Chaka Khan - Funk This
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Music CD Cover
Artist: Chaka KhanEdition: Music CD
Format: Enhanced
CD Release Date: 2007-09-25
Music Label: Strategic Marketing
Soundtracks:
- Back In The Day
- Foolish Fool
- One For All Time
- Angel
- Will You Love Me?
- Castles Made Of Sand
- Disrespectful featuring Mary J Blige
- Sign 'O' The Times
- Pack'd My Bags/You Got The Love featuring Tony Maiden
- Ladies' Man
- You Belong To Me featuring Michael McDonald
- Hail To The Wrong
- Super Life
Free Music Notes for Funk This
Free Music Review: This is the funk-soul siren's creative rebirth.
Hit: 4 Stars
Chaka makes her best and funkiest album for over two decades, and her powerful voice -- that first hit the airwaves with Chicago funk band Rufus in the 1970s and punched out the mighty "Ain't Nobody" and "I'm Every Woman" in the 1980s-- on this recording shines throughout.
"Funk This", which debuted at number 15 on America's top 200 album chart - her highest chart position since her first solo album in 1978 peaked at number 12 - is a return to Khan's purity.
Recorded in analogue, it's how she sounded before the "I Feel for You"-style disco anthems of the '80s.
The album opens with an autobiographical song she co-wrote with Terry Lewis. Over the slap-wristflick of retro-funk, Chaka recalls growing up fast in "Chi-town" where her "Momma was strict about them kids".
The vocals are tight and scratchy-raw. They capture the pent-up frustrations of a young girl whose curfew meant she was "Missing the funk of the night".
The mid tempo dancer "Back In The Day" has that Rufus sound to it, and that is also evident in the covers of two Rufus classics "Pack'd My Bags/You Got The love" featuring Tony Maiden.
The funky mid tempo dancers "Superlife" , "Sign Of The Times" and "Hail To The Wrong" keep up the pace, whilst the melodic mid tempo floater "One For All Time" is also classy.
Most of Khan's musical heroes are women: she's particularly effusive on the subject of her friend Joni Mitchell, who she says is "a genius and always just a beat away from funk." The new album features a cover of Mitchell's "Ladies' Man", on which Khan pours the ache of personal experience into lines such as: "Couldn't you just love me like you love cocaine?"
The beat ballads "Angel" and the raunchy version of "Foolish Fool" are also good. On "Angel", Chaka works through of her own drug use. "Troubled little angel," she sings "inconsistent flying blind most of the time/ Drama Queen/ Preening and untangling the feathers in her wings/ Captured by her dreams desperately she sings".
"Funk This" is a mixture of originals and covers of some of the best Rhythm and Blues, Funk, Blues, and Soul music from the past thirty to forty years.
One of the songs to show off her delicacy of touch is her cover of the Jimi Hendrix's "Castles Made Of Sand". A mid-tempo song about the impermanence of dreams and the dangers of living in a fantasy world, where Ms. Khan utilizes her voice to help generate a mood appropriate to the song.
This song is also a good example of her ability to put the song ahead of her ego instead of making it about her and her talents. While younger, less mature singers will look for any excuse to unload pyrotechnics and show off their abilities, Chaka is content to let the mood of the song dictate her performance. Listening to her duet with up- and-coming powerhouse singer Mary J. Blige on the most exciting track of the album "Disrespectful" that difference is made perfectly clear. The song is a Blige composition.
"It's the kind of song two women can really sing together," says Khan, who admits that when she listens to the track now she can hardly tell where her voice ends and the younger singer's begins.
You certainly wouldn't want to be the man on the receiving end of this duo. As the jerky beat smacks you round the face, Blige and Khan take total control of the song and the relationship it describes. "You can't make me lose my mind," they roar. "I'm too strong for you".
Also amazing is Chaka's versatility as a singer as demonstrated by the range of material that "Funk This" has to offer : from the full throttle Funk of the opening track "Back In The Day" to the ballad "Angel".
She shows that slowing the pace down does nothing to detract from her sincerity as a singer.
Too often people with strong voices become stentorian when faced with a ballad and equate emotion with loudness and straining for the upper regions of the scale.
Music icons like Chaka Khan are often stifled by the pressures of delivering a successful album to their fans.
"Funk This" is an album for all skeptics.
Through the preparation for this album, Chaka has admitted that she has "been on a little journey in the last few years".
Sometimes the path to re-discovery leads us back to where originally we began. Chaka Khan's "Funk This" reminds us why we fell in love with her over 30 years ago.
The reason is because she's hopelessly...FUNKY !
Funk This Poster
The first track off Chaka Khan's first album since 2004's Classikhan unspools the vibe she's going for instantly--in the space of a single boing-y guitar lick--and a little deeper in, the lyrics seal the deal: "Those very sounds floating in and out of my head/Created the magic that sealed my fate," she hollers in the don't-hold-back style that's made her an icon. We get the picture--Funk This is Chaka reflecting on three decades of full-bodied, fevered-up soul music and examining how it is she got to be so funkalicious in the first place. Where a lot of legends retrace their backstories and end up with albums that sound warmed over, though, Chaka forges forward (and back) with fresh and fiery swagger; you wouldn't want to handle any of these 13 songs without an oven mitt. That's not to say they aren't familiar. In addition to several just-written songs (the pretty, provocative "Angel," the heartfelt "One for All Times," and the pointedly honest "Will You Love Me"), Chaka covers Prince's "Sign o' the Times," Joni Mitchell's "Ladies Man," and Jimi Hendrix's "Castles Made of Sand," and she also twists a couple of songs she originally recorded with Rufus, "Pack'd My Bags" and "You Got the Love," into a juiced-up medley. Carly Simon's "You Belong to Me" gets the cover treatment in a likable duet with Michael McDonald, but it's another duet that earns this disc five stars for sizzle: "Disrespectful," written by Mary J. Blige and sung with her, busts out glorious grit and gut-level soul, the kind that'll leave listeners quoting Chaka in her "I'm Every Woman" phase: "Whoa, whoa, whoa-oh." --Tammy La GorceChaka Khan's Funk This showcases some of her powerful vocals and most compellings songs to date. In perfect form, Chaka has recorded both new material and covers of some tracks that are near and dear to her heart. This incredible funk album takes us back to Chaka's roots, with much of the feel and instrumentation used in her Rufus days. Includes guest artists Mary J. Blige, Michael McDonald and original Rufus member Tony Maiden.
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