The 1970s File Feature
Get The Funk Out Ma Face
Get The Funk Out Ma Face — The Brothers Johnson: Quincy Jones and the Making of a Funk Classic The Brothers Johnson arrived in 1976 as one of the most impres…
01 The Story
Get The Funk Out Ma Face — The Brothers Johnson: Quincy Jones and the Making of a Funk Classic
The Brothers Johnson arrived in 1976 as one of the most impressive discoveries in the career of producer Quincy Jones, a man whose talent for identifying and developing exceptional musicians was already well established. George and Louis Johnson had been working as session musicians and had come to Jones's attention through their work with Billy Preston, among others. Jones recognized in them a combination of instrumental virtuosity and commercial instinct that was relatively rare, and he signed them to develop an album under his production supervision for A&M Records.
The resulting debut album, "Look Out for #1," was released in 1976 on A&M Records and introduced the Brothers Johnson to a wide audience. "Get The Funk Out Ma Face" was among the most energetic and immediately striking tracks on the album, a performance that announced the group's capabilities with considerable force. George Johnson's guitar work and Louis Johnson's bass playing were the instrumental foundation of the Brothers Johnson sound, and on this track both were operating at a very high level, delivering a performance that was simultaneously technically demanding and viscerally satisfying in the way that great funk almost always is.
The production by Quincy Jones was a master class in the application of studio resources to funk material without diminishing the essential rawness and physical energy that made funk work. Jones was a studio craftsman of extraordinary skill whose approach to pop and R&B production drew on his jazz background to create arrangements of unusual sophistication. But sophistication in a funk context requires a specific calibration; the arrangements cannot become so complex that they overwhelm the fundamental rhythmic drive that is the music's reason for being. Jones navigated this calibration with characteristic precision on "Get The Funk Out Ma Face," creating a production that was clearly the work of a master craftsman while retaining the floor-level energy that the genre required.
The single was released from the album and received significant radio airplay on Black radio stations and soul/funk-oriented programming. A&M Records was well positioned to market this kind of material; the label had established relationships with radio programmers who served the Black music market, and the Brothers Johnson's combination of instrumental excellence and commercial appeal made them relatively easy to promote. The single charted on the R&B chart and contributed to the album's substantial commercial success, helping to establish the group as major new figures in the funk and soul landscape.
George Johnson's guitar style on the recording showed the influence of multiple traditions: the rhythm guitar approach of funk pioneers like James Brown's bandleader Jimmy Nolen, the more melodic work of jazz-influenced players, and a personal quality of rhythmic precision and tonal brightness that became a Johnson signature. Louis Johnson's bass playing on the same recording was equally distinctive; his slapping and popping technique, which drew on innovations associated with players like Larry Graham, gave the low end of the mix a percussive quality that made the rhythm section sound like a complete unit in itself, with the other instrumental elements adding texture rather than providing foundational support.
The success of "Look Out for #1" and its singles launched a period of productive collaboration between the Brothers Johnson and Quincy Jones that produced several additional albums and a string of hits. The relationship was mutually beneficial: the Brothers Johnson provided Jones with material that allowed him to demonstrate his funk and R&B production abilities at the highest commercial level, while Jones provided the Brothers Johnson with a production environment and promotional infrastructure that gave their abilities the widest possible audience.
The broader context of 1976 funk and soul music was extremely competitive, with major acts like Earth, Wind and Fire, Parliament-Funkadelic, Kool and The Gang, and others all operating at high levels of commercial and artistic achievement. For a new act to break through in this environment required genuine distinction, and the Brothers Johnson possessed it. "Get The Funk Out Ma Face" was a statement of arrival that the broader funk audience received with immediate enthusiasm.
The recording's legacy is secure within the history of 1970s funk production. It appears regularly on compilations devoted to the genre and era, and its instrumental performances remain benchmarks of technical excellence within the tradition. The guitar and bass work, in particular, are frequently cited in discussions of the era's most accomplished funk musicianship, and the Quincy Jones production is recognized as among the finest examples of his work in the genre.
02 Song Meaning
Get The Funk Out Ma Face — Assertion, Groove, and the Philosophy of Funk
"Get The Funk Out Ma Face" operates at the intersection of personal assertion and collective groove that was one of funk music's defining characteristics as a cultural form. The title phrase is a demand, an instruction to clear space and make room for the force of the music itself, and this imperative quality is entirely consistent with funk's broader philosophical orientation toward music as a liberatory physical and spiritual experience. The command is not aggressive in a hostile sense; it is the exuberant assertion of a musical energy that cannot be contained and that requires the listener's full surrender to be properly received.
Funk as a genre was always as much philosophy as musical style. James Brown's innovations in the late 1960s had established a framework in which the groove itself was the primary carrier of meaning, a framework in which melodic and harmonic complexity were secondary to the collective rhythmic experience of musicians locking into a pattern and driving it forward with maximum energy and precision. The Brothers Johnson inherited this tradition and applied it with the additional technical refinement that their specific combination of jazz-school training and commercial pop awareness provided.
The song's insistence on clearing the face, on removing whatever stands between the listener and the full experience of the music, is a metaphor for the kind of psychological clearing that funk at its best actually produces. George and Louis Johnson were musicians who had spent years developing their technique precisely so that the technical execution would become transparent, so that the effort involved in producing the sounds would be invisible and only the sounds themselves would register in the listener's experience. This is a difficult thing to achieve, and it requires both individual mastery and collective integration of the kind that the Brothers Johnson had developed through years of playing together.
The lyrical register of "Get The Funk Out Ma Face" is celebratory and assertive, claiming space and confidence in a way that resonated with the cultural values of the Black community from which funk music emerged. Funk's political dimension was rarely explicitly stated in the music; it was expressed through the values embodied in the music itself, the emphasis on collective participation, on individual virtuosity within a communal framework, on the body as a site of joy and freedom rather than constraint. A song that demanded space for its own energy was making a claim about the legitimacy of that energy, a claim that carried weight in the social context of mid-1970s America.
For the Brothers Johnson as artists, the song established the parameters of their artistic identity in ways that their subsequent recordings both confirmed and extended. They were not primarily message-driven artists in the explicitly political tradition of some of their contemporaries; they were musicians whose statement was made primarily through the quality and energy of their playing. "Get The Funk Out Ma Face" made this argument as clearly as it could be made, presenting virtuosity and groove as values sufficient in themselves, requiring no additional justification or narrative framework.
The Quincy Jones production added a layer of refinement to the raw energy of the Brothers Johnson's performances without compromising that energy's essential character. Jones's genius as a producer in the funk and soul context was precisely his ability to make sophisticated studio craft serve rather than overshadow the fundamental drive of the music, and on this track that ability was deployed with particularly good results. The recording sounds simultaneously polished and alive, a combination that is far more difficult to achieve than either element alone would be.
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