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That 2014 single from Bruno Mars went not “platinum” but “diamond” and remains the poster child for a renewed interest in the sound of funk that’s now half a decade strong. It’s no accident that the Frères Jonas hired some funky production for their comeback single following a six-year hiatus: They needed to ensure a hit.

Funk’s musical vocabulary can now be heard across genre and geography: in Hot 100 Billboard hits like this year’s summery anthem “Juice” by the rapper Lizzo, in the dance music of the Montreal producer Kaytranada, the breezy electropop of the Australian outfit Parcels, the Japanese city pop of Suchmos, the midtempo soulful EDM of London’s Jungle and the unclassifiable sonic mashups of Los Angeles-based acts like Anderson Paak and The Internet whose shows sell out hours after they’re announced.

The pull of the resurgence is so strong that Calvin Harris — who came to global fame in the same glossy, treble-driven house music space as DJs like Avicii in the early 2010s — switched up his sound and made “Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1,” arguably the album of the summer in 2017. The list of those featured on his Earth, Wind & Fire-inspired jams is a who’s-who of contemporary music: Ariana Grande, Pharrell, Migos, Frank Ocean, Katy Perry and John Legend, to name just a few.

“Juice,” which landed on Barack Obama’s most recent public summer playlist, uncoincidentally shares a groove, a guitar riff and a message of nonjudgmental love with Prince’s electrofunk hit “Kiss,” from the president’s school years in the ’80s. And today’s musicians are not just channeling the sound of funk; they are collaborating with the O.G. pioneers and exposing them to new audiences. George Clinton of Parliament-Funkadelic, for instance, lends his gravelly voice to the opening of Kendrick Lamar’s platinum album “To Pimp a Butterfly.”

For an inveterate funk fan, this has all been welcome news because funk — for a very long time — was decidedly uncool.

Growing up in the funkless desert that was most pop music in the 1990s, I had to endure the duller styles of the era — and stand by while my nemeses the Red Hot Chili Peppers desecrated Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground.” As a Jewish kid growing up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, I was in no position to be the arbiter of anyone’s funk bona fides. But that didn’t stop me from worshipping at the altar of the Ohio Players and Betty Davis or from bowing before the deep grooves and high drama of Parliament-Funkadelic.

Neologisms like “Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop” rolled off my tongue; my eighth-grade yearbook picture quotes “Mothership Connection,” the group’s essential 1975 album: “Put a glide in your stride, a dip in your hip and come on up to the Mothership.”

This didn’t make me the hippest kid in eighth grade, but I wasn’t alone. With friends Dave Harrington, Tash Neal and Brent Katz I formed a group called Funktion. We played cover songs at school talent shows, alongside our own originals (and we’re all playing together again today). I remember sneaking out to see Bernie Worrell, keyboardist for Parliament and the Talking Heads, and staying out so late that I was grounded for weeks. It was a small price to pay. I was a part of a coterie of funkateers, dedicated to the cause.

Dedicated at least until high school progressed and our funk obsession started to seem less and less socially acceptable in our admittedly limited social sphere. Though Sharon Jones, D’Angelo and Amy Winehouse embraced the sound during the 2000s, along with much of America I mostly missed these developments. G-funk had a moment before then, but had faded. And I had forsaken the genre in search of different scenes.

Now I can’t help feeling if I had stuck to my guns, I could have been as rich as Bruno Mars’s producer Mark Ronson. Jealousy aside, funk’s current omnipresence is inspiring. Of course, it had never really “left” after its 1970s heyday; it just slipped, chameleon-like, into other types of music. In that, the unique unpredictability of the genre, which oddly makes it so identifiable, is also key to its current pop success.

Prince, circa 1985. The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images Bootsy Collins, a funk bassist who played with both James Brown and Parliament-Funkadelic. Robert Knight Archive/Redferns Rick James performs onstage in 1983. Photo by Paul Natkin/Getty Images Bootsy Collins, a funk bassist who played with both James Brown and Parliament-Funkadelic. Robert Knight Archive/Redferns Prince, circa 1985. (top) The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images Rick James performs onstage in 1983. (right) Photo by Paul Natkin/Getty Images

There are no hard boundaries around funk. It’s more a constellation of audial markers: emphasis on low-end registers, looped grooves, intense syncopation, intricate horn lines, interlocking rhythms and melodic riffs. The pliable style merges easily with adjacent genres, sharing the rhythmic drive of disco, the fierce vocal delivery of soul and the simple chord structures and harmonies of pop. In its pop reincarnation, there are some records that would have felt quite at home in 1979. For others, funk is serving less as a standalone genre and more as an approach — an element that soups up the alchemy of a tune, like an extra bit of sugar or shot of espresso.

