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Miss Funkyflyy is a nickname I've had since I was about fifteen years old. I used it as a pseudonym during the mid-eighties, when I was broadcasting a one-hour heavy-duty Funk show on various local community radio stations and the name has stayed with me. I didn't invent it, though. Well, kind of. I altered it. It comes from an absolutely horrid and equally obscure 12" on T.K. Records from 1980 called "the Crazy Mule Saloon" by a Madam Funkyfly, who tried to pose as a female version of the X-rated rapper/comic Blowfly. The fly (in the banner at the top of this page) is designed by my talented friend Maryam. My "real" name is Maria Granditsky and I live in Stockholm, the capitol of Sweden. I was born in 1966 and have been listening to Soul and Funk music for almost 20 years. It all began in grade school, with Disco like Donna Summer and Boney M (even Amanda Lear, yikes!), after which I discovered the T.K. "Sound of Sunshine" (Gwen McCrae, Benny Latimore, etc), the bluesy R&B of Ann Peebles and in the early eighties, serious Funk, via artists and bands like Rick James (I loved his thigh-high red boots), the Bar-Kays, Slave, Cameo, Con Funk Shun, Bootsy, Chocolate Milk, Isley Brothers, Ohio Players, George Clinton, The Time, André Cymone, Aurra, Prince, Ray Parker Jr. & Raydio, One Way, Brick, Rose Royce and many, many others. I also enjoyed a good deal of American Disco-Soul such as Skyy and pure Soul, from Johnnie Taylor, Denise LaSalle, etc. I spent all my pocket money on LP's, which I guess, made me a bore since I never could afford to go to the movies or grab a burger with my friends. There were no Black music magazines, no TV shows, so how I got into many artists was purely by chance. I actually bought a numerous amount of records, simply because they had African-American faces on the cover. I was racially biased you could say, but in a good way. I didn't know anyone who liked the same music as I did. Well, my best friend Helene could handle Ray Parker Jr.'s "A Woman Needs Love" and my "Secret Combination" LP by Randy Crawford, but that was about it. I remember one particular day in high-school when we were all supposed to bring a tape of our favorite music to the gym, for the class to work-out to. My cassette, with the slamming 12" inch version of the Bar-Kays' "She Talks To Me With Her Body", Bootsy's "Body Slam" and André Cymone's "Surviving in the 80's", didn't go down too well. In one voice, the entire class screamed "shut that crap off already!". I feel that to be able to communicate with other music lovers, which has been made possible via the Internet, is just fantastic and I can only imagine how great it would have been if I had had the same possibility to do so back in the day. The records of my desire were nine out of ten times not issued here, so I had to go to the few shops in the city that imported LP's directly from the States. I've often wondered if those stores would have survived if it hadn't been for the fact that they had very little competition in the field. Providing customers with the slightest amount of service was the last thing on their agenda. The clerks were DJ's and took more interest in spinning the latest jams to impress their friends who hung around the counter all day, than to let anyone pay for a record. You would just stand there, LP and wallet in hand, and wait for twenty minutes or more, before they showed some mercy and allowed you to pay. It was degrading, sure, but anything for the Funk, right? There were also several shops that specialized in so called cut-outs. Those LP's could easily be distinguished by the sleeve. They either had a corner cut off or, a saw mark. Let me tell you, cut-outs were extremely cheap! In 1982, nobody had to, or were willing to, pay more than 50 cents for Funkadelic's "One Nation Under A Groove" or a dollar each for any Bootsy's Rubberband LP, for example. Yeah, those were the days! In the 1980's and throughout the 90's, I worked as a DJ on community radio stations, wrote for various magazines and papers about Soul, Funk and R&B. I reviewed records, went to concerts and interviewed hundreds of artists. Since 2000 I have worked in other fields than journalism, but my love and passion for writing, doing the research, interviewing people and the music itself has not diminished. Via this web page, and now in later years, through sites like Facebook and YouTube, no one will have to Funk all by themselves, like I did in my teens. :) And there are great places to buy records, like eBay, GEMM and Discogs. Sites with unique interviews, made by people who are just as enthusiastic as I was when I created this back in 1995, are still not common as muck, but at least much more prevalent than it was in the early days of the Web. Today I like to chat about music and the people behind it on Facebook. |
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© Maria Granditsky
1999. |
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