Funkify Your Life: The Meters Anthology [Import, Best of]

There is so much butter and cream on this comp it just makes me weak in the knees. Do yourself a favor and learn what hip hop producers have known for about a generation or so- The Meter's are rhythm incarnate!

The first CD makes this worth it alone- you get damn near all The Meter's hits from the Josie years! Cd 1 has 26 tracks of their early material, all their top ten R&B hits from 1967- 69, and quite a few more. Look-ka-py py, Ease Back, Cissy Strut and Sophisticated Cissy among them. I mean c'mon- 26 tracks on THE FIRST CD ALONE!!!!

CD 2 does less for me, but gives a good display of The meter's output for Warner/Reprise. This was a time period that saw the band go through some changes and also play as the opening band for The Rolling Stones' 1975-76 tours. On these tracks Cyril neville (Art's brother) replaces Zigaboo on drums and it shows, I think... The material here consists of longer cuts and more diverse styles, ultimately I prefer the Josie material, but you should check it all out and make up your own mind...

Over 45 tracks of the kind of funk usually reserved for immortals and denizens of the lower planes of funky good times. For about 30 bucks that's like 66 cents per cut. Brother please. If you buy 1 'Best Of,' retrospective set this year- make it this one. Then go get the JB's 'Funky Good Time.' Now you've got a party.

A reasonable approximation of the sound of Alvin Toussaint's studio and Neville Brothers/Wild Tchoupitoulas backing band the Meters is much-better-known than the band itself, on account of a '90s stand-up comedy bit recounting relatively recent experiences; but there's nothing too funny about the musical skills of this New Orleans group, due to drummer Ziggy Modeliste's genuinely revolutionary approach to musical time. The late '60s and early '70s featured much speculation about "the one", that element of drumming lending unity to a group (although James Brown's saying "funk is on the one" was something of a piece with most of his efforts).

But with Modeliste you get the one you get, and if this is more "instructive" than contemporaneous experiments in jazz there may be strings attached: this is music which was not designed for the use it was put to (as a blueprint for "incidental" music recorded by other groups) and as a result the actual "tenor" of the cuts handsomely collected here by Rhino is worth considering in light of trends in contemporary music. Whatever has come from this, it is not music people have been "going back" to: and whether this is due to mere fashion, technical difficulty, or a more fundamental disconnect between the cultural sphere and its traditional "constraints" is a question which permits of formulation. Important music for "unimportant" occasions.