Gentle Reader: Perhaps you are sitting at your computer now, feeling kinda square. Is there something missing from your life? Do you feel out of touch with the world? Do you find yourself unappealing to the sex of your preference? Do you, in short, lack verve, style, and/or pizzazz? Perhaps, sir or madam, what you need is a healthy dose of funk. Oh yes. A funknoculation is precisely what you need – it does the body some good.

I might reasonably assume at this point that you’re interested, since you’re still reading. You might even be thinking, “Sure. Tell me how to be funkier, if you’re so special.” So I think I will, Reader. The following is a Simple Guide for Learning How to Be Funky.

It all starts with listening to funk music.

No discussion of funk or funkiness would be complete without addressing the notion of the music itself. So, first of all, get hold of some; something seminal, and preferably something with some horns; James Brown and the Famous Flames is a good place to start. I’m not asking you to buy albums, here. If your local public library (libraries are funky in a nerdy kind of way. Nerd-funk is legitimate.) has a music section it’s bound to have James Brown. What is special about funk music and the way it is performed is that it’s very impromptu, strung-together in an off-the-cuff kind of way. Aspire to be a little bit more improvisatory.

You’ll notice, when you listen to James Brown, that he’s actually structuring the song as the band plays; he’ll have the rhythm section go through a given musical phrase another few times, or he’ll signal a change in the structure. It’s like building a house out of prefabricated materials; the pieces are all already there, but someone has to decide how they’re organized. Something you’ll hear a lot out of the Godfather of Soul is “take it to the bridge!” Now that is funky.

If you’re not familiar with how many popular songs are structured, frequently they contain bridges: these are melodic passages that bring the listener out of the chorus and into a final verse to prepare you for the end of the song. So Brown calls out “take it to the bridge,” and that means he’s placing blocks of song together to form a cohesive whole.

Take this as a larger approach to your life. If you find it difficult to be spontaneous, try a funkier tack, and do the James Brown thing: organize your time in prefabricated blocks. Come up with a general idea of how to entertain yourself but don’t tie yourself down to an exact point in time. Say you’re looking at the business end of an upcoming weekend and you don’t know what to do with yourself: pretend you’re doing a funk arrangement of your life and write out the charts, man.

Maybe you were gonna go check out a neighborhood you’d never explored before, or maybe you were gonna try cooking something new. Don’t tie these events to a given day, don’t say, “On Saturday I’m going to location X”. No, you’re not. You don’t know that. Anything could happen between now and Saturday! Take it to the bridge! Bring in your old pal Maceo (you’ll notice Brown says his name a lot, too) for a blazing saxophone solo performance.

And take care of your body. Just because you’re trying to be funky doesn’t mean you gotta smell funky. So check yourself, wash yourself, and get out there and groove with your bad, funky self…