Some songs are famous for the story behind them. This one is famous, at least among funk diggers, for the story that came after it.
„Don’t Fake the Funk“ is a deep, slow-burning groove from 1982, built on a fat bassline, a battery of synthesizers and one very strange instrument you have probably never heard of. It came from a Boston band called Prince Charles and the City Beat Band, and if you have never heard of them either, that is entirely fair; although they were always bigger here in Europe than at home. The man behind the name went on to have one of the most quietly extraordinary second acts in modern music history.
A prince from Boston Latin School
Unlike his Windsor namesake, Prince Charles Alexander was not born royalty. He grew up in Boston, went to the prestigious Boston Latin School, and picked up degrees from Brandeis and Northeastern along the way, hardly the standard biography for a funk frontman. He adopted the stage name as a teenager, apparently borrowing some regal swagger from the actual British Prince Charles, and by 1979 he had formed his own band.
What set him apart from the pack of early-eighties funk acts was his choice of instrument. Alongside sax, keys and drums, Alexander played something called the Lyricon, a wind synthesizer, essentially a saxophone-shaped controller that let him play electronic synth lines with breath and embouchure instead of a keyboard. It gave the City Beat Band’s records a strange, almost futuristic quality, funk with an alien edge, right as the genre itself was shifting from live basslines toward drum machines and synthesizers.
Stone Killers and the Duran Duran stage
„Don’t Fake the Funk“ appeared on the band’s 1982 album Stone Killers, their second of three records for Virgin. It never troubled the American charts much, but in the UK and across Europe the band found a genuine following; underground funk and disco crowds loved the deep grooves and the sheer strangeness of that Lyricon sound. In 1983 they even opened for Duran Duran and Robert Palmer at a huge charity concert at Villa Park in Birmingham, in front of 18,000 people, a genuinely surreal booking for a band this obscure.
By the mid-eighties, though, Alexander had had enough of performing. He disbanded the group and walked away from the stage entirely, which is usually where these stories end. Instead, this is where it gets interesting.
From the stage to the mixing desk
Alexander turned his attention to the technical side of music, becoming an audio engineer, and it turned out he had a serious gift for it. Over the following two decades he became one of the most in-demand engineers and producers in HipHop and R’n’B, working across the catalogues of some of the biggest names of the era: Mary J. Blige, Usher, Boyz II Men, Jodeci, Brandy, Babyface, Sting and Aretha Franklin all passed through his hands. He mixed the Notorious B.I.G.’s „One More Chance“ at New York’s legendary Hit Factory studio, and became a central figure at Bad Boy Records during its imperial phase, with credits on Blige’s „My Life“, Biggie’s „Ready to Die“ and Puff Daddy’s „No Way Out“.
The numbers tell their own story: more than forty Platinum and Gold RIAA certifications, two Grammy Awards, including Best Contemporary Soul Gospel Album in 2003, and seven Grammy nominations. These days he teaches the next generation as a professor of Music Production and Engineering at Berklee College of Music, back home in Boston, not far from where he once fronted a band that opened for Duran Duran.
Why this one made the cut
It would be easy to pick this week’s spotlight track for the obvious reasons: the killer breakbeat, the deep bass, the sheer rarity of hearing a Lyricon on a funk record at all. But what makes „Don’t Fake the Funk“ worth six minutes of your Sunday is the man who made it, and the journey he took from a bare-chested funk frontman with a strange electronic horn to one of the most respected names behind the scenes in modern HipHop and R’n’B.
He never faked the funk. He just changed which side of the studio glass he stood on.