Funk Is Its Own Reward with Lloyd Bradley

From 1968 to 1978; from ‘Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud’ to Off The Wall; from the Third Harlem Cultural Festival to the P-Funk Earth Tour: Funk Is Its Own Reward plots the journey of an African American cultural movement that was always about far more than simply music.

With roots in the poetry, art, theatre, intellectualism and jazz of the celebrated 1960s Black Arts Movement, and made possible by the shifts in thinking brought about by the Black Panthers, the rise of Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Black political involvement, funk was the Second Great Black Renaissance. 

By putting the music firmly in the context of the movement, Funk Is Its Own Reward drags a vibrant art form out from under the notion it only existed to help white people dance. It shines a light on the skill, experimentation, sense of community, humour, formal training, Black pride, self-celebration and intellectual and musical freedoms that went into it.

Join Lloyd Bradley, one of the UK’s leading Black music experts and cultural commentators, to uncover the happy accident that was the wah-wah pedal, how life in a hippie commune changed George Clinton, why Sesame Street was the funkiest programme on television, what Blaxploitation actually meant to its intended audience and where Earth Wind and Fire’s Maurice White first brushed up against the cosmic pyramid!