Funk
Cultural Research > Funk Intro > Funk Essay
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Introduction The Look: The ultimate in ostentation and blatant sex appeal. Towering platform boots and afros hair, huge bellbottoms with ‘spray can fit’ at the top. For males as well as females – the former with luxury accessories including the all important pimpmobile. The Time: Bubbling up in late ‘60s but only gets noticed by the media in early ‘70s. The Place: Black ghettos of urban America. Influenced: Glam, B-Boys & Flygirls (Rap & Hip-hop), Acid Jazz – and much broader in terms of liberating male style. |
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Essay Excerpt While white, middle-class Hippies were getting increasingly natural and ethnic in the late ‘60s, in America’s black ghettos something very different was happening. Dressing up instead of dressing down, flash and flamboyant in the extreme, the Pimp Look was about as far from the casual, scruffy Hippy aesthetic as it was possible to get. As its name suggests, the Pimp Look was a celebration of both money and sex. Although in the same aspirational dressing up tradition as the Zooties and the Pachucos who used their appearance style as a symbol of financial success and social status, the Pimp Look combined this with a much more explicit celebration of male sexuality. |