When I was going out in the Eighties, you could get your ass kicked if you put on Parliament's "(Not Just) Knee Deep" at a house party. Some DJs wouldn't play that song or "Flash Light," because a fight would start: The crazy motherf*****s at parties would become real crazy. "Knee Deep" was their coming-out music. At damn near fifteen minutes, it was so long and so good, it made you feel like now was the time. For whatever. George Clinton showed me that anything goes: You do what you feel.
It’s no wonder that the Parliament-Funkadelic steez – their music, their concepts, their subject matter, their marketing, their overall otherworldly spaciness – can be detected in everyone from Rick James to Prince to Dr. Dre to Cube to Redman to Snoop to the Red Hot Chili Peppers to OutKast to Sa-Ra. When James Brown died, everyone took a step back and, for one last time, took an honest and pensive estimate of the grandeur of his impact on contemporary music. That impact was so considerable that it was difficult to calculate. One day, but hopefully not too soon, the same will be done for George Clinton and his band of space cadets. This might sound like I’m on some of that good-stuff (that funk) that George and his partners were on when they made albums like Maggot Brain or Funkentelchy vs. Placebo Syndrome; but when the final tallies come in, we might reach the conclusion that no one – not Grandpa James, not Prince not Run DMC, nobody – had greater impact on the music produced over the last 25 years. We’re not just talking about Dr. Dre, whom many consider to be the greatest hip hop producer ever, jacking whole beats or bridges (see “Mothership Connection (Star Child)” and “Let Me Ride”), but OutKast appropriating much of Stankonia’s cosmic vibe from Parliament’s funk mythology or even Prince’s 80s funk-rock hybrid that was an update on Funkadelic’s decidedly gritty version of 70s rock or as they called it “psychedelic funk.”
Cube spoke of the “(Not Just) Knee Deep”, a song that affected those West Coast party-goers in a way that they felt anything could go down and shownuff, synthed-out, getdown groove also borrowed by late 80s peace-keepers De La Soul for the classic “Me, Myself and I” off 3 Feet High and Rising. De La’s joint dropped about 10 years after “(Not Just) Knee Deep” appeared on Uncle Jam Wants You. This was the last truly relevant album by either Parliament or Funkadelic, ending a string of nine monumental years beginning with Funkadelic in ’70.
During this nine-year span, Funkadelic released 11 albums while Parliament dropped nine of their own. The bands were typically comprised of the same members – with additions here and subtractions there – but released the albums on separate labels due (what else?) legal problems with record labels. The two bands also had a distinct sound and distinctly different mythologies. Funkadelic was more along the lines of Sly and the Family Stone or Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsy’s, except the funk was more concentrated. And the word “funk” was used as a catch all for what is good and worthy. Funk was as much an ideology as it was a description of the music. Clinton and Funkadelic used this to comment on the American realities of the 70s. In 1970, on the first track (“Mommy, What’s a Funkadelic?”) of Funkadelic’s self-titled debut, Clinton lays down the foundation: “My name is Funk/I am not of your world/Hold still, baby, I won't do you no harm/I think I'll be good to you.” From that point on, this band – fit with some of the illest musicians of that time: Bootsy Collins, Mike Hampton, Bernie Worrell – produced everything from downright nasty, super-sexual, funked up rock (“I Call My Baby Pussycat”, America Eats Its Young) to the Vietnam-era apocalypse found on Maggot Brain’s finale “War’s Armageddon” where Eddie Hazel uses feedback, ala Hendrix, to simulate chaos.
The world and nation were changing by 1978 and One Nation Under A Groove, considered to be Funkadelic’s finest hour, delivers the funk ideology at its ideal and ambitious peak. It went like this: Funkadelica is a nation ruled by the Funk. The people of Funkadelica are called Funkateers, led by Uncle Jam and they are on a mission to rescue dance music from the doldrums of unFunkiness. On the title track Clinton says, “Here’s my chance to dance my way out of my constrictions.” The funk was a cure-all. And if you’ve been to a wedding, where a DJ must play this song or face lynching, you can see this remedy at work. By this time, the Funkadelic’s sound had began to more closely resemble that of Parliament’s, with the screaming guitars of their early material replaced by a funkier bass guitar and more synthesizer. But in case one forgot that Funkadelic was always there to put funk and soul into what had become considered “rock” music, they included “Who Says A Funk Band Can’t Play Rock?”, a song where the Funkadelic Main Invasion Force puts everyone on notice.
Parliament mythology was much spacier, almost cartoonish. Though several albums, including the ultra funky Chocolate City (an album where Clinton envisions an Afro-American takeover of the White House where Aretha Franklin, Richard Pryor, Muhammad Ali and Stevie Wonder are cabinet members), were released before Mothership Connection (1976), it was on this album where P-Funk mythology really took root and set a blueprint for all subsequent artists to construct their parallel world through music. It goes something like this: Starchild is a divine alien being, who came to earth from the Mothership to bring the holy Funk (the cause of creation and source of energy and all life), to earth. According to The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein (1976), Starchild secretly worked for Dr. Funkenstein, the intergalactic leader of outer space Funk. Dr. Funkenstein is capable of fixing all of man’s ills, because he’s the "big pill". His predecessors had encoded the secrets of Funk in the Pyramids because humans weren’t ready for its existence until the modern era. Starchild’s nemesis appears on Funkentelechy Vs. the Placebo Syndrome (1977). He goes by the name of Sir Nose D’Voidoffunk and talks like his lungs are full of helium. He wants to end the Funk because he’s too cool to dance. He is the master of the Placebo Syndrome, which causes unFunkiness (a combination of stupidity and no dancing) and he wants to put all humans in the state Zero Funkativity. Starchild won’t let this happen and uses his Bop Gun ("Bop Gun Endangered Species”), to achieve Funkentelechy for all mankind. With the Funky powers of the Bop Gun (which is bolstered by the “Flash Light”), Starchild forces Sir Nose to reach Funkentelechy, and find his Funky soul. There’s more, but, you’d be reading all day. It’s better to hear this multi-chapter comedic-drama unfold over the string of Parliament albums released during the latter-half of the 70s. It might very well be the most enthralling bit of fantasy ever put to music.
