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Kae Sun shuns the nu funk tag


Schwa.

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Kae Sun is completely clueless as to who booked him. If I were an interviewer, i'd have researched this a lot better.

Kae Sun shuns the nu funk tag

BRAD WHEELER - Globe and Mail

February 21, 2008

Who's got the funk? Urban musician Kae Sun is booked to play Clinton's Tavern tomorrow, and although the show is part of a multi-venue nu funk festival, don't ask the Hamilton-based artist what exactly "nu funk" is. "In my opinion, funk is very much alive," says the 25-year-old Sun, who released his EP Ghost Town Prophecy last year. "You can hear it in elements of what hip hop artists and R & B artists do." And the term "nu funk?" "You'd have to ask the guy putting the festival together, but I think it's more of a marketing thing."

Funk music has always been a hybrid of sorts, a mix of soul, jazz and rhythm and blues, famously popularized by the likes of James Brown, Sly Stone and George Clinton, a crazy-great weird-haired pioneer who brings his Parliament-Funkadelic collective to the Phoenix on Monday. Sun, born and raised in Ghana, doesn't regard Clinton as a prime influence on his own music (a blend of spoken word, soul, reggae and spiritual rock), but does count funk-informed hip hop duo OutKast as heroes. As for other shapers - "all across the map" - Sun draws on Bob Marley, K-OS and the sly and lithe Curtis Mayfield. In sum, Sun's package is as hard to define succinctly as it is to describe "funk," a danceable music with more extensions than George Clinton's hair and just as freaky.

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I was pretty pissed to read this yesterday. uggh..

Kae Sun phone me today to explain...

... his side of the story is this:

He was completely clueless as to who booked him - he knew it as "Jay from Toronto" not NUFUNK.

He thought he was being asked if his sound was in the genre "NUFUNK" - he said he thought he was more hiphop.

Brad asked him - so do you think this is more of a marketing thing ? Kae Sun then said -yes maybe, you'd have to ask the guy putting the festival together.

words were kinda put in his mouth.

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to be fair...a person who isn't well versed in the sub genres and all these new fangled music names doesn't really know that nufunk festival is a festival put on by nufunk productions or whatever jay's calling his enterprise these days (way to go jay keep workin hard)....and could be mistaken for a festival entirely comprised of bands that play nufunk (why do i keep typing nufuck) music. i can see where the confusion came in....

kae sun is actually a very humble person and i don't think he'd intentionally diss any of the people who've helped him along the way to where he is.

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