FUNKY DRUMMER AIN'T GOT NO FEAR

A behind the scenes look at my latest AI assisted music video

It’s been a while. For those who still subscribe, sorry and thank you. (Though I don’t charge so I don’t feel that bad). This is a piece I wrote at the request of the company that reps me as a film editor to the advertising community. Roam Editorial. It’s about a music video I recently did for my own band Miller & Sloan. “Funky Drummer Ain’t Got No Fear”. Quite the navel gaze, yes. But it also explains both my personal history with music as well as film. Plus I wax existential about our new alien overlords otherwise known as AI. Enjoy. (Or don’t. Please comment! I love a good back & forth).

The year is 1978. I'm 15, maybe 16 years old. I'm in a band called "Nomad". The leader's name backwards. Damon.  We're an instrumental group. A six piece.  Three horns, bass, drums and me on guitar. So far our only gigs were busking in Subway. Usually the West Side IRT. (Known as the 1,2, 3 today).  Mostly at Penn Station.  I still walk by the spot we use to play at. A truly "diverse" group.  Black, white, Puerto Rican, everybody just a freakin', as we used to say.  

But this particular night was our first real gig.  A dance at JFK High School in the Bronx.  I'd only been to my friend Neil's house in Riverdale. But this was the real Bronx. I think we started with our standard cover. "Pick Up The Pieces" originally done by the platinum group Average White Band.  Maybe it was Sir Duke by Stevie Wonder.  But at some point we did one of our few originals.  A jam called "King Of The Disco Grapefruit".  Why grapefruit?  I still don't know. It was a good R&B groove. But the dance floor got a little dead since no one knew it.

Then Steve, the drummer, went into a break and Lonney, our trombone player, leaned down into his horn mic. Something I'd never seen him do in rehearsal.  He basically screamed into the mic "Hear the drummer get wicked!!!!!!!!!"

The crowd went absolutely crazy.  I mean batshit crazy.  

It was new to me of course. A white kid from the Upper West Side. And my buddy Blake on bass, who lived in my building. We both went to the High School of Music & Art in Harlem.  (As art students even though we loved music).  We liked everything. Rock, punk, disco even. And we loved the R&B standards that we played and learned with Nomad.  But Lonney screaming in the mic, not singing, was what the crowd wanted. He and the other Bronx members of the band knew what he was doing.  He was ..... rapping.

This was before Grand Master and before the Sugar Hill Gang. Or at least before I heard of those groups. But from that point on, everything was different.  

Blake & I went on to form a "funk" band with my brothers Mike & Dan in the early 80's, with the unfortunate name Miller Miller Miller & Sloan. We became staples on the downtown club scene.  CBGB's, Mudd Club, Irving Plaza etc.  It was a crazy time.  Post punk, early hip hop.  The city was scary but it was also a place where, at least creatively, you felt anything could happen.  We opened for the Clash at Bonds.  Doing our own songs and covers like "Respect" by Aretha Franklin. Grand Master Flash opened for the Clash the night before us, legend has it.

Of course it all got co-opted and exploited and segregated. But for a short time, right before the Beastie Boys got big, there were bands like us and Nomad. With names like Urban Blight, The Nitecaps, The Pedantiks. Where punk, funk and this new thing called "rap" all mixed together. A true melting pot.

During Covid I reunited with my old Miller & Nomad bass player Blake Sloan, who now is a programmer in LA. We started trading tracks back & forth which turned into a reunited version of the band with my brothers, now simply called Miller & Sloan.

The term "Funky Drummer" comes from a James Brown record. That drum break in that song, by the late Clyde Stubblefield became a hip hop staple. Sampled over and over.  I don't use that sample on this track, but that's where the term comes from.  And as sampling became bigger it became a problem for record companies. 

My older brother Dan went on to become an audio engineer and actually worked on the legendary old school hip hop classic "Three Feet High & Rising" by De La Soul. That record had so many "samples" that the record company didn't know what to do, so they just released it. There was no structure for licensing so many "bits" from other records, which all hip hop rap artists did. Wether it was by vinyl DJ or sampling in the studio. In fact, Three Feet High & Rising faced so many legal problems from those samples, it only got released on streaming services this past year for the first time.  It took over 40 years to clear all those samples!

I play real drums on this little homage to early hip hop. (There's one legal sample of drums in the middle, but again, not "funky drummer", just a loop on Logic Pro). But I in fact MIGHT be "visually" sampling drums and other images in this video.  It's hard to say!

Most of the images are made with the AI image program Midjourney. I know this is a controversial thing these days. Just like sampling was in hip hop. No, I didn't drag a drumset to the Brooklyn Bridge.  What I did do was find the perfect prompt that made the black & white images I want look authentically 1980's.  But with me in control.  "A broken piano in Coney Island, early 80's boardwalk, trash and graffiti everywhere".  Then I took these images and played further.  They got subways and even graffiti right. They needed some help with boom boxes and the proper metal basketball backboards. So I tweaked the images in Adobe a bit. 

Sometimes the AI just couldn't get what I wanted at all so I did take a couple of real drums around town and photographed them . Then I'd feed those images back  into the AI programs and say "make it more early 80's. More graffiti. More grit & grime".

In my humble opinion, working with AI is the same thing as what my brother did with De Le Soul in the studio and my friend Lonney did at that high school gig. And what the Sugar Hill gang did. And the Cold Crush Brothers. And Stetsasonic.  And Grand Master Flash and the Furious five.  All those kids, mostly from the Bronx, were taking old stuff and making it brand new. Not unlike what AI is doing now.

This video I made for Funky Drummer Ain't Got No Fear feels like what 1980's New York felt like to me at the time. It feels real. Which is both fascinating and scary.  But to me AI is just re-mixing. Sampling. DJ'ing. Like early Hip Hop.  And I think it can be beautiful.  We have to figure out how to pay the artists that these machines are "learning from". But like sampling and MP3 streaming I think we will.  Eventually.

And when we do, a new generation will pick up the mic and scream a 21st century version of "Hear the drummer get wicked!!!!"  And that kid, like the funky drummer, and like all the funky artists of the early 1980's in New York City, will have no fear.

Barney, March 2024