rebellious spirit, evidenced briefly during high school as a volunteer worker for the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, into a self-conscious and contrarian artist who epitomized funk aesthetics. As one of the few women funk singers who didn’t have a gospel background or grow up in a musical family, Khan developed a jazz-inflected vocal technique and a singular, Chicago-based, rhythm-and-blues sound that became a funk trademark. At the same time, the chapter demonstrates that Khan’s interpretation of funk as a concept, particularly its nonconformity, which she exemplified in exhilarating eroticism during live performances, proved to be a double-edged sword. While she captivated music fans, Khan battled executives at ABC Records over racialized images of her sexuality. 

This chapter examines Gil Scott-Heron as an exemplar of the socio-political manifestation of the contrarianism in funk aesthetics. Combining biographical information from Scott-Heron’s memoir and interviews, critical methods from literary scholarship, and insights from philosophy, the chapter highlights Scott-Heron’s understanding of the blues as a locus of black aesthetics and political philosophy. In doing so, the chapter illuminates Scott-Heron’s prescience, and examines many of his multiple talents, including poetry, songwriting, singing, and playing keyboards. Unlike most recording artists, however, Scott-Heron was influenced by writers, especially the Black Arts writers who generally believed that artists should create primarily for working-class African Americans. Consequently, he curtailed his budding career as a novelist and shifted his concentration to performing and recording songs and poems in the early 1970s. The chapter includes textual analyses of key recordings as well as discussions of Scott-Heron’s satire and social criticism. Additionally, Bolden highlights musical aspects of Scott-Heron’s appeal, especially the timbre of his voice but also the musicianship of the Midnight Band, which he co-led with longtime collaborator Brian Jackson.  

This chapter showcases Betty Davis’s transposition of women’s blues into rock-inflected version of funk. Bolden advances two key arguments. First, Davis reprised the sexual politics and rebellious spirit exemplified by singers Bessie Smith and Ida Cox, for instance, and reinterpreted those principles in modern America. Second, Davis’s eroticism and sui generis style of funk, which she expressed in her recordings and onstage, reflected a sexual politics that served as a counterpart to those of black feminists writers such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and many others who were publishing coextensively. But whereas black feminist writers often wrote about black women in previous generations, Davis not only addressed contradictions that black women encountered in contemporary street culture; she also represented such X-rated sexual desires as sadomasochism in her songwriting. In addition, the chapter provides biographical information that contextualizes Davis’s route to the music industry, and Bolden uses critical methods from scholarship on African American poetry to illuminate Davis’s vocal technique. 

This concluding chapter focuses on Herukhuti's explanation of why he founded the Black Funk Center. His states that black people can and do create revolutionary sexual cultures that can become the foundation for centers of sexual health, well-being, and decolonization. Black communities need more sexual cultural centers like Black Funk, but since sexuality and eroticism tend to be ignored, there are few political ideologies or organizations that see such centers as a part of black revolutionary movements. By exploring spaces and sites where narratives and performances of the body provocatively intersect with expressions of interior movement, the chapter argues that the need for such centers has already been articulated elsewhere—in profane sites of memory.

Chapter 4 charts the fragmentation and diversification of northern soul during the late 1970s. It illustrates the tensions and schisms that were created in the later years of northern soul’s pre-eminence. Such fragmentation is explored through a number of themes; musical preferences (‘oldies’ and ‘newies’), factionalism between DJs and fans, new genres and styles in black music, the changing aspirations and tastes of consumers, the rise of rival venues and the increasing popularity of ‘all-dayers’. At the heart of these tensions was a debate which ran to the core of what northern soul was, or had become. There is a detailed examination of the challenges posed by shifts in soul music styles such as New York disco and jazz funk. The chapter draws on a range of primary sources in making sense of the politics of the dance floor in clubs such as Wigan Casino, Blackpool Mecca and Cleethorpes Pier.

As rapid economic changes hit Chicago, black musicians continued to create new work and gain wider audiences throughout the 1970s. Deindustrialization harmed the neighborhoods that had been home to an earlier generation of musicians, but younger artists and music media took advantage of new opportunities, including FM radio frequency. Funk performers, like Daryl “Captain Sky” Cameron, drew on a mix of idioms. A few artists who developed their craft earlier in Chicago helped create bestselling albums in the 1970s, such as Earth, Wind and Fire and The Emotions. Others, like Linda Clifford, recorded disco. This chapter also looks at the racial overtones of the subsequent anti-disco backlash in Chicago and the development of another form of dance music, known as house. The chapter concludes with an account of how musicians worked for Harold Washington’s mayoral election in 1983.

