Let Us Now Praise Connie’s “Funky Little Beat”

Some of you know me for Hell of a Hat, the newsletter I started in 2021 to promote my book Hell of a Hat: The Rise of ’90s Ska and Swing. This is something different. It’s a love letter to freestyle music, and if you’re not sure what that is, please check out the introductory article I published last year.

This is pure speculation, but most young people who frequent dance clubs probably aren’t there to find soulmates. More likely, they’re after casual hookups, and more power to them. When the music is thumping and the strobe lights are strobing, the heart takes a backseat to other bodily organs. Because the night belongs to lust, as Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith once said.

So it’s funny that most freestyle songs—which were engineered specifically for the clubs—are about being ridiculously in love. As Judy Torres said in 2022, freestyle “reminds us of a very dramatic telenovela,” and that’s precisely what makes it great. Most of the genre’s classic tunes are sung from the perspectives of young people caught at extreme romantic turning points. They’ve either just met or just lost the loves of their lives, and they need the whole world to hear about it.

And then there’s Connie’s “Funky Little Beat,” the exception that proves the rule. This light and fluffy 1985 single is all about dancing with someone at a party and wanting to get to know them better—nothing more, nothing less. Connie doesn’t exert herself as she sings lyrics like, “Breath to the rhythm as I stared at the way you moved/Lots of class as you stomp and grind,” and the drums cruise at a chill, after-hours tempo. Best of all is the synth line, a strange, vaguely hopeful riff closer to Talking Heads’ 1983 masterpiece “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)” than to anything in the freestyle canon.

“Funky Little Beat” has an unassuming sweetness that adds to its listenability. Anytime is a good time to play “Funky Little Beat.” The song wasn’t a massive Billboard chart success, but it’s beloved in freestyle circles, and in California—3,000 miles from where it was written and recorded—it’s a full-on anthem.

As is often the case in freestyle, Connie is a one-hit wonder. Born Consuelo Piriz in Miami and raised in the nearby suburb of Hialeah, Connie fell in love with singing and performing when she was seven or eight years old. The daughter of a Cuban father and Ecuadorian mother, she spent her early years listening to everyone from Celia Cruz to Dean Martin. The young showbiz hopeful competed in beauty pageants and talent contests and enrolled in drama club in junior high, hoping it would cure her shyness. Which it did.

As she grew older, Connie came to love Donna Summer, Michael Jackson, and Diana Ross. In college, she went around to area studios looking for work as a singer. A few producers offered to make her a demo for $2,000, but she didn’t have that kind of money. She became jaded—so much so that when her brother, who worked for a Miami radio station, told her about an opportunity to audition for a local producer, she initially hesitated to call the phone number. She’d been burned before. Why should this be any different?

But then Connie found out the studio was owned by Henry Stone, the legendary music mogul who founded TK Records and helped to launch Miami heroes KC and the Sunshine Band, among countless others. She scheduled an audition and met with Amos Larkins, producer and co-writer of “Funky Little Beat.” (Stone’s wife, Inez, is the other credited writer.) Connie sang a little for Larkins and took a stab at recording the song’s chorus. At one point during the audition, Henry Stone—eventually credited as the track’s executive producer—came in and watched her, but he left without saying anything. Two weeks later, they called Connie back in to record the whole song. She did a few takes, and shortly thereafter, they had her back to sing it one more time.

Satisfied with the results, the producers told Connie they were going to release the song locally, then nationally. “I’m listening to all of this, and I’m like, yeah, right,” Connie told the podcast Old School Rewind. But sure enough, Miami’s WEDR began playing “Funky Little Beat.” At first, it was just in the background of a commercial for the seafood restaurant Captain Crab’s, but then the station put the song in heavy rotation. Other stations followed suit, and before long, stations in California and Texas were spinning “Funky Little Beat.”

Connie has described “Funky Little Beat” as more Miami bass than freestyle. While that may be true, the song transcends genre and region. It opens with the beat—steady hi-hats and syncopated kicks—followed by that warm, chipper synth figure, which welcomes everyone to the party. This isn’t a track that seeks to overpower or intimidate. When Connie starts singing, she never raises her voice. She’s at a club or a house party where the action has spilled out onto the street, and one coordinated fellow has grabbed her attention.

I like that move, boy, you’ve got that groove

Rockin’ in the streets to this funky beat

Whereas a lot of freestyle amounts to young people playacting an exaggerated version of grown-up romance—that telenovela thing Judy Torres talks about—“Funky Little Beat” retains a degree of teenage innocence. Here’s Connie in the second verse, trying to coax her bashful crush out of his shell.

Two o’clock, the party’s still goin’ and

All my friends, they’re ready to go

You turn around, oh, I smile at you

That’s when you shy down

Forget just what you want to do

Connie doesn’t get mad at the guy. On the third verse, a spoken-word version of the second verse, Connie is only lightly exasperated as she says, “I give you all these clues/And you still don’t know what to do.” She’s hopeful she and this guy will get together, but she’s not really sweating it either way.

Onstage in the mid-’80s, Connie wasn’t quite as innocent. “I try to project a very sexy, very aggressive and kind of evil woman on stage, while the actual Connie is very shy and quiet,” she told Daily Sundial, the student newspaper at California State University, Northridge, in 1985. “But I do it with good taste. I’m naughty with my gestures. I’m not that naughty with my mouth.”

Connie wound up releasing a self-titled full-length album in 1986 featuring “Funky Little Beat” and seven other great tunes that feel young and nocturnal. The moody “Fire In My Heart” is a standout, but “Rock Me,” backed with “I Can’t Stop,” became the second single. As Connie remembers, the label promoted “Rock Me” on the West Coast and “I Can’t Stop”—featuring male vocals on the hook, not unlike Shannon’s “Let the Music Play”—on the East Coast. “Experience,” a straight-up dance-pop song you can imagine Madonna singing, was the third single.

“Then everything came to a halt,” Connie told The Freestyle Channel. It was the usual music-biz fuckery. She was locked in a contract with her label, and she couldn’t do anything. She went through a period of depression but eventually got married, had kids, moved away from South Florida, and started a life away from the industry.

But Connie kept on making music. In 1995, she released the album No Tears, comprising five rock-solid freestyle tracks, a couple of hip-hop-flavored R&B tunes, and a cover The Delfonics’ 1967 Philly soul staple “La-La (Means I Love You.)” In 2006, with reggaeton all the rage, Connie returned with the genre exercise Let’s Party (Estilo Reggaeton). Connie reunited with Amos Larkins in 2015 for Amos Larkin Presents Connie Party Time 1, a collection of new dance jams built around various types of clubby beats.

All of these are fun listens, but Connie remains best known for “Funky Little Beat,” which she performs regularly at freestyle nostalgia shows. Onstage, she often features breakdancers as a tribute to the B-boys who helped to make freestyle what it was back in the day. “Funky Little Beat” is like a house party on a warm summer night that’s lasted four decades.

“They describe a few of us as the pioneers,” Connie told Cali Scenes TV in 2012. “I can honestly tell you I just enjoyed every minute of it. I was in the right place at the right time. I have just been riding the wave, baby.”