What is Future Funk?

Retro-style culture cannot be called mainstream, but it still occupies its niche. The insane popularity of Gosling movies, games like "Yakuza", "Katana Zero" and "Hotline Miami" suggests that there is a demand for the aesthetics of the neon 80s. The situation is about the same with music.

Compositions in the retrowave or synthwave genre have long been recognized by the people for their atmospheric character and relative ease of execution. In the wake of the popularity of retrowave music, micro-genres similar to it began to be born. This article will be devoted to one of them – a genre called Future Funk.

What is Future Funk?

Future Funk is a genre of electronic music, which is a processing of old pop compositions that have not gained popularity, pop compositions wrapped in a special anime aesthetic. The style of anime plays an important role in this regard, since the genre mainly lives on the Internet in the form of various montages and clips on YouTube. Stills and animations from old-school anime of the 80s and 90s like "Sailor Moon", "Grendizer" or "Megazone 23", which complement the music, are simply called aesthetics or aesthetics in the community. For some compositions, there are several variants of different aesthetics.

Technically, Future Funk doesn't look too inventive, it's often just rhythmic remixes of popular music from previous years with the addition of a "cut-off" filter and synth tracks.

The main feature of Future Funk, which distinguishes it from similar genres, such as Vaporvawe, is that unpopular compositions of the Japanese or Korean pop scene are processed. The hieroglyphs in the track names act not only as an element of style, but also as the original title of the song. Future Funk always sounds rhythmic, incendiary and familiar. Although for performers of the genre, the main challenge is on the contrary to find the basis, that is, a track that almost no one has ever heard.

History

The very name Future funk literally means "funk of the future". But specifically, funk, popular in the 60s and 70s, has nothing in common with the musical direction. Rather, the fact that the very word "funk", or in Japanese "funk", sounds quite old-school and nostalgic, plays a role here. It is quite difficult to answer the question of why the genre exploits Asian aesthetics.

Perhaps the reason lies in its niche, and the entire audience, including the performers, are just fans of the old anime. It can also be assumed that the painted Japan in the eyes of the community is most vividly associated with the future, and the word Future is inserted in the name for a reason.

The first to start working in this genre is considered to be the American musician Skylar Spence or Saint Pepsi.

Prior to that, he wrote music in the Vaporvawe genre and in 2013 released the album "Hit Vibes", in which most of the tracks belonged to the then-new genre of Future Funk.

Future Funk today

Now Future Funk tracks can be easily found on the Internet. Music of this format almost does not go beyond the network, no concerts or thematic events are held on it. This is quite obvious, because in fact Future Funk is just a not too complicated remix of an existing song.  

  Even in its niche of electronic music, funk of the future is not very popular, mainly due to the fact that anime style is not to everyone's taste. There are several online radio stations on YouTube broadcasting music in this genre, and a whole mountain of clips with aesthetics. In this regard, the Artzie music channel stands out especially, but among all the compositions there you need to look for exactly those with hieroglyphs in the names. The most popular song in the genre is probably the composition ("Break") from the artist Lordsun, more than a dozen aesthetic options have been made for it.  

Future Funk is certainly not the most inventive and revolutionary genre. It sounds monotonous, and from the technical side, they don't put too much effort into it to admire the work done later. The funk of the future is well suited for walks, household chores or just nostalgia for the days when the grass was greener, games more difficult than "Ninja Gaiden" have not yet been invented, and only good anime was played on TV.

I took the article from here