“Funk is oxygen. It’s life,” according to Lauren Halsey. The Los Angeles artist can recall the day that funk music changed her life. It was the early 00s and she was on her parents’ computer, downloading music from the filesharing website LimeWire, as she did every night, when she happened upon the entire discography of the band Parliament. “It turned me out,” she reminisces fondly. Of the track How Do Yeaw View You?, by Parliament sister group Funkadelic, she says: “Hearing that and believing in it in my most formative years gave me a certain confidence to go for my funk.”
Later, once YouTube had come into existence, Halsey watched Parliament’s Mothership Connection P-Funk Earth tour and made it her life mission to become a member. “Obviously I didn’t make it in the band,” she laughs. “But they’re huge references for me. So much of what I make is in response to the context of funk. It’s another layer. It’s another portal of possibility.”
