Funk rap
| G-funk | |
|---|---|
| Stylistic origins | |
| Cultural origins | Late 1980s – early 1990s, Los Angeles, California, United States |
| Typical instruments | |
| Other topics | |
G-funk, or gangsta-funk, is a subgenre of hip hop music that emerged from West Coast gangsta rap in the early 1990s.
G-funk (which uses funk with an artificially altered tempo) incorporates multi-layered and melodic synthesizers, slow hypnotic grooves, a deep bass, background female vocals, the extensive sampling of P-Funk tunes, and a high-pitched portamento saw wave synthesizer lead. The lyrical content depended on the artist and could consist of sex, drugs, violence, vandalism and women, but also of love for a city, love for friends and relaxing words. There was also a slurred “lazy” or "smooth" way of rapping in order to clarify words and stay in rhythmic cadence.
Unlike other earlier rap acts that also utilized funk samples (such as EPMD and The Bomb Squad), G-funk often utilized fewer, unaltered samples per song. Music theorist Adam Krims has described G-funk as "a style of generally West Coast rap whose musical tracks tend to deploy live instrumentation, heavy on bass and keyboards, with minimal (sometimes no) sampling and often highly conventional harmonic progressions and harmonies".Dr. Dre, a pioneer of the G-funk genre, normally uses live musicians to replay the original music of sampled records. This enabled him to produce music that had his own sounds, rather than a direct copy of the sample.
G-funk, given its name by Laylaw from Lawhouse Production, became a very popular genre of hip hop in the 1990s. Although G-funk originated in Los Angeles, the subgenre drew a large amount of influence from the earlier Bay Area-based sound known as Mobb music of the mid- to late 1980s, pioneered by Oakland rappers like Too Short & E-40. Too Short had experimented with looping sounds from classic P-Funk records over bass-heavy tracks during this period. However, unlike Bay Area Mobb music, Southern California-born G-funk used more portamento synthesizers and less live instrumentation. Too Short's lazy, drawl-heavy delivery was also a major influence on later G-funk rappers like Snoop Dogg.
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