Fundamental to just about all modern music (and a great deal of older material, too!), syncopation is – in literal terms – the placing of accented notes on the ‘weak’ beats of the bar. This is an extremely open-ended definition, however, given that those ‘weak’ beats could be considered to be beats 2 and 4 (which, technically, makes the common or garden backbeat a form of syncopation) or the eighthnotes that fall in between the four main beats of a bar of 4/4, or even the 16th-notes that fall in between those, and so on.
To put it in non-technical terms, syncopation is what puts the funk, groove, skank or other rhythmic ‘feel’ into a piece of music. Although it’s been a quantifiable concept in all genres and styles since man first took stick to log, it’s always been particularly important in dance music, which just wouldn’t work without it – imagine, if you will, a dancefloor full of people just stomping along to beats 1 and 3. Not our idea of a fun night out. By dance music, we mean all the way back to the tribal beats of pre-history, then up through medieval music, classical, jazz, rock ’n’ roll, and on to house, hip-hop, jungle, trance, electro, dubstep and all the rest of ’em.
Funk is built upon syncopation; James Brown would’ve been a decidedly stiff and ungroovy fellow without it
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