Various Artists: The Funky 16 Corners

Though it's released less than a dozen proper albums during its five-year history, Peanut Butter Wolf's Stone's Throw label has already established a reputation for quality, ambition, and experimentation to rival labels 10 times its size. From Quasimoto's mind-bending The Unseen to The Breakestra's The Live Mix, Part 2 to Madlib's retro jazz project Yesterday's New Quintet, Stone's Throw specializes in iconoclastic acts that pay tribute to black music's rich past while spinning its sound and ethos in funky, unexpected new directions. Though its music is separated chronologically from the rest of the label's output by decades, the remarkable funk collection The Funky 16 Corners finds common ground with the Stone's Throw catalog in its deep reverence for the past, its crate-digging savvy, and its remarkable attention to detail. Compiling an ample helping of regional funk recordings from the late '60s and early '70s, 16 Corners aspires to be nothing less than a funk version of Nuggets, Lenny Kaye's seminal garage-rock compilation. While 16 Corners contains its share of James Brown imitators and ersatz Meters doomed to relative obscurity, the disc's surreal detours from funk orthodoxy make it a valuable, life-affirming piece of musical sociology. Most of the groups here aspire to little more than engineering good times and moving butts (such as Ernie And The Top Notes Inc., who grant listeners permission to "get up, do any dance that's groovy to you!" on "Dap Walk"), but some nurse aspirations that border on messianic. Co-Real Artists, a group that originated as part of an NEA-funded public-arts program, takes on just about every social issue on "What About You (In The World Today)," a stripped-down proto-rap song rooted in call-and-response and a spare drumbeat. Rhythm Machine's "The Kick" aims even higher, as its whiny, Kool Keith-meets-Ed Wood intro makes abundantly clear. Positing itself as a strike against addiction, the song begins with a nasal, hilariously stiff monologue—"As our contribution to the drug war, we are introducing a new dance called The Kick, hoping that those of you who are trying to kick, or those of you who would like to kick, will get caught up in The Kick influence"—before launching into a sweaty funk workout. Such surreal moments abound, and even at its weakest, The Funky 16 Corners is seldom less than joyous and irresistible. Like the garage-rock majesty found throughout Nuggets, this overlooked funk demands its own box set.