George Clinton never died

Ever since the mothership of Parliament-Funkadelic went under the radar in the disguise of The P-Funk All-Stars, Clinton hasn’t been the same, and releases bearing his name have mostly been thrown together without class. Atomic Dog was, of course, the shit, but besides that he has rarely shined like in the seventies. Two moments are worth the mention, though.

Just out of jail, and with both Dr. Dre and George Clinton on his side, U Cant C Me is as relentless and triumphant as we ever saw Tupac Shakur. This is one of his hottest tracks, much owing to Clinton’s idiosyncratic adlibs and Dre’s gloriously perfected p-funk (the beat is so large that it doesn’t matter that its skeleton is identical to Snoop Doggy Dogg’s Who Am I). When the Clinton spaces the funk out on Synthesizer from Outkast’s critically-hugged-to-death Stankonia it’s another beautiful moment. But in recent years, solid contributions have been missing, and you would suspect that Mr. Clinton have been paying more attention to the crack-pipe than to the microphone. A friend even had the nerve to inform me of his demise some years ago, a piece of bad news that a quick googling could refute; in fact, he had a new album out. And he put in his input on that Wu-Tang Clan-album.

How does he do it? Perhaps George Clinton is a perpeteum mobile, an alien, cyborg machine that “just don’t stop“, defying physics and AA meetings. In a way the essence of Funk: bodies defying the laws of gravity, shaking, getting it on, grooving for hours and hours and years and years. It’s mind-blowing to see sixty-year-olds like James Brown blasting the same shit on stage as forty years ago. Funk aint slack. You gotta sweat if you wanna have fun. If you want your spot in the sun, you gotta be on some hot shit. On the other hand, if you got funk, you got style.

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