Crate Digging is a recurring feature that takes a deep dive into music history to turn up several albums all music fans should know. In this edition, electro-funk duo Chromeo select 10 essential records from Dayton, Ohio’s influential funk scene.
The full interview with Dave-1 and P-Thugg is available as an episode of the Consequence UNCUT podcast. Listen below or wherever you get your podcasts.
Chromeo’s Dave 1 and P-Thugg are indebted to the classics. Their irresistibly funky sound has captured both the analog-forward nostalgia of the late ’70s and early ’80s while also remaining modern and relevant. But the duo feels like the electro-pop sheen that has characterized their biggest hits — and their refreshing upcoming album, Adult Contemporary — is irrelevant.
What matters to them is the tradition of funk: where it came from, the instruments utilized, how it grew, and the tangled web of cultural connections that funk has spawned over the last 50 years. As teenaged hip-hop lovers from Montreal, Dave and P would dig into the samples found on their favorite rap tracks and share the original tunes with each other. Eventually, they found their sound revolving around expressive grooves of Minneapolis funk and P’s instrument of choice, the talk box.
But their love of the talk box is not owed necessarily to the Minneapolis sound — it all began in Dayton, Ohio. The instrument was pioneered by Roger Troutman, who made a significant impact on the Dayton funk scene alongside his brothers and his band, Zapp, and whose futuristic sound went on to influence a significant wave of hip-hop artists in the ’90s and beyond. Chromeo list Dayton’s Zapp, Slave, and the Ohio Players as game changing artists that defined the midwestern offshoot of funk, and eventually, the music world at large. Yet, Chromeo feel that “for different institutional, prejudicial, and racist reasons,” funk and the Dayton scene has gone “under taught, under appreciated, and under discussed.”
Chromeo even planned to produce a documentary about Zapp and the Dayton scene before COVID got in the way. “We wondered why so much funk was coming out of Dayton, Ohio in the ’70s and ’80s,” Dave says. “One of the main reasons is that Dayton had a substantial middle class — it was an industry town. You had a lot of families that had basements and kids could learn instruments and practice together. That gave way to this shape-shifting funk tradition where young musicians could thrive because they had houses and garages. Dayton, Ohio is a story about community and about an economic moment in America during the ’60s and ’70s that gave way to this really specific brand of funk.”
Read on for Chromeo’s list of the 10 essential Dayton funk albums that everyone should own.
Sun — Wanna Make Love
P-Thugg: The reason why this is first is that Sun is an older group from Dayton, it dates back to the early ’70s. This was an album that was produced by Roger Troutman and his brother Lester. You can definitely hear it, and this is one of the first times Roger was experimenting with a talk box. That’s actually him playing the talk box through a guitar on that song “Wanna Make Love.” And that’s Lester playing the drums. These dudes were like the young cats from Dayton — Roger, Larry, and Lester Troutman — they went up to these kids and they were like, “Hey, we’ve got a great new sound.”
This album is giving you the blueprint for what would be Zapp 1. When you listen to songs like “Be Alright,” the drum sounds, the way it’s produced, the way it’s mixed, it’s very similar to Sun, that specific album that Roger and Lester produced and also wrote and composed.
Roger Troutman was at his most creative spot where he was like, “I want to use this talk box.” And Roger was referencing Sly and the Family Stone with the talk box. That’s how it started — he made it into like a lead vocal with a synthesizer because he was missing the sustain. This is the birth of Roger Troutman and Zapp,
Essential Track: “Wanna Make Love (Come Flick My Bic)”
Zapp — All the Greatest Hits
P: There are so many Zapp songs and albums that we could use for this. This song, “So Ruff, So Tuff,” I thought was fun because there’s a big Beastie Boys sample on there. To me, the definition of funk is Zapp and Roger Troutman. We have a lot of talk box during our show, and this is where it started. When Dave and I were teenagers collecting records and we discovered the music of Parliament Funkadelic, Bootsy Collins, and Zapp, that was pretty much the start of it all for us. The day I heard “More Bounce to the Ounce,” “So Ruff, So Tuff,” “Dance Floor,” I knew that was something I wanted to do and recreate for the rest of my life. So it has a special meaning for us.
Essential Track: “So Ruff, So Tuff”
Heatwave — Candles
Dave 1: Heatwave is a bit different. Obviously they’re known for “Boogie Nights,” and the band itself is British. But they’ve got two members of the band from Dayton, Johnnie and Keith Wilder.
