George Clinton never died

there’s no mistake that the early music was hard. In stark contrast to their later cartoonish space-freak image, the band looked and sounded as earthy as the dirt on the cover art for Maggot Brain. Funkadelic were bad motherfuckers. They shared management and stages with the other ‘bad boys of Detroit’ – Ted Nugent & the Amboy Dukes, MC5, and The Stooges. Their management even cooked up a marriage between George and Iggy Pop as a publicity stunt. Iggy was probably relieved that it was never followed through. ‘He could have been my wife’, tittered Clinton. (…) Funkadelic’s unique relationship with white rock ‘n’ roll started when they had borrowed amps from Vanilla Fudge. They were so pleased with the high volume that they immediately got their own. Like Jimi Hendrix and Sly and the Family Stone, they reclaimed rock music as their own. (…) By 1970′s Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow, Funkadelic sounded as if they had absorbed some of MC5′s aggression and The Stooges’ decadent nihilism. They continued their critiques of capitalism and booty-liberation theology, but instead of the blues, Free Your Mind‘s title track showcased lysergic-drenched noise, with Bernie Worrell’s slavering, distorted three-note organ riff similar to Velvet Underground’s Sister Ray.

With time, the hard-work funk ethics of James Brown came more and more into play, and the psychedelic distortion and acid noise of the first albums took the back seat as the line between Funkadelic’s and Parliament’s identities blurred. The albums got more concentrated and funkier, and funkier, reaching a pinnacle with One Nation Under A Groove in 1978. As the album name suggests, the lyrics and concepts had moved closer to black nationalism (a course that took a later generation of black musicians a lot further. It is also interesting to note that the evangelic SF imagery is a central element not just in the Parliament’s completely masterful Mothership Connection, but also in the mythology of Nation Of Islam – and The Church Of Scientology).

As the eghties drew nearer, the P-Funk-army got more involved in the war against disco, which shows up in both confrontative song titles and in the music itself (it was getting polished). Funk was becoming more and more difficult to play. The times were changing. Cocaine replaced acid, and the quality of music declined. In the disco-era, what else could you do but sell your soul to the placebo syndrome and start smoking death instead of sweating away death under the powerful groove from A Fully Operational Mothership.

The pioneering work of the funk-tribes had however been accomplished. With Uncle Jam Wants You they passed the legacy onto the next generation. Not long after, Uncle Jam’s Army of pioneering hip hop-DJs was formed in Los Angeles, with Egyptian Lover sent out on a mission to once again reclaim the pyramids. On his solo release Computer Games from 1982 Clinton passes the torch to Afrika Bambaataa with the chant “like Planet Rock, we just don’t stop“: Planet Rock was released the same year, and a new world of music was born. Another generation took over. Once again black music was taken out of the clubs, into the urban landscape. Once again the sound in the parks was rough and raw, not smooth and polished. A rich foundation had been layed for the future of funk, and hiphop-producers gathered the ammunition needed for the oncoming battle. The apocalyptic Bring-The-Noise-eclecticism of Funkadelic was essential in The Bomb Squad‘s revolutionary Wall Of Sound-technique, while the beautifully bouncing booty-bass and slick arrangemnets of Parliament lives on in the productions of Dr. Dre, DJ Quik, Organized Noize, and many others.

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