Fina Dupa

Funk is a dirty word. And it should be: The style was conceived as a grimy, hormone-drenched reaction to the detachment and abstraction of cool jazz. Sadly, few funk practitioners in the decades since the style's heyday have retained that gloriously unwholesome essence of lust and sweat. Nothing drives this point home more painfully than Fina Dupa's seven-song debut, The Booty EP, which will be unveiled on Friday, September 23, at Herman's Hideaway. More the product of an accounting program than a sex machine, the disc substitutes chops for balls as it pounds away with all the soullessness and precision of a piston. Things are only worsened by a horrendous reggae rendering of "Tenderness" that ironically drains any love or subtlety out of the General Public classic. Overall, Booty comes off as the handiwork of a remedial Fishbone with jam-band aspirations -- only more limp and squeaky-clean than even that might imply. Nothing that a quick dip in the trash can won't fix.