P: Two members were from Dayton and another member is Rod Temperton, who wrote a lot of Michael Jackson stuff. So, in my mind, Heatwave has always been a sort of supergroup.
D: I love the fact that they’ve got a drummer from Czechoslovakia.
P: Heatwave has always fascinated me because of that diversity. And the album cover is insane. It’s like an airbrush thing with melting cakes and candles.
D: We put “Gangsters of the Groove” as the essential track because our first song that ever came out as Chromeo, ever, was called “You’re So Gangsta.”
Essential Track: “Gangsters of the Groove”
Aurra — Send Your Love
D: The thing about Dayton is that all roads leads back to Ohio Players and Slave. So a lot of projects are offshoots from those two bands. But Aurra had a specific style that I always loved. I remember Dave and I collecting records together and we had looked at the cover and been like, “this is so Prince.” It has a certain Minneapolis vibe to it. It’s not as Slave-y or Lakeside-y as the rest of the Dayton stuff. It’s got a bit of a Minneapolis thing to it, which I always have appreciated.
Essential Track: “Are You Single?”
Shirley Murdock — Shirley Murdock!
D: Oh my God, Shirley Murdock. I mean, she has a beautiful duet with Roger Troutman, so she’s sick.
P: Well, not only that, Shirley was Zapp’s Tawatha.
D: Tawatha [Agee] was the singer for an ’80s funk band Mtume. She sings the song that Biggie sampled on “Juicy” called “Juicy Fruit” — so that woman who sang that famous hook is alive and kicking today. She’s sang backup with Steely Dan, Aretha, and she’s been our go-to backup singer for our last three albums. So when P says she was their Tawatha, he means she was Roger and Zapp’s go-to backup singer.
P: Yeah, and a lot of Shirley’s records were produced by Roger and Lester. She was kind of like their sister, their spiritual sister. To this day, Lester speaks very highly about Shirley.
Essential Track: “Teaser”
Slave — Slave
D: As P said before, everything ties back to Slave and the Ohio Players. For this album, the essential track is “Slide,” and it really ties back to our personal history. If you look at this song on Spotify, there’s actually two primary artists: Slave and Jimmy Douglass. Jimmy Douglass was the producer for that band and I think that for some kind of Spotify reason, he’s also listed as the primary artist. Jimmy Douglas has a daughter, her name is Felicia Douglass. She sings with a band that you probably know called the Dirty Projectors. She also sings backing vocals on two songs on our new album, because her style is very different than Tawatha.
So, when Tawatha is not singing backing vocals on this album, it’s Felicia Douglass, daughter of Jimmy Douglass. Producer of Slave, seminal funk band from Dayton, Ohio.
Essential Track: “Slide”
Faze-O — Riding High
D: This one is a big classic. I would say the essential track, “Riding High,” is one of the most famous Dayton songs. And personally, I never liked that song. I don’t know why I hated it. It’s weird, it’s not really groovy in a way. It’s kind of like, I don’t know… It’s a little bit psychedelic because it’s got this drone-y synth. But now I listen to it and I find it genius.
P: I like Faze-O because they had a very distinct style. It’s very goofy. It’s not like the typical funk sound — It’s very elongated, drone-y, almost ethereal. They have very strange funk sounds that are straight up, “boom, clap, boom, clap,” very, very lo-fi. I just like them in the landscape of Dayton funk. They really have their place.
D: That song, “Riding High” is famous also because it was sampled by EPMD, a seminal rap duo from the ’90s. They have a song called “Please Listen to My Demo” and it samples the song, and EPMD is interesting because people usually associate west coast hip-hop with those kinds of funk samples. But EPMD is New York and they’re specific.
They’re kind of not talked about enough. I find they don’t get mentioned the way that De La Soul had a whole Renaissance from and such — obviously well deserved, but I feel like more people need to talk about EPMD because they were really special and they’re an East Coast rap group. They’re from Long Island, but all their samples were funk, that was their twist. Actually, they sampled all the Roger stuff a couple of years before Dr. Dre, and Dre ran with that. Obviously N.W.A. were doing it, but EPMD was doing it with a New York twist. They’re very singular.
