Slap Bass Equals A Vegetarian Spread?

Well, in a manner of speaking. This Guardian article compares the sound of a slapped bass to Marmite in a "love-it-or-hate-it" sort of way. This kind of discussion hit its heyday more than a few years ago, so it's a little strange to see a mainstream publication pick up the fight again. Especially when it gets some of the facts dead wrong:

• Louis Johnson is thought to have developed the technique in parallel with Larry Graham, or at least shortly afterward. Not to take anything away from Graham, but leaving Johnson out of the discussion is wrong.
• Speaking of Graham, the article claims he developed the technique "simply trying to create a drum-like sound to flesh out the rhythm in the then drummerless Family Stone." He actually did this in a band before Sly put together the Family Stone.
• "The most virtuosic expression" of bass playing? Hardly. Possibly the most unique, but the player most credited with bringing virtuosity to the bass guitar (Jaco Pastorious) slapped nary a lick.
• "The most reviled totem of 1980s musicianship ever"? Your article addresses the inventors of the 70s and the new popularizers of the 90s. In fact, the article mentions only the Power Station (okay, fair enough), Level 42 (yep, Mark King slapped a lot, but the music wasn't terrible), and Mike Watt of the Minutemen (as a GOOD example) as examples from the 80s.
• Calling Rick James "bad" as a qualitative example is dead wrong. DEAD wrong.
• "The point is to create a percussive, loud, buzzing tone, with guitar solo-like techniques of hammer-ons and pull-offs replacing the usual root-note pulse." Yep - unless we're slapping a mile-a-minute, we're just plucking repetitive root notes. I'm not looking for in-depth analysis and transcriptions from the Guardian, but a little more depth would be nice.
• "Slap is an integral component of funk, and its fluid, frenetic, spiralling groove reconnects the artform back to jazz." The first part could be considered truth, although there was funk before slap. And there was jazzy funk before slap. So the second part of the sentence makes no sense, really. Funk is music, slap is a technique used to play music.

Silly. Just silly. Slap when you need to slap, pluck when you want to pluck, pick when you want to pick, and always serve the song. Even if you serve it with Marmite.