Challenging accounts of black gender and sexuality that equate radicalism with misogynistic and patriarchal values, this chapter looks to the subversive cinema and performance art of the 1960s for prefigurations of the gender and sex nonconformity of today. Placing in counterpoint the theater and cinema of Melvin van Peebles and the performance and conceptual art of Adrian Piper, this chapter foregrounds the role of a funk epistemology in both cases. Contemporary queer and transgender art and aesthetics can only gain, this chapter argues, by acknowledging these works as sources of fabulation.

This chapter explores what most underscored the need for jazz and hard bop to change: basically a sameness in the way that the musicians were playing (so that they merely followed the giants that nourished bebop and hard bop by innovation). True, jazz players could crop up, but unless they did more than play the same old blues and the same old funk, jazz would be unable to develop as a means of expression comparable to the machine of raw energy that it was in previous years. Yes, there were exceptions. Ornette Coleman, for example, sizzled in a scene that was slowly fading and introduced new energy unseen since bebop. Coleman was hailed by many as a genius, because in spite of the doubts raised against his technical ability, he was always able to churn out music that was fresh. This chapter juxtaposes these two different scenes, which introduced a tension that allowed hard bop to linger for longer, but, however was unable to push it to new heights.

The development of percussion of Afro-Cuban origin in Latin jazz and other U.S. music such as pop and funk after 1950 depends on the presence of several percussionists in addition to Mongo Santamaría. Among several important Cuban drummers, four stand out. This chapter recounts the percussion exploits of these four individuals who, together with Mongo, laid the rhythmic basis for the growth and development of Latin jazz between 1950 and 1990: Armando Peraza; Patato Valdés; Francisco Aguabella; and Cándido Camero. Each of them possesses very distinct and personal characteristics as a drummer, and all reached their pinnacle of success and visibility in different ways, in different U.S. cities, and, to a certain extent, in different periods. Taken together, these individuals provided a sound foundation for the continued expansion of that hybrid of hybrids, Latin jazz.

In this chapter, I focus on a youth group that since the mid-2000s has been reshuffling public spaces. The event examined here takes place in the city’s vast poor peripheries. The first part of the chapter locates music within sound-politics. I consider the spread of street parties known as “pancadões,” or “big thumps,” a term that alludes to the loudness. By following the pancadão controversy, I am interested in understanding the disposition of specific groups as they try to either maintain or eliminate this sound from the streets. In the final section, we are going to examine the actors deployed by groups interested in disarticulating the pancadão in the name of public security, good taste, family values, and quality of life.

Christine L. Willis and Varinder K. Aggarwal at the University of Bristol have developed (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2012, 51, 12444) a procedure for the diastereodivergent synthesis of trisubstituted alkenes via the protodeboronation of allylic boronates, such as in the conversion of 1 to either 2 or 3. An alternative approach to the stereoselective synthesis of trisubstituted alkenes involving the reduction of the allylic C–O bond of cyclic allylic ethers (e.g., 4 to 5) was reported (Chem. Commun. 2012, 48, 7844) by Jon T. Njardarson at the University of Arizona. A novel synthesis of allylamines was developed (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2012, 134, 20613) by Hanmin Huang at the Chinese Academy of Sciences with the Pd(II)-catalyzed vinylation of styrenes with aminals (e.g. 6 + 7 to 8). Eun Jin Cho at Hanyang University showed (J. Org. Chem. 2012, 77, 11383) that alkenes such as 9 could be trifluoromethylated with iodotrifluoromethane under visible light photoredox catalysis. David A. Nicewicz at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill developed (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2012, 134, 18577) a photoredox procedure for the anti-Markovnikov hydroetherification of alkenols such as 11, using the acridinium salt 12 in the presence of phenylmalononitrile (13). A unique example of “catalysis through temporary intramolecularity” was reported (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2012, 134, 16571) by André M. Beauchemin at the University of Ottawa with the formaldehyde-catalyzed Cope-type hydroamination of allyl amine 15 to produce the diamine 16. A free radical hydrofluorination of unactivated alkenes, including those bearing complex functionality such as 17, was developed (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2012, 134, 13588) by Dale L. Boger at Scripps, La Jolla. Jennifer M. Schomaker at the University of Wisconsin at Madison reported (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2012, 134, 16131) the copper-catalyzed conversion of bromostyrene 19 to 20 in what was termed an activating group recycling strategy. A rhodium complex 23 that incorporates a new chiral cyclopentadienyl ligand was developed (Science 2012, 338, 504) by Nicolai Cramer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and was shown to promote the enantioselective merger of hydroxamic acid derivative 21 and styrene 22 to produce 24.