P: EPMD was probably the reason I fell in love with funk music. They were one of the first groups I listened to when I moved to Canada as a kid — I was into hip-hop, so I was listening to LL Cool J, De La Soul, and EPMD. And EPMD always had those talk box samples, those funk samples. When we started collecting records, I was like, “Oh, this is from EPMD. This is from here, this is from that.” And I knew all that music already because I’d heard the loops before, I’d heard them chopped up. So that was a musical awakening.
Essential Track: “Riding High”
Steve Arrington — Steve Arrington’s Hall of Fame, Vol.1
D: Steve Arrington was a member of the aforementioned Slave. The essential track is called “Speak with Your Body” and the album is called Steve Arrington’s Hall of Fame Vol. 1, which is hilarious because it’s his debut album. I love people who name their debut album “Greatest Hits.” My brother [A-Trak] actually did that with Duck Sauce.
So Steve Arrington was the bass player for Slave and the producer of this album was Jimmy Douglass, who we talked about before. So again, it all kind of connects together, which is dope when you have a smaller town like that and a scene of musicians, cause there’s like all these charts you can draw in between all the players. It’s fascinating, it’s like a Rubik’s cube.
P: Steve Arrington’s career has continued on as well. He’s still active.
D: Yeah, he’s on Stones Throw, probably one of the greatest independent hip-hop record labels of ’90s all the way to today. Madlib, J Dilla… Steve Arrington’s got an album on there. Two, actually.
P: He always reminded me of a tamer version of Rick James. He’s just always involved everywhere. His career lasted so long, you see him in interviews… He’s a real character.
Essential Track: “Speak with Your Body”
Ohio Players — Fire
D: The first song we discovered from The Ohio Players as kids, again, through hip-hop samples, is a song called “Funky Worm.” There’s something about the Moog keyboard, which became a staple of the G-funk sound. It’s very high, very legato. And “Funky Worm” has it in a really zany way.
P: The thing about the Ohio players is that they had so many members. They’re kind of like Parliament, there’s probably two other artists on this playlist that come from the Ohio Players. Junie Morrison was a member of both, he had later solo albums which are very much in the Parliament Funkadelic vein of funk.
D: Ohio Players are really the Godfather of all of this because they formed in 1959. They’re almost a whole two generations before all the other ones. I mean, if you look at their Wikipedia page, the list of members is incredibly long. You could say they’re one of the most important funk bands, period.
P: They’re like the bizarro Parliament Funkadelic. That’s how I always saw them. They have so many proficient members, it’s impressive. But the Junie Morrison link between the two is so important. The link between them, and then the links between Roger, Zapp, the Dayton community, and all the bands
D: To tie it back to what we were saying before, there’s an important point for us to make on this episode: all this music is underreported, under-discussed, and under-acknowledged. Not to be too vindictive, but one of the reasons we started Chromeo is that we’re literally outsiders from this whole world. We’re French-speaking dudes from Montreal, Canada, from immigrant families, we did not grow up with this kind of music. We discovered it in the nineties through hip-hop samples, then traced the roots of all these samples.
Because we played music and were in the high school band, we fell in love with funk music, appreciating it from the outside without the musical segregation and prejudices that came with the American music industry in the ’70s, where genres were segregated. It’s really fucked up. Earlier today, we were doing an interview with the Grammys, and we realized there’s no category for funk. They have broad R&B categories, but you’re really talking about a salt-of-the-earth strategy towards an Americana genre from industrialized Dayton, Ohio.
This is the American dream, the post-war model creating functional middle-class towns where a thriving middle class can form bands and have kids practice in their garage. You have seminal bands. One creates Roger Troutman — who created one of the most sampled catalog of songs ever, right up there with James Brown. One creates Steve Arrington, who is still making records today. Ohio Players, they’re monuments. Jimmy Douglass has mixed and produced albums for everyone from Timbaland to Duran Duran to Kanye West.
Still, there’s no institutional recognition for stuff like this, and that’s why we started Chromeo. Our deal is that this music didn’t get its flowers, so we’re disguising it as blog house, electro, or indie to make more people familiar with it. As kids and outsiders, this stuff blew our minds.
Essential Track: “Fire”
Lakeside — Fantastic Voyage
D: When we were kids, Coolio came out with a song called “Fantastic Voyage” that sample this Lakeside song. I actually gave P the Coolio album on vinyl for his 15th or 16th birthday. It was really an anthem.
Essential Track: “Fantastic Voyage”
