A traditional history of rock music divides up the genre into chronologically discrete eras, the fifties, the sixties and the seventies. Due to its convoluted influence streams, black popular music, especially funk must be looked at differently. Following on from the narrowly defined funk of James Brown, the second-wave of funk groups such as Sly and the Family Stone and Funkadelic allied themselves to the late-sixties psychedelic rock movement. Essentially funk was black music and rock was white, and the pivotal figure that connected these two movements was Jimi Hendrix.

Contemporaneous soul albums were referencing jazz, which had by the early seventies, become wholly appropriated by white musicians. Funk became a tool for the re-appropriation of African and African American musical idioms. In doing so it set itself up as a parallel and an alternative to mainstream rock, a sort of black rock analogous to punk rock music's relationship to mainstream rock a generation later. Indeed the parallels between funk and punk run deep. Funkadelic, during their brief spell in Detroit were part of the same underground scene as some of the founding figures of punk namely, Iggy Pop and the MC5. Funk gave voice to the expression of urban alienation felt by many African-Americans in the seventies, but it also, at first through the use of funk in blaxploitation films, became a symbol of vice, funk being the soundtrack to both seventies cop-dramas and seventies pornography.

Ultimately, funk was subsumed by the disco movement, a genre that it had helped create. Yet funk was to reappear again in the eighties as the instrumental basis for hip-hop. The cross-section of this time period most closely addressed in this dissertation is the early seventies, and in particular 1971, looking at two seminal funk albums from this year, There's a Riot Goin' On by Sly and the Family Stone and Maggot Brain by Funkadelic. Both these albums demonstrate how the influence of the white musical mainstream enabled black musicians to re-appropriate genres of African-American music. Ultimately both albums show that the greatest contribution made by funk was that it gave voice to the consciousness of a people.