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Funk—whether taken as a musical genre, manner of playing, or hard-to-describe feeling of a piece—has been a musical force for half a century. Although the heyday of the style is now some 30 years in the past, funk still has an ability to affect listeners. While preparing this chapter, the author attended a New Year’s Eve celebration where the 70-year-old George Clinton, along with the current incarnation of his band Parliament-Funkadelic, performed for an audience of some 20 000. The members of the crowd bobbed heads, danced, shot hands rhythmically into the air, and sang along with the songs in a joyous uniting of young and old, black and white, celebrating the musical power of funk.

The question is not if funk is an expressive musical genre, but why it is. This chapter surveys relevant literature and builds on it with research hypotheses and a small amount of new data. The focus will be on rhythmic aspects of funk, although other musical parameters will be addressed briefly. A fundamental concept will be that of groove. Groove may be defined as “a quality of music that makes people tap their feet, rock their head, and get up and dance”(Madison 2006, p. 201),“the urge to move in response to music, combined with the positive affect associated with [music]”(Janata et al. 2011, p. 54), or “a kinetic framework for reliable prediction of events and time pattern communication”(Pressing 2002, p. 308), which may result from a musical structure having a “simultaneously dense and openly spaced fabric of rhythms”(Danielsen 2006, p. xi). Regardless of its definition, groove and the rhythmic phenomena that fuel it lie at the heart of funk.