Picture this: It’s a Saturday night at Yoshi’s, a restaurant and nightclub in Oakland. You see folks strutting in, decked out in suits with wide lapels and jewel-tone dresses that glimmer like distant stars. Draped in bangles, clutching canes, full-brim hats angled just right.
They’ve come to see ConFunkShun, the R&B group known for fusing funk and soul and pouring out heart-oozing hits like “Love’s Train” and “Straight From the Heart” and “By Your Side.”
It’s a scene out of the 1970s. Except this happened last December.
While fans nibble on Japanese food in the dining room next door, Michael Cooper and Felton Pilate do a sound check in the empty performance room under black-and-gold balloons and a disco ball.
Hailing from Vallejo, Calif., these two original members have been performing for decades. Others have come and gone, but Cooper and Pilate refuse to stop, fueled by a shared history that goes way back before Yoshi’s (est. 1972) existed.
“We became dependent on each other for our survival, and that creates a serious bond,” Pilate says. “If we didn’t play gigs and didn’t sound amazing, we couldn’t pay our rent, so it provided extra inspiration to be the absolute best at what we do. We could not afford to half-step.”
These two men have been whole stepping ever since, a testament to their tenacity, the harmony of their voices and—as science reveals—their brains. Their journey embodies the power and tradition of Black men bonding through music, from blues and jazz bands to gospel quartets and doo-wop to the soul and R&B groups who gave full-chested melodies to feelings that men don’t always have the space to express.
Echoes of that old-school vulnerability carry on. But emotionally expressive singing groups don’t dominate the mainstream charts the way they did in the earlier eras of pop and R&B.
Never Be the Same
The idea that Black men have to be strong and tough manifests “by us not talking or supposedly not being able to talk about our feelings,” says Matthew Oware, chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Richmond, who studies Black masculinity in music.
He’s been a fan of the rap genre ever since he was a teenager, listening to artists like LL Cool J and his favorite emcee, Rakim. His research, published in 2011, focused specifically on rap music and artists who talked about police brutality, racism and street life. While the tough talk flooded the airwaves, ideas of what it means to be a man and longing for connection seeped through rap verses.
Similar to sports, he says, music can chisel away hardened exteriors, allowing men to express a range of emotions out loud.
“Especially in rap music, we could see men express concern, love, joy for other Black men,” Oware says. “Although it may rest on homophobic undertones, there’s still a positive aspect where Black males feel like they can say, ‘I love my boy, I love my man,’ and have that be viewed as something that’s normal.”
He points out the shift away from vulnerability in the ’80s and ’90s, as rap and R&B became more intertwined. Maybe it was hard for singers to be emotionally honest on a track with a rapper talking about women in degrading ways, he says. But beyond any single track, his research showed, record labels have a major influence over how artists present themselves.
“The music label is saying, ‘Wait a minute, this artist sold this much, and they talked about gang violence, or they talked about drug use. Well, if you want us to sign you, you can put that in your music,’” Oware says. “Rap is braggadocio, rap is talking about material aspects, how many women they have. That’s not necessarily the message that was conveyed by Marvin Gaye.”
By Your Side
Despite industry constraints, artists still find areas to inject grief, love and pain on records. Oware recalls Kanye West in his early days when he presented vulnerability in a nuanced way, and how Jay-Z might talk about selling drugs in one track, but open up about regrets in another.
“There are also moments where Jay-Z is talking about cheating on his wife and feeling badly about that,” Oware says. “I think there are spaces and moments where artists can express their vulnerability, but they’re still operating with this capitalistic model of ‘I need to make money, I need to go platinum.’”
Success comes with its own emotional costs. In 1986, when ConFunkShun’s recording contract ended and the group disbanded, Cooper went solo. He remembers those days and the “absolute moments of loneliness.”
“I’m talking about a room full of people, giving autographs and all that stuff and the first thing that pops in my head is, ‘I don’t know anybody here. And damn, I miss being in the band,’” he says before the show in December. “Every ounce of success and happiness was shared by the seven of us. You just feel better when you’re surrounded by people who work together to make that harmony and make that sound.”
