The roots of the groove of African American pop music, explained

There’s a sound that reverberates through the history of African American music, according to UC Berkeley historian and lecturer Rickey Vincent. Writing it down, as a drawn out “whooooooo,” hardly captures the emotion or shiver that it elicits in listeners.

“That’s the ecstatic,” explains Vincent. “That’s the kind of transcendence that a lot of people put on a record so that they can reach that, or reach for that.”

This high note can be heard sung by blues singer Robert Johnson in his 1937 song “Me and the Devil,” and as Vincent notes, it can be traced through a lineage of African American singers, like Little Richard, James Brown and Prince, whose own ecstatic notes punctuate his funky grooves.

Vincent teaches a course called African American Music and U.S. Popular Culture and is the author of a book on the development and long-lasting reverberations of funk music, which laid the foundation for early hip-hop. His course touches on the lasting effects of music from artists like Johnson, Nina Simone, rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and the influential 1960 recording “Drums of Passion” by Nigerian drummer Olatunji. In this video from UC Berkeley’s Academic Review series, which asks Berkeley faculty and staff to break down subjects through their scholarly expertise, he captures what made each of these artists special, and how songs from each continue to influence current pop music.

“What you’re listening to today, it may feel new, but it’s not new,” says Vincent. 

Case in point: that infectious drum sample that Nicki Minaj is spitting rhymes over on Fergie’s “You Already Know?” That’s a slice of a classic track from the early 1980s by MC Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock called “It Takes Two,” which is itself a loop from a 1970’s James Brown number with singer Lyn Collins called “Think.”

“Somebody is going to loop that in the 2030s,” says Vincent. “All of this music is connected. The attitude, the groove, the passion and the immediate moment — and yet the roots of the groove are all tied together.”

Watch more Academic Review videos here, to see how Berkeley experts unpack the deeper meaning of TV and film scenes, music, political speech and even AI-generated deepfakes.