Every great story that's so good it truly sticks with you, doesn't ever have a necessarily cohesively solidified agreed upon proper kick off. It's completely up to the author to take you along for the ride.
You can be airdropped into the center of the chaos, finding your way through the plot in secret - embedded into flashbacks or call backs, with proper dosings of foreshadowing, surely.
That's not the hard part.
Shit - Tarantino has been making a meal off the reverse plot line since I was but a twinkle in my old man's nads.
The hard part is knowing where to begin, especially with a living legend in his 70's- whose career began as the bassist for "The hardest working man in show biz"- James motherfuckin' Brown.
Collins is the exception and not the rule in the era of Tik-Tokification of anyone's ability to stay captivated for more than a few seconds, let alone a full 60 tick on the hands of the clock in the corner you forgot was there until some sort of anxiety kicks it and it sounds like the masked red and blue Ultras playing base drums with wooden mallets at a PSG home match.
Sidenote : I hate that level of panic attack. I mean any level sucks but when the clock starts to sound like a fuckin' Brazil/Argentina match, I'm 100% ghosting the vicinity.
But back to Bootsy.
The mission provided by RocNation was a complex matrix that was wrapped in a simple, direct sentence.
"Make Bootys Collins relevant in today's pop culture landscape."
BACKSTORY:
I was never a big funk guy, I mean - I fucking get it as a genre and musical language.
The years spent soaking up Advanced Music Theory in the band room basement of the Yale-New Haven Cooperative Arts & Humanities School with Mr. Smith doing his best, real life, JK Simmonds act from the film "Whiplash" on me paid off in spades.
My ex girlfriend's father's cousin sang for KC & The Sunshine Band for over 25 years.
Not that KC was funk, but it was just surely the same era, and a kissing cousin derivative off shoot. I spent a longer period of time with all the KC crew over one summer and found myself picking up a lot of funk's theory, time signatures & showmanship to have a good base to work from here.
Funk was just not what my personal Spotify playlists are exclusivley powered by.
I'll always be a hip-hop head, with a romantic love affair with screamo, hardcore, 3 chord punk pop in the homies shitty garage, Marley, Miles Davis, Sublime, NIN, "White Pony" era Deftones, and a host of rappers that I fucking love - that for some reason, the world isn't up on yet- David Wolves being one of the best examples I could give you.
ADHD said "I digress." again.
So I wanted to tell Booty's story as a nod to the legacy and staying power so many except his most die hard stands knew. That had to start in the 60's- pre color television in most homes here in the states. So we staged a James Brown short cut to kick it all off. I wanted it to feel both "found footage" and a proper cinematically focused documentary in one.
Every good story begins at the beginning. I know that sounds ridiculous and almost childishly pedantic, but I don't mean it in any such way.
I meant it as "We have a a fuckin DECADES long body of work and we need to cover territory as well as reimagine the legend for 2025-2026 and beyond."
We started in the 60's and moved the clock to present day, weekly extending what was to become both new Web UX design, as well as "murketing" buzz gen right off the back of his latest solo masterpiece the first release in a long time. - "Album Of The Year, Number One Funkateer."
We ran down this chronological rabbit hole as it tied all the eras of BC's culture relevance to today.
The challenge was- how to do both give a cat like BC who's BEEN a legend for so long his flowers without feeling like a trailer for an obituary, and also achieving new discovery with new audience silos. It dawned on me it should be narrated through the decades, almost in this AI "Uncanny Valley" sweet spot where you could both play up kitch, and cover the basic pillars that would become "new discovery silos" for like- the vinyl hoarding culture sect & collectors who dominate the landscape Gen Z & Millennials.
We ground-swelled R&D in a sprint, and the homie Becka Bishop who was my PA & PM on the Bootzilla Records side, recently obtained by RocNation along with several other "traditional classic legacy labels" was so pivotal in her undying, envelope-pushing & stellar work on the mission. She flawlessly managed the project in ways RocNation didn't even know.
There's levels to the shit- sis knows.
It was all to enter the new brand's digital hub, and from there, years of dev on an immersive world that one could enter via any of the headset goggle brands that you see trust fund douche bags abusing in their Cyber Trucks have. All of the basic while consistently working well past however many hours exist on a clock to basically create a retro afro-futuristic world, Funktropolis.
Bootsy's hand emerging from a throwback Payphone was a direct homage to one his his biggest hits, "What's A Telephone Bill?"
That's enough words. Here's the rest, from tour stops at some of the nation's most iconic record stores that had lines around the corner, and grown ass men weeping to meet BC. Real shit, that was special to experience.
A peak into the Funktropolis-verse, every detail is a call back or nod to something in his career. Shout Bruno Mars.
TOUR APPEARANCES:
Each stop on the Record Store National Tour was more or less embracing the culture of the cities, and"Booty-izing" it by dialing up the surreal. BTW, "Bootsy-izing" -that's surley not a word by Webster's standards. Fuck it, we ball.
NASHVILLE:
THE CHI
ATLANTA
BOOTSY X GAMING
Bootsy Collin's in the latest 2025 Tony Hawk game on all systems- smash hit. Shout my big bro Tim Heslin.
"METAL HEALTH" ERA W. BUCKETHEAD
Concept: Both Bootsy X Bucket are standing back to back in a 80's B - Horror movie cover style. Or something.
TBH - I wasn't all in on that meeting. I just recorded it so I could hear the parts that mattered to me and would listen to later after roasting some Sour and starring at the lighting in my bedroom slowly change soft pastel colors.
Life is full of tiny wonders.
It started with s sketch I cut out, photocopied and placed on lined grid paper to work off of.
The Final Spotify and vinyl album cover- several minutes after it was posted.
And that's the playbook on how to bring back a 70 year old OG that has influenced absolutely everything you know, but don't know its origin. Collins is still the most sampled man in hiphop. He co-created the brilliant Silk Sonic w Anderson Paak & Bruno Mars. hes best friends with Samuel L Jackson and Snoop Dogg, and his Cinci crib's home studio has a lab he calls "Rehab"- cuz music changes the soul in ways no actual rehab can or does.
I would know.