During a show in ’93, when Pilate was in attendance, Cooper invited him on stage, and immediately, the magic was back. They’ve been performing together again ever since.
“We just recreated ConFunkShun in 10 seconds,” Cooper says. “As soon as he opened his mouth and I opened my mouth, it was instantly ConFunkShun.”
Sho’ Feels Good to Me
There’s a science behind the magic. Frank A. Russo, professor of psychology at Toronto Metropolitan University, studies the brain benefits of singing. For Black Americans already carrying chronically elevated stress loads, he says, singing can’t erase systemic pressure, but it can offer some release, thanks to two key hormones.
Whether solo or in a group, singing causes cortisol, the stress hormone, to drop, he says, mostly due to regulated breathing.
“When you’re stressed, your breathing tends to be shallow, irregular,” he says. “When you sing, you take this big inhalation, and then over the course of the phrase, you let it out. And then you do it again, so breathing becomes very regular. We increase oxygen into the system.”
Oxytocin, the bonding hormone, released when people make love or when mothers have a baby, also increases, specifically when singing with at least one other person in a low-stress environment.
To test this, Russo conducted an experiment in 2017 in his Science of Music Auditory Research and Technology (SMART) Lab. He divided undergraduate strangers into two teams. One with red pennies, the other with blue. After some bonding activities, he assembled the groups to drum together.
Each individual had on headphones, listening to a soundtrack. In one condition, the blue group drummed to one beat, while the red group drummed to another. In the second condition, everybody drummed to the same beat. In the third, every individual drummed to their own unique beat. After, he measured trust through a money-sharing game with real dollars on the line.
“What we found is that people were more willing to share when we blurred the lines between the two groups,” he says. “When people move together, synchronously, they trust one another more.”
He notes that in a low-stress environment, singing with people you relate to elevates feelings of self-esteem as a group, making individuals feel “less stressed, less stigmatized, less isolated,” he says.
“We’re reminded of our common humanity,” he says. “We’re doing this thing together, and it’s not just me against this crazy world.”
Make It Last
Doing anything together isn’t always easy. There will be tests. For ConFunkShun, one test came early on, when Cooper and Pilate ended up involved with the same girl. Cooper remembers visiting her one late night, calling upstairs to her apartment from a phone booth outside of the gate.
But Pilate was up there.
“When I called up, she said, ‘You can’t come up,’” Cooper recalls, “and I said these words, which a brother would not say: ‘I said, if by chance you would let me just come up and we can talk about this.’ She said, ‘Nope, you can’t come up.’”
Cooper returned home that night, tears flowing, and once inside, he went straight to the reel-to-reel machine to translate the raw pain in real time.
“I’m thinking about exactly what happened, word for word: warm night, can’t sleep, I’m too hurt, I’m too weak,” Cooper says.
He didn’t know it then, but that fracture would lead to the enduring classic “Love’s Train.” (The song found a new generation of listeners after Silk Sonic, the duo of Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak, put their retro-soul spin on it for Valentine’s Day in 2022.) Over four decades later, Cooper says, the song causes fans to scream so loud, the group almost can’t hear themselves play.
So what has kept these brothers together all this time?
“Stubborn,” Cooper says with a laugh.
“We just refuse to give it up,” Pilate adds. “We refuse to let it go.”
That refusal by both men manifests on and off stage. Even in conversation, there’s a certain rhythm to their perspectives, a harmony in how they speak each other’s language.
“I could live in your eyes, find peace with the light shining through,” Pilate says.
“‘I could live in your eyes and find peace with the light shining through,’” Cooper repeats, shaking his head. “It’s like, ‘Okay, I’m done. Turn that off.’”
They laugh.
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Brotherly Love is a six-part digital series about the emotional and social lives of Black men through the science of love.
Funding for this series was provided by UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, as part of its “Spreading Love Through the Media” initiative, supported by the John Templeton Foundation, Acton Family Giving, and Unlikely Collaborators.
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