It all makes the sound an ideal genre for our heterodox musical present, one that seems to be heralding the “end of genre” as listeners and artists themselves have come to understand genre as something often as driven by confining, race-based labels as by musical technicalities. Funk’s loose vibe also matches a youth cultural moment that, in stark contrast to the larger political moment, is more at ease with multiracial friendship, romance and spaces; O.K. with people, sounds, customs a bit foreign to them at first.

[Want to hear more this funk renaissance? Listen to the playlist on Spotify.]

And the philosophy of funk equally fits the present and rightfully proud posture of people of color — who made the bones of not just American democracy but also American music. For the scholar Rickey Vincent, the music has always represented “a joy of self and a joy of life, particularly unassimilated, black, American life.” New Orleans’s Funky Butt Hall was an early touchstone, a venue for musicians and dancers to develop the first forms of jazz in the first decade of the 20th century.

The olfactory nature of the name “funk” suggests the music was all about sweat and sociality. And it is. But it’s also something greater. Funk insisted that physical release begets mental salvation and vice versa, a collapsing of Cartesian mind-body duality summed up succinctly in the title of a 1970 Funkadelic album: “Free Your Mind … and Your Ass Will Follow.”

The American rhythm and blues and funk group the Gap Band performing on “Soul Train,” 1979. The group included family members and brothers Charlie, Ronnie and Robert Wilson. Photo by Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images

In black communities of the 1970s, funk musicians imagined radical futures and wrote new histories. The style has always had a dose of Afrofuturism, what the artist and critic Nettrice Gaskins calls “the artistic practice of navigating the past, present and future simultaneously.”

A close read of “Mothership Connection,” the source of my junior high yearbook quote — and a song famously sampled in the G-funk classic “Let Me Ride” by Dr. Dre — reveals it as a reinterpretation of the iconic spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” As sung by embattled and enslaved African-Americans, the song symbolized liberation (and may have served as code on the Underground Railroad).

When Parliament sings “Swing down, sweet chariot, stop and let me ride,” they’re celebrating themselves and their crowds. They’re also enacting a protest across time and space, reinforcing that “black is beautiful.”

I was always drawn to the sound of funk, and as I rediscover it as a musicologist today, I realize it wasn’t just the sound that mattered to me but also the sonic message behind it. Each Bootsy Collins bass slap brought me deeper into a kinder cosmic worldview. Funk’s outrageous costumes and unruly dance moves signaled more than escapist fun: They were expressions of a larger narrative outlining a battle between conformity and self-actualization, between division and unity. Sir Nose D’Voidoffunk — the chief antagonist among the personae dramatis of the Parliament-Funkadelic universe — wasn’t just a comical character but the personification of reactionary close-mindedness. (He remains at large.)

In Funkadelic’s anthem “One Nation Under a Groove,” the chorus sings: “We’re one nation and we’re on the move / Nothin’ can stop us now.” The sentiment finds a modern analog in an Anderson Paak song released this spring, “King James,” when he sings, “There’s a movement we’ve been grooving on / you can move or stay your ass to sleep.” On a collective level, it may be no coincidence that many of those who have turned their noses up at funk have been on the wrong side of history not only in a musical sense.

Funk has always been a socio-political philosophy as much as a sound, and as it crests on the radio, at bars, clubs, house parties and in our popular consciousness, we should pay attention to the meanings we derive from it. Fourteen seconds of breakbeat drums on the latest Jonas Brothers hit is all it takes to recognize the music is still alive and well. But even as we groove to the joy-inducing syncopation, neither these artists nor we in the audience can afford to ignore the radical history of what we’re jamming to and miss the clues it’s giving us.

Nate Sloan (@neatsloan) is an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, a co-host of the podcast “Switched on Pop” and a co-author of the forthcoming book “Switched on Pop: How Popular Music Works and Why it Matters.”