Clinton’s more recent persona is misleading. He didn’t add the rainbow colored locks until the 80s, as his creative star was beginning to fade. During the 70s, he was a character, but he wasn’t a caricature. Same with Bootsy – he was a weirdo, but he was a hip weirdo. Parliament and Funkadelic would bum-rush a stage – with Clinton descending from a real live spaceship, the Mothership – and from that point on, it’d be sensory-overload. And as much as their live shows crystalized the P-Funk ideologies, their album covers may have done more. Countless artists have talked of the hours they spent studying the covers – not just the music…the covers. Take your pick. Are you intrigued by the woman’s afroed head peaking through the soil on Maggot Brain? Or perhaps you dig The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein with Clinton in a galactic bird suit. Or maybe it was some of Pedro Bell’s psychedelic creations, beginning with Cosmic Slop in 1973. These weren’t the first instances of album covers morphing into album art, but they were some of the first salient examples of album art as important cogs in a band’s overall aura. It is said that Parliament-Funkadelic album covers served the same purpose as music videos do now – they provided visual reinforcement for the sonic mission.
At the core of all this, was the sonic journey. P-Funk was some raw stuff. James Brown was the Funky President. It all started with him. Sly and the Family Stone and Curtis Mayfield were other forefathers. But if you take funk literally as a stench, a foul odor, then we can probably say that P-Funk smelled the worst. Especially once Bootsy came on board in 1972. He and Worrell were almost as important as Clinton, a man that couldn’t read or write music…and couldn’t really sing either. Clinton used to hum rhythms and melodies and then his band of experts would recreate his grunts and moans (similar to what the JBs did for James) into the sinister grooves and pugnacious funk that seeped out of those vinyls during the 70s. In 1976, Funkadelic dropped Hardcore Jollies at the end of September, right around the same time Stevie Wonder released the seminal Songs In the Key Of Life. Amidst a glut of landmark music on Songs In The Key, lies “All Day Sucker” a funky romp about Stevie getting played by a woman. The stutter-step rhythm is strikingly similar to what drummer Jerome Brailey lays down on “If You Got Funk, You Got Style”, a song about a girl who “ain’t a cover girl” and “don’t care about her walk”, but she’s funk and that’s all it’s about. As funky as Stevie’s tune is, this smells much worse, with Boogie Mosson erotic bass, Mike Hampton’s wa-wa guitar and funky refrains like “a-go ‘head, go ‘head.” Ahh, those refrains – another hallmark of Parliament-Funkadelic music, one of their many stamps. They could chant a refrain 20 times in a row for seven minutes. With hooks like those, who needs verses?
And what of the breaks and bridges and general in-and-out nature of P-Funk tunes. Tunes that’d begin with a groove that wreaked, smoldering under some screaming guitar and brass-blasts, only to break into the most majestic of melodies or a chorus with Motown written on it. Throughout it all, there was Clinton, most likely preach-rapping the funk gospel: “For there is nothing that funk will not render funkable/This is Mood De- Control urging all y’all to funk on!”
In 1998, OutKast followed ATLiens with Aquemeni, a classic album that borrowed heavily from the whole notion of Funkentelechy – they’re both abstract states of mind, with the whole intro to Aquemeni pulling whole chapters from Parliament rhetoric and ideology. Stankonia might as well be Funkadelica. They're both fictional places ruled by a music-governed theocracy. Before that, everyone from Dr. Dre to DJ Quik was beat-jacking and hook-snatching up a storm for early 90s West Coast music. There was also a brand of hip hop funk specific to NY-NJ where Eric Sermon, Redman, Lords of the Underground and others produced beats mired in funk and spit lyrics using the word funk in the broad way Clinton did. Dare Iz A Darkside, Redman’s second album, was primarily a vehicle to engage his alter-ego, Funk Doctor Spot, and featured a song entitled “Cosmic Slop”. And in the early 80s, Prince and Rick James went on a brief tour, with each artist labeled as punk-funk, undoubtedly a term used to describe their music which was funk and R&B-based rock or vice versa. From the actual sonic quality of to Prince’s abstract lyrics and James’ use of funk as a double entendre – it was all an ode, of sorts, to Parliament-Funkadelic, which had just wrapped up one of the most prolific decades any group has every had.
Twenty albums! They dropped 20 whole albums from 1970-1979. Half of them are classic or impactful or splendid in some meaningful way. They say Led Zepplin was the greatest band of the 70s. Most popular? Yes. Greatest? We beg to differ.
