The votes keep coming and we are just a few days from the final results of the 100 greatest funk songs of all time. This morning I put together some preliminary tallies from the voting so far.There are some surprises, but a lot of unanimity amongst the funky faithful.
A lot of people thought perhaps that P-Funk and James Brown would dominate, but in the top 20 so far there are 14 different bands. We've got a wide variety of funk. Also down at the bottom of the list are some songs deemed horribly unfunkified, among them The Power Station and The Steve Miller Band.
So let me talk about the methodology so you'll know what's up.
Straight Funk & Hype Funk
There are seven grades of funkativity from 'No' at the bottom end to 'Da Bomb' at the top. Each song gets two composite scores. There is the Straight Funky Score and there is the Hype Funky Score. The point systems work out like this:
|
Rating |
Straight Funk |
Hype Funk |
|
No |
1 |
-1 |
|
Barely
Funky |
2 |
0 |
|
Somewhat
Funky |
3 |
1 |
|
Funky |
4 |
2 |
|
Extra
Funky |
5 |
3 |
|
Hella
Funky |
6 |
4 |
|
Da Bomb |
7 |
6 |
The Straight Funk Score gives every song the benefit of the doubt. The Hype Funk score takes no prisoners and gives extra props for being Da Bomb. The two scores are combined to give a maximum Funk Score of 13 which is the funkiest number in the Cosmos, last time I checked.
The Boogie Factor
Since everybody didn't vote for every song, the averages are calculated according to the number of responses. So while it's possible that one song might be voted 'Da Bomb' by only one person giving that song a perfect score, it didn't happen. So while I didn't have a cutoff, or an adjustment for songs that were very funky but unpopular, no song in the top 100 has had less than 10 responses. So I calculated a Boogie Factor which tells me how well situated the song is in its ranking relative to the score that it got. The higher the Boogie Factor, the more certain you can be that the song got the grade it deserved. Boogie = #Responses / Combined Funk. Average Boogie Factor is 1.94. It's not currently figured into the ranking, but it could be.
The highest combined funk score is 11.59 with a boogie factor of 1.47.
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