Funk is anything it needed to be to save your life at that time. Do the best you can, and get funking. Once you've done the best you can in any situation, ain't nothing else you can do. So you'll be able to stay funking with out guilt: "I've done the best I can, so now let's get down." And that's the way you apply the music. You look at old Blues players who walk in and start playing. Funky. It don't matter what key it's in, what arrangement. It ain't that deep. Let's just get down.

I don't think I heard it as a genre of music until, you know... Maybe James Brown might have said it. But as a concept, as a genre, we wanted to make it special. It wasn't Blues, jazz or rock & roll—it was something that you heard. Jazz musicians used it, Blues musicians used it, but nobody said "We gonna play the funk." I think that's what I continually wanted to say then, because rock & roll had been changed so thoroughly. Black people didn't know it was theirs. "That's white music," because white stations were playing their version of rock & roll. And we just gave it away. Without Jimi Hendrix, we were going to have no claim to it. He actually single handedly took this shit back. I mean, we really took it back. We were like, "We got another version of that same thing." So we did "Free Your Mind, Your Ass Will Follow." We were tripping our ass off, turned that shit up as loud as we could, all the amps in the world, and we just went off. Because I knew how to make street records. I worked at Motown, and theirs was completely clean and straight. We knew how to do that, but it was time to change. They had all types of names for us: The Temptations on acid, James Brown on PCP.