Shrine to the Funky Drummer

The “Funky Drummer” is a five-second excerpt from a James Brown song that has been used as the foundation of hundreds of other musical compositions and is one of popular music’s most famous samples. This experimental documentary portrays the performance and subsequent sampling of the Funky Drummer as an archetypal cultural moment and a lens through which to examine a multifaceted story of creative appropriation. Rosenstock collected and created artifacts, “holy relics,” and ritual performances that explore the early history of Hip Hop, the fetishistic culture of record-digging, and the creative acts of sampling and remixing.