Article - Dam-Funk delivers the sho-nuff uncut

Dam-Funk (pronounced dame-funk) is Damon Riddick, a thirtysomething Los Angelino whose love for the funk permeates his platelets. “During high school I liked a lot of music, but I realized that funk was what ran through my veins,” he says. “The other stuff was just kind of in my head.”

Raised in gangland Pasadena, he was able to avoid getting caught up in any nonsense by devoting his waking hours to the groove. His granddad and father were musicians, and straight out of high school he won gigs as a session keyboard player and later recorded with such West Coast rappers as Mack 10 and MC Eiht. His various day jobs included piloting a truck for the Red Cross; he’d make his music at night, and during the day would study the recordings on his boom box while driving around delivering blood. “Some of these trucks didn’t have a radio, but that wouldn’t stop me,” he says.

His 2009 Stones Throw debut Toeachizown is funk of the most unadulterated kind, a surprisingly focused exploration of love, culture and rear-end gyration. (The album is a five-volume LP set that will run you a cool 50 bucks, although it’s also available as a double CD for a more manageable $17.)

Riddick is almost single-handedly attempting to usher in a new era of funk, one that feels a lot like the old one, eschewing modern permutations like chillwave in favor of the sounds of folks like Prince and Roger Troutman. Though Riddick’s hairstyle is borrowed from Super Fly and he’s not afraid to play the talk box or the keytar, he insists there’s nothing ironic about what he’s doing.

“People used to see funk like a Pepsi commercial with people wearing platforms and looking silly, but I consider my music a continuation of what got forgotten along the way,” he says, adding that there’s more to the black experience than hip-hop, jazz and house. “My music features the soundscapes of where I’m from. I could easily make Lil Wayne-style beats – trust me, I could – but I want to sound like Damon. I wanna sound like me.”