Last Call: Funky President
Carnegie, M. D.
"Last Call: Funky President" by M.D. Carnegie IT SEEMS LIKE AGES AGO, doesn't it, that Bill Clinton said his mission was to get the American people "to get out of their funk." In...
...And it's not funk...
...My last day there was Halloween, on which the RNC holds an annual party during office hours for underprivileged kids...
...Then Clinton—who'd made the remark coming back from a California trip to raise funds for his re-election campaign—panicked...
...He sings, "Ah need ta be the guv'nah / Ah NEED ta be the GUV'NAH...
...Rooting about his musty dictionaries, Safire missed one shade of the word's meaning...
...This usage carried yet another of funk's varied meanings, one that Safire did get: smelly...
...Sounds like JB was presaging the rise of Bill Clinton...
...For TAS's many wonderful readers above the cultural divide, funk is a distinctive style of black music that grew out of the soul music of the 1960's...
...In any case, Safire wouldn't have found out about funk rummaging through Francis Grose's 1698 Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue...
...In a little-used drawer I found a rubber mask of Bush, put it on, and went strolling about the building...
...82 January 1996 • The American Spectator...
...It must have been an early source of political inspiration for Bill...
...It was also Clinton who occasioned my only pleasant moment during a brief stint at the Republican National Committee...
...Those soldiers are about to become immersed in an age-old conflict, stepping into something very deep, indeed...
...The American people might think he thought something they didn't want their president thinking...
...The song was released at Christmastime 1974, in the aftermath of Nixon's resignation, but Brown was actually referring to Jerry Ford —"Taxes keep goin' up / Changed from a glass / Now I drink from a paper cup / . . We got a brand new funky president...
...Corridor lights are turned out, candy is distributed, and staffers are encouraged to make nice with the little shavers...
...That's more like it, but a bit long...
...The press pounced on him with ominous reminders of Jimmy Carter's "malaise" speech...
...THE MOST PREPOSTEROUS omission in Safire's column was even passing reference to what "funk" means to any sentient American under the age of 4o...
...THERE'S NO WAY he could have known, then, that one of the standard reference songs in the funk discography is James Brown's "Funky President...
...At press time he is very stupidly sending our young men off to Christmas in Bosnia...
...Actually repositioning is a bit mild to describe the phenomenon: In 1984, Orwell described Big Brother's "need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of the facts...
...I SUSPECT THE KID'S CONFUSION was more wishful thinking than anything...
...There's even a little bit at the end in which James starts talking about "changing things...
...Taking more and more taxes out of people's pockets...
...While he correctly noted that funk can mean "to smoke," it also means "to blow smoke"—an apt enough term for the First Bubba's incessant repositioning...
...Well certainly it was from the perspective of public relations and spin control...
...if you have to ask," as both Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong are reputed to have said about jazz, "you'll never know...
...It was George who first gave Washington the nickname Chocolate City, and who standardized the measurement of funk in the late 1970's: if something was very funky, it wasn't high or loud or wide or long, it was deep — "Not just knee deep, she was to-ta-LEE deep," as he put it...
...I came up to a little boy, extended my hand, and his eyes grew as wide as half-dollars: "Wow," he said with great excitement, "you're George Clinton...
...Few felt like doing so...
...the mood at the RNC then was a sour one, with Bill having knocked George Bush out of the White House the winter before...
...In fact it's only been a few months, but that's the equivalent of a million light years in the Clinton fully adjustable presidency...
...The president had misspoken—"funk was a poor choice of words...
...So, in the blink of a news cycle, he un-thought it...
...THE OTHER PRIME PROGENITOR of funk music was George Clinton...
...It was only a matter of days before he was saying that he hadn't been saying that we were in the funk he'd said we were in before...
...For economy and style, let's just say: Bill's the Funky President...
...The only way to do it...
...Pioneered by the likes of James Brown and George Clinton (no relation), funk is characterized by a medium-tempo beat and a groove driven by the bass...
...Of course, describing music is ultimately a futile endeavor...
...I'd rather have the composer of "Uncle Jam Wants You" in the White House than the other Clinton...
...IT NEVER TAKES MUCH to tempt a pedant into showing you what he doesn't know...
...You may occasionally see him now hawking Apple Computers on television, his hair an explosion of multi-colored braids and his voice as drawn out and gravelly as Claus von Bfflow's driveway...
...William Safire used the funk flap as an occasion to treat readers of his "On Language" column to a disquisition on the origins of the word...
...LAST CALL by M. D. Carnegie "taboo 44w, L' Funky President IT SEEMS LIKE AGES AGO, doesn't it, that Bill Clinton said his mission was to get the American people "to get out of their funk...
Vol. 29 • January 1996 • No. 1
