How a French Phenom Became the King of Modern Funk: ‘Nobody Has His Reach’

“I have a question,” Dabeull asked. “Do you have the funk?”

There was only one answer at Brooklyn Steel, an 1,800-capacity venue in New York City — an affirming roar.

The French producer was in New York City in September promoting his new album, Analog Love, with his first ever full-band tour. But the short jaunt, which also stopped in San Francisco and Los Angeles, was freighted with extra importance — less of a tour, more of a mission of renewal. “My job is to make funk a modern music again,” Dabeull says. 

He speaks about this goal in unabashedly grand, romantic terms. “I don’t make funk music for money,” he explains. “I make funk music for people’s dreams.”

That is no small task, but Dabeull’s efforts have been more successful than most. His top five songs on Spotify have over 135 million streams combined, outshining many of his funk-obsessed peers — not to mention many of his early influences, whom have often languished in obscurity in the streaming era. 

Dabeull “is one of the best, if not the best, modern funk artists out there because of his analog aesthetic — it’s all raw synths recorded live,” says Ivan “Debo” Marquez, one of the co-founders of Funk Freaks, a DJ collective and record label from Santa Ana, California. “Nobody in the modern funk scene has actually had the reach that he’s having.” 

It took a while, though. For years, Dabeull had to prioritize other styles of music, like electro house, to help generate income, as he wasn’t established, and the genre he adored was out of favor. 

He grew up in Paris, and discovered American funk through friends and increasingly frequent trips to record stores as a teen in the late 1990s. “I never went to school for music,” he says. “My school is reproducing the Bar-Kays, Kleeer, really good funk from the 1980s.” (Kleeer’s 1981 album is titled, appropriately, License to Dream.)

A young Dabeull would play LPs on repeat, picking apart the grooves: “What bass is that? What guitar is that? What effects are on that guitar?”

In the U.S., much of the vital funk of the early 1980s — often known as “boogie” — never got its due outside of the Black community, “hampered by a disco backlash at pop radio,” as Nelson George wrote in his book The Death of Rhythm & Blues. “Of the 14 records to reach No. 1 on the Black chart in 1983,” George noted, “only one reached the pop top 10.” 

This freeze-out still has lingering effects to this day. As Dabeull put it, “for a lot of people, funk music [from this era] is seen as cheesy.” 

It’s an unfortunate phenomenon: Nearly universal love for the hits of Michael Jackson and Prince doesn’t necessarily trickle down to Midnight Star’s “Wet My Whistle” or Kashif’s “I Just Gotta Have You (Lover Turn Me On).” Some indelible music from this period, including tracks from the S.O.S. Band, the Chi-Lites, and One Way, never even made it to Spotify — another obstacle to fandom in the modern era, as finding the good stuff can take on elements of an archival project.

In many of these songs, the bassline is the true star, svelte and muscular like an Olympic athlete. This is why good DJs can still rely on these records to whip up dancefloor mayhem. “Some people like steppers, the slower stuff,” Marquez explains. At Funk Freaks parties, in contrast, “we like the get-your-ass-dancing, sweat-the-alcohol-out feel” of boogie. 

And Dabeull’s strongest productions can hold their own alongside the original gems. On songs like “On Time” and “JoyRide,” a track for frequent collaborator Holybrune, the basslines are formidably plump, but still limber. Synthesizers flash like emergency flares; the drums remain curt and clipped; vocalists trace breathy arcs in the space cleared by the bullish low-end.  

Holybrune also sings on “You & I,” Dabeull’s most popular song, which sounds as if he took Dennis Edwards’ 1984 classic “Don’t Look Any Further,” crumpled it into a compact ball, and then shot it out of a cannon. Dabeull’s band shores up its bona fides by hurtling through other throwbacks: At the show in Brooklyn, they played a snatch of Earth, Wind, and Fire’s “Boogie Wonderland” along with the Rah Band’s “Messages From the Stars;” one guitar riff evoked “Get Down Saturday Night,” Oliver Cheatham’s sparkling ode to weekend debauchery. (The band also delivered a runaway-train version of Michael Sembello’s Flashdance anthem “Maniac” — less groovy than “Boogie Wonderland,” but no less effective.)

In case anyone doubted Dabeull’s fealty to 1980s funk, when it came time to record Analog Love, he got his hands on the mixing console Jackson had used to record Thriller. “He’s a bit of a perfectionist,” Marquez says. (Funk Freaks released a vinyl-only Dabeull 7″ in 2020.) Dabeull prefers the word “picky.”

The console, which weighs more than 1,000 pounds, had previously been in the possession of the French band Phoenix, who paid $17,000 for it during the sessions for their 2013 album Bankrupt! But the equipment had fallen into disrepair. “They said, ‘If you can fix it, you can have it,’” recalls Julian Getreau, who serves as music director for Dabeull’s nine-person band, and is credited on his releases as Rude Jude. 

While that mending process took two months of “working every day,” according to Dabeull, it was worth every ounce of elbow grease: “Making funk on this board was magic,” he says reverently. “To keep the funk alive, you have to do it properly,” Getreau adds. “You cannot go the easy way.”

Maybe it’s the board — there’s a touch of the Jacksons’ “Walk Right Now” in the hard charge of the Analog Love track “Look in the Mirror,” while some of the louche slink of Thriller‘s closer, “The Lady in My Life,” seeps into Dabeull’s “Fabulous Kisses.” “Let’s Play” goes another direction altogether, reimagining West Coast G-funk as tender music for lovers.

A sizable chunk of the crowd at the Brooklyn Steel show was not alive in the mid-1980s when Jackson conquered the world with Thriller — that was their parents’ music. The importance of this is not lost on Dabeull. Many listeners who worship funk are “a bit older; they get nostalgic about what they heard when they were younger,” he says. “We want people that are younger to get intrigued and get into it, so it’s not seen as an old kind of music.”

His plan seems to be working, at least in the three American cities he visited on tour. Because Dabeull’s show in L.A. sold out quickly — “that’s the Mecca of funk,” Getreau notes — some fans hopped a plane to see him play in New York, adding the price of a cross-country flight to their concert ticket. (Holybrune kindly ferried their posters backstage for Dabeull to autograph.) Another fan made the pilgrimage south from Montreal, declaring the show “the most fun she’d ever had.”

After his performance, Dabeull seemed slightly dazed by all the attention Stateside. “For us, it’s unbelievable,” he said. A few minutes later, a member of his team informed him that all the merch had sold out. “It’s crazy,” Dabeull replied. “Why?” 

His publicist offered a gentle retort: “Because people like you.” Or, perhaps, they really do have the funk.

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