Is P-Funk part of Nature? Part 1 – Funkdom Dogectivity

Throw your ball I’ll run and chase it
Fetch you the newwwwspaper
Treat me good, I’ll do you tricks
I’m in need I’ll catch a fix
Love me ’til I’m in your favor
I said a dog is man’s best friend!
I said a dog is girl’s best friend!
Oh a fox, can be foxy
And brother wolf, he’s the guy
Shootin straight through the woods and ate, grandma
But a dog is a dog
Is a dog is a dog
Unlike the wolf who’d make a widow out of grandpa
I’m liable to save a life to you baby when you’re lost out in the snow
I’ll be like Santa Claus, so don’t be dissin
Say you sho’ can use some snow
Provin dog is man’s best friend
Ohh milkbones for milk y’all
Make me stick my nose in there
And see who do I smell, ahahahaha!

Unlike Detroit alumni Iggy, George-as-dog isn’t really a signifier of a master/slave relationship. He’ll be playfully subservient but only cos it gets him off (one thinks of the above quoted lyrics from Man’s Best Friend or Standing on the Verge’s classic indecent urolagniac proposal ‘Hey lady, won’t you be my dog, And I’ll be your tree, And you can pee on me!’), and domination doesn’t give him the horn either clearly. His ideal is too egalitarian for that.  As usual ‘nature’ is used to differentiate so-called ’instinct’ from a socially derived ‘intelligence’ (eg. good sense).  In George’s work bodily functions, sexual urges, psychological tics and a range of other ‘social bullshit’ are alluded to in jokes, asides and catchphrases on the lyrical level to which the sound world of their rubbery and experimental funk is the perfect vehicle. They coalesce to form a modernist reflection on what it is to be human.

Now saying that lust and physical desire is a wonderful part of life but can also lead to you to some grief isn’t exactly original. However Clinton’s take on it comes from a characteristically idiosyncratic angle. People-as-dogs was always going to be a good metaphor for P-Funk to tackle the subject of the libido - animal instinct or social programming?  The ‘Atomic Dog’ is the ‘dawg’ of slang but one who’s all to aware of the truisms about how the sexual imperative distorts and interferes with other areas of life. Though George’s persona is too genial to be a ghetto fabulous MacHeath the comparison is worthwhile:

Brecht - They’re all the same in meeting love’s confusion
Poor noble souls get blotted in illusion
The one who swore he could escape the clinches
Who is it that entangles him, wenches
It fain resists their lush authority
Before him stands his old dependency

George - Like the boys
When they’re out there walkin’ the streets
May compete
Nothin’ but the dog in ya

Why must I feel like that
Oh, why must I chase the cat

Nothin’ but the dog in me

All the heavy panting, barking and howling are just the icing on the cake. P-Funk always make the music sound like the subject matter. Once again proof towards the conclusion that the P-Funk oeuvre is an Gesamtkunstwerk of imaginative expression of their obsessions and notions.

These tales of ‘dogs and bitches’ perhaps always were always going to do no favours for women’s liberation considering the gross sexism in society but I do believe that Clinton was mostly just trying to be realistic about sexual desire and to cut through the puritan bullshit that marked the era of his youth and was a making attempted comeback as the protestant Christian right regrouped after their ideological rubbishing in the sixties. If he speaks of bitches then they’re no better or worse than dogs but just following their libido like their ‘posed ta do. It’s certainly quite distant from hip-hops later utterly misogynistic use of the word. George counters puritan scorn and holier than thou empty platitudes though sometimes by adopting a rather Nietzschean pose suggesting that we are just a bunch biological drives fighting it out within our physiology. Though coming from a left-wing perspective this is an idea traditionally associated with the political right, suggesting as it does that a fight for an equal society is undermined by human nature. Thus in America Eats its Young’s’ ‘Biological Speculation’ the band sings -

We’re just a biological speculation
Sittin’ here, vibratin’
And we don’t know what we’re vibratin’ about

And the animal instinct in me
It makes me wanna defend me
It makes me want to live when it’s time to die 

However, this tendency is offset by the band’s ever-present political and social radicalism, ‘Biological Speculation’ continues -

Y’all see my point? (y’all see my point?)
Some of you, you might not be aware
That some of us don’t eat
Some of you don’t, you don’t even care

An individualist reading is more convincingly undermined by their music itself sounding like a liberated, collective and joyful process. Nothing is more alien to P-Funk than the concept of the self-interested individual - the idea that underpins all bourgeois philosophy and ideology - for the funk mob we rise or fall together. If it sometimes takes aim at human weakness it’s less a Nietzschean thing and more a sigh and a smile that our high ideals have been brought back to ground by material limitations that may be transcended in different circumstances.

The late concept album ‘Dope Dogs’ uses human/dog metaphors to make witty and sagacious comment on law enforcement, drug dependency, wage labour, personal relationships and sexism, as well as the usual polymorphous perversity and politics. ‘US Custom Coast Guard’ is about cocaine addicted drug sniffing dogs while taking aim at drug prohibition and the geostrategic objectives behind the State Department’s ’War on Drugs’. A particularly memorable line goes ’Old Mac Uncle had some drugs, CIA-IO, And with those drugs he bought some arms …. Old Mac Uncle starts a war! CIA-IO’.

So is Man and/or P-Funk part of nature? George is too wise for such binary thinking. He knows the answer is both yes and no. How else can one take his oft-quoted observation about our battle between instinct and intelligence. The path of human life is a mediation between nature, that is what we are physically and what we have in the world (the resources and processes of the planet), and the society we have built using these things that gives us a (social) conciousness that is part of our physical self but much more again. If you don’t think that’s there in the music you’re not listening deep enough!

Right To Be Lazy

Let us be lazy in everything, except in loving and drinking, except in being lazy. – Lessing

(Also, can you think of a single instance when a capitalist would want you barefoot?)

…why thus cudgel your brains to work out an ethics the practice of which you dare not counsel to your masters? Your dogma of work, of which you are so proud, do you wish to see it scoffed at, dishonored? – LaFargue

Blacks Can’t Swim?

The above ahistorical pseudoscience and it’s ilk needs not just scholarly rebuttals

RIP Garry Shider

Garry Shider, Starchild, Diaperman, dead at 56. One of the greatest figures in music history is no more.

Garry Shider embodied everything good about P-Funk - his eccentricity, outrageousness and childlike sense of unrepressed fun shone through every time you watched him perform or speak.  His talents as a musician are self-evident and I don’t feel the need to recount the oft-told tale of how he came to the band but it needs to be reiterated that this man co-wrote some major songs ‘One Nation Under a Groove’, ‘Uncle Jam’, ‘Oh, I’, Let’s Take It To The Stage’ ‘Night Of The Thumpasorous Peoples’, ‘Unfunky UFO’, ‘Bop Gun’, ‘Atomic Dog’ amongst others. That he was one of the few major P-Funkers to remain a constant in the line-up since the heyday is surely an indication of how much he identified with the overall aesthetic project of the band. His importance to and identification with George’s general intellectual project cannot be overestimated, for instance who else would be Clinton’s co-writer on two of Funkadelic’s most  disgusting and deepest statements of purpose and intent Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis Enema Squad and Icka Prick. He was George’s most trusted comrade-in-arms when it came completely undermining the rules of repression they call civilization.

By all accounts a man of great kindness and love, Garry Shider of course wore a diaper onstage for the entirety of his career, perhaps one of P-Funk’s most lasting impression in the conciousness of millions. Who else of such great talent would take themselves so unseriously to happily look that foolish. And who else would take their project so seriously to offer themselves as a symbol of the great values of this music – cosmic silliness, childlike openness, polymorphous acceptance, absolute equality and fun. And it always looked like fun for Garry. To a life that deserves all the applause the future can give it. Love ya Starchild.

Xgau on Clinton

Robert Christgau on a mid-80′s solo George compilation compared to his earlier masterpieces “it’s totally lacking in epistemological integrity, and if you think that’s a ridiculous thing to say about a funk album, you’ve got placebo syndrome–George knows what I’m talking about, and without a dictionary”

Idealism and Panpsychism in the bombed out embers of Black Power

When Norman Whitfield turned the Tempts funk it was the best recognition that Motown politic had become out of step with a Black America that had seen Detroit burn, Bobby Searle gagged and bound in the courtroom and the two greatest leaders of the African-American peoples assassinated.  The focus on the urban ghetto was natural as the positivity of civil rights movement gave way to heroin, Nixon and Vietnam draft tours of duty. Sly gave Funk and Soul its first radical political icon. It was a stroke of genius to send The Temptations, classic Motown’s greatest male group, to the inner city to reflect on the state of Black America. As one who as always found Curtis Mayfield a bit too programmatic and pat those early 70s Temptations funk records -  operatic yet with more forward motion than a northbound train - sum up that year zero after detroit from the point of view of the man, or the kid, of the sixties who really thought things were on the up, and the one who never believed they would. Where Mayfield (a wonderful artist no doubt) could only give us Curtis’ preachers lament The Temptations, Whitfield and lyricist Barrett Strong gave us a kaleidoscope of black male perspectives totally fictional and plausible.

It was around this time, decisively influenced by Sly Stone, the Temptations and the whacked-out Detroit rock like The Stooges and MC5 that George Clinton decided to give the talented kids backing his go nowhere soul band The Parliaments the musical initiative. No doubt vibing off the same buzz as Norman Whitfield he took the new venture in characteristically left field territory- hard drugs, ghetto slang, occultism and escapism. If a seriously unfunky German professor who probably wouldn’t have endorsed wearing diapers on stage or acid eating contests was correct in suggesting that ‘the veiled tendency of calamity of society cons its victims in the false revelation, in the hallucinatory phenomenon. They hope, in vain, that its fragmentary obviousness will enable them to look at the total doom in the eye and withstand it’. Then maybe that’s one reason why the band that a few years earlier in the upturn of social struggle were writing doowop and slighty left-field motown-alike ballads were now letting the Satanists of the Process Church of the Final Judgment write its liner notes. It’s as if the breaking of the sixties dream still left a tendency for antinomianism however deranged. It is probably necessary to say that the main plank of Funkadelic philosophy is the problem of naturalism – that of what is man’s place in nature – but I shall deal with that in a longer post in the future – so I just wish to note some more specific observations about early Funkadelic and their times.

The first (self-titled) album it is already notable that for a fully fledged aesthetical escapism. This band certainly didn’t care for the light approach to the popular druggy surrealism prevalent in rock and harder soul at that time. Despite talk of joints rolled in toilet paper and ham in corn flakes the album sounds extremely dark and foreboding. The first track, such a great introduction to the overall aesthetic of the band, is the classic ’Mommy, What’s a Funkadelic’ (answer: someone from North Carolina who saw eternity on acid and tried to contain it within a groove). It’s George Clinton’s first outing of using alter ego’s and fictional personalities, his announcer style patter later perfected on ‘Mothership Connection’ and ‘Funkentelechy’ this time as somebody called ‘Funk’ from another planet wanting the listener to come with him. The perfect little guitar figure is the take off point for some stretched out jamming under a great nonsense vocal line and a Clinton’s dirty come-on innuendo. ‘What is Soul’ similarly finds a groove that’s pleasurable and sticks with it, it’s a slow burning foot tapping piece with guitar and harmonica fighting it out for funky supremacy.

The second Funkadelic album ‘Free Your Ass… and Your Mind Will Follow’  is even more out there. The great title perfectly sums up the bands idealism (in both senses) in a beautifully concise phrase (though perhaps a materialist should reconfigure it to ‘Free Your Ass… and Your Mind Will Follow’, or even ‘With the Correct Ass / Mind Praxis You Could Be Free’) that without realising it takes conventional (that is to say the dominant) idealist thinking about human liberation to its nonsensical end point. Alongside that line we also get the group chanting Clinton’s classic line of being ‘Free from the need to be free’ and Tolstoy’s (?) ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is Within’ accompanied by jive talk, screams and stoned Hazel guitar work in a dirge that becomes more funky as it goes on. The many singers seem to be on the same page and the music is tight and addictive but the chatter and odd noises have a alienating effect too. Needless to say the result is pretty disturbing, utterly suggestive of a bunch of people trying to get away from social tumult even if their own minds (via chemicals means) is the only place to go. As often in George Clinton’s work subjective idealism is mixed with notions of togetherness and community –  even when he edges towards solipsism he knows the only life is social life. In a way it sounds (if in form not content) reminiscent of some ceremony or religious ritual. There is an odd formalism to the monotony of the drums and keyboards counterposed to the soaring fuzzed-out guitar. The static alongside the ecstatic, the later necessitated by the presence of the former – a musical metaphor for the need for illusions in a painful world. Like the even more bizarre final track ‘Eulogy and Light’ which features the Lord’s Prayer read to electronics and feedback, the result sounds like a bunch of people who having lived with the reality decided that black America of 1970 was the last place they wanted to be. As if the decadent abyss was more desirable than the world they lived. If Detroit was a heartless world then music was the opium of Funkadelic with acid probably one of many enablers.  These overall impression of these two albums can only be said to be that of a strange hedonism – essentially represented by the pace and repetition of the music - one that is the only adequate escape from the social misery and claustrophobia palpably expressed by the way the music itself sounds.

Maggot Brain, 1971, is a less downbeat album featuring a few top-notch soul and rock tunes, including the beautiful socially wise ’Can You Get to That’, the hard rocking cautionary tale ‘Super Stupid’ and the great ‘You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks’ a class conscious defence of interracial love. However,  Funkadelic still deliver one of their weirdest and most crazed pieces of music ever. Whilst the subject matter of Vietnam takes it away from the escapist mysticism of the previous long form jams the treatment is characteristically bizarre enough to warrant note of kinship. The dirty funk groove ’Wars of Armageddon’ truly looks doom in the eye. The syncopated drumming, keyboards mixing chords with licks and fills, scratchy rhythm guitar and high-pitched soloing  are mixed with screaming, mock protests chants (More power to the pussy!), tannoy announcements and weird noise effects. It’s like a veteran back home still living in the thick of battle inside their head, like splicing the dissent at home with the violence abroad. War is truly a madhouse here.

The final puzzle piece are Eddie Hazel’s long virtuoso guitar solos that are usually given a programmatic subject by way of a George Clinton ‘sermon’ (monologue), the most famous being ’Maggot Brain’:

Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time
For y’all have knocked her up.
I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe
I was not offended
For I knew I had to rise above it all
Or drown in my own shit

  

 Whilst ‘America Eats It’s Young’ proclaims

 

A luscious bitch she is, true
But it’s not nice to fool mother nature
The proud mother of god like all ho’s
Is jealous of her own shadow
So who is this young Vic Tanny bitch
Who wish to be queen for a day?
Who would sacrifice the great grandsons and daughters
Of her jealous mother
By sucking their brain
Until their ability to think was amputated
By pimping their instincts
Until they were fat, horny and strung-out
In her neurotic attempt to be queen of the universe
Who is this bitch?

While ‘Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts’ drops the fuzzed out tone for a clearer sound and more mystical message

The oak sleeps in the acorn
The giant sequoia tree sleeps in its tiny seed
The bird waits in the egg
God waits for his unfoldment in man
Fly on, children
Play on

You gravitate to that which you secretly love most
You meet in life the exact reproduction of your own thoughts
There is no chance, coincidence or accident
In a world ruled by law and divine order
You rise as high as your dominant aspiration
You descend to the level of your lowest concept of your self
Free your mind and your ass will follow

Needless to say these silly lines are just a runway it’s the music that takes you off to the heavens. These solos sound like an organic process. The way each guitar line evolves from the last is reminiscent of both the processes of nature and of associative thought. So it’s hardly surprising that George Clinton thought to present them as metaphors for nature and conciousness. However this is not just a sonic representation of abstract natural processes but also devastatingly emotional music. A lament for the pain and suffering in the world. This where Funkadelic’s retreat from reality reaches its peak in panpsychism. Finally the results of social inequality and oppression are naturalised, nature becomes one and all phenomena are themselves at the whim of the cruel necessity of its workings. Artistic lament is the only escape. Philosophical idealism reaches its logical conclusion - go with the flow and be taken where the world wills you. However it is not the world’s will but specific historical forces, class forces, that make and remake the world we live in.

So these early records Funkadelic show us a dialectic of the conciousness of a defeated side in a social struggle. The bitter fruits of the dream deferred is a regression in conciousness. Where outrage at injustices go from being a call to arms to a running away. The thought of ultimate defeat so terrible that victory itself becomes a chimera. However, artistically it makes for a breathless summation of a point in time and timeless music for the heart. Later both Parliament and Funkadelic would reconvene with a different, still radical, politics of pleasure but this early work makes for a thrilling, frightening tour of the bombed out acid-fried fag-end of the radical conciousness and social revolution of the USAs 1960s.

Guerrilla Funk

Paris’ Guerilla Funk from 1994 is a beautiful little G-funk gem, a little bit faster tempo than the Dre/Snoop classics and all the better fo it. Paris is definitely one of the better rappers around, adding a bit of black militancy to the party friendly on the one sound of west coast early 90s rap was always going to be a winner - a defiant political attitude when getting your groove on is spiritually and politically liberating sui generis. The basis of the song is (not just) Knee Deep obviously.

Funk is fun – Bootsy Collins

‘ Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness’ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Perhaps the best thing about Bootsy Collins’ music and persona is his sense of fun. The ridiculous multi-characterisation of himself mocks so many ’serious’ musicians claims to tortured artistry as little more than ego. The joy of witty and silly but intelligent self-expression is what Collins is about. Though there is a playful self-aggrandisement in the way the songs big himself up as a lover or a (bass) player, it is with irony that so we know that that’s not the point. To me, at least, it seems to say ‘who are any of us anyway, lets just be who we want’. And it’s completely absent of the braggadocio that marred late hip-hop.

The man himself says he’s got a cartoon mind and makes elastic music - the band was consciously marketed toward younger P-funk fans - and his work does have something of animators like Chuck Jones and Tex Avery about it. He shows how human passions make and distorts personality. How obsessions are exhilarating and scary. Unacademic but endlessly intelligent in an associative organic way, like his great collaborator Clinton