7 Days of Funk 7 Days of Funk (Stones Throw Records) ***
When Snoop Dogg (aka Calvin Broadus, aka Snoop Lion, aka Snoopzilla) says he’s releasing an album with the new-funk maestro Dam-Funk, expectations are going to rocket sky-high. The G-Funk proponent, in fact, grew up on P-Funk, the cosmic, psychedelic funk rock of George Clinton’s behemoth of a band, Parliament Funkadelic. As much a movement as a group, Parliament had a message: “One nation under a groove” that they sang over the agile, reverberant bass of Bootsy Collins. And for all of Snoop’s immense hip-hop career (and his strange reggae interlude, with this year’s Reincarnated), there is no doubt that the funk is in his soul.
He and Dam-Funk lay their cards on the table early: the first song, Hit Da Pavement, was the first they recorded together and is the most driving of the otherwise horizontally laid-back record, and while it feels almost like a return to his Doggystyle G-funk days, it is P-Funk that is referenced, declaiming a mission “to find the funk and reconnect the Mothership”. In the first single, too, Faden Away, Snoop is dubbed “Snoopy Collins”.
To this end, Snoop has a new moniker – Snoopzilla, a tribute to Collins’s sometime alias Bootzilla. Yet this short album is no rehash of Parliament Funkadelic’s back catalogue.
In fact, at just seven songs and 34 minutes, it’s a tight production onto which only three or four sprawling P-Funk jams could have squeezed. And despite Snoopzilla’s homage to Collins, the bass lines are not of the strong, driving, guitar variety, but are super-deep West Coast hip-hop riffs.
Sonically, this is closer to the warped, synthesised funk of the early 1980s – more Rick James or Evelyn King keytar wobbles than George Clinton’s orchestrated madness. Inevitably, then, it lacks some of the chaotic, emotional charge and shocking, purposeful lyrics of the Mothership – there is no room for a Maggot Brain guitar solo here; instead, musings on love and parties are repeated through the songs – most relentlessly on 1 Question, which owes something to Andre 3000’s vocal style.
This is, though, a modern take on funk, not a pastiche: it’s a 34-minute chilled-out groove, R&B-smooth and a labour of love.
And for all its languid, Doggystyle swagger, Snoop’s mind is not on his money here: it’s on the sheer, unbeatable pleasure of making funky music with a fellow funkster.