Frank Glorius of the Universität Münster devised (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2011, 50, 12626) a catalyst for the enantioselective acylation of a cyclopropene 1 to the ketone 3. Geum-Sook Hwang of Chungnam National University and Do Hyun Ryu of Sungkyunkwan University effected (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2011, 133, 20708) the enantioselective addition of the diazo ester 5 to an α,β-unsaturated aldehyde 4 to give the cyclopropane 6. We showed (J. Org. Chem. 2011, 76, 7614) that face-selective allylation of an α-iodo enone 7 followed by Suzuki coupling and oxy-Cope rearrangement delivered the cyclopentanone 9. Karl Anker Jørgensen of Aarhus University combined (Org. Lett. 2011, 13, 4790) two organocatalysts to effect the addition of 11 to an α,β-unsaturated aldehyde 10, leading to the cyclopentenone 12. Tomislav Rovis of Colorado State University also used (Chem. Sci. 2011, 2, 1835) two organocatalysts to condense 13 with 14 to give the cyclopentanone 15. Gregory C. Fu, now at CalTech, found (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2011, 133, 12293) that both enantiomers of the racemic allene 16 combined with 17 to give the cyclopentene 18 in high ee. Piotr Kwiatkowski of the University of Warsaw found (Org. Lett. 2011, 13, 3624) that under elevated pressure (8–10 kbar), enantioselective conjugate addition of nitromethane proceeded well even with a β-substituted cyclohexenone 19. Marco Bella of the Università di Roma observed (Adv. Synth. Catal. 2011, 353, 2648) remarkable diastereoselectivity in the addition of the aldehyde 22 to an activated acceptor 21. Following the procedure of List, Jiong Yang of Texas A&M University cyclized (Org. Lett. 2011, 13, 5696) 24 to 25 in high ee. Bor-Cherng Hong of the National Chung Cheng University described (Synthesis 2011, 1887) the double Michael combination of 26 with 27 to give 28 in high ee. Observing a secondary 13C isotope effect only at the β-carbon of 30, Li Deng of Brandeis University concluded (Chem. Sci. 2011, 2, 1940) that the addition to 29 was stepwise, not concerted. In contrast, the cyclization of 32 to 33 reported (Org. Lett. 2011, 13, 3932) by Tadeusz F. Molinski of the University of California San Diego likely was concerted.

A central challenge in the synthesis of the antiangiogenic cortistatin A 3 is the stereocontrolled assembly of the cycloheptene ring. Shuji Yamashita and Masahiro Hirama of Tohoku University solved (J. Org. Chem. 2011, 76, 2408) this problem by the addition of the intermediate radical from the reduction of 1 in an intramolecular sense to the cyclohexenone of 1 to give 2. The starting point for the synthesis was the enantiomerically enriched enone 4, prepared from the Hajos-Parrish ketone. Alkylation gave 6, which was reduced, after some experimentation, selectively to the trans-fused ketone 7. Pd-mediated oxidation of the silyl enol ether derived from 7 gave the enone, which was homologated to the aldehyde 8 by way of the corresponding enol triflate. Condensation with dihydroresorcinol 9 delivered the triene 10, which was carried on the iodide 1. Unexpectedly, 1 readily epimerized at the indicated stereocenter, presumably by way of an equilibrating Claisen rearrangement. Fortunately, when the solid iodide was maintained at-30oC for 12 h, the desired diastereomer became dominant. The free radical reduction then proceeded smoothly to give 2. To introduce the pendant isoquinoline of the natural product, 2 was protected and oxidized to 11. Reduction of the thiocarbamate derived from the tertiary alcohol 13, with H atom transfer to the more open face of the intermediate free radical, then delivered 14. To oxidize 14 to the enone 15, the ketone was deprotonated, then exposed to the Mukaiyama reagent 15. Nucleophilic epoxidation followed by reduction, following the Nicolaou precedent, then set the stage for selective opening with dimethylamine, to complete the synthesis of (+)-cortistatin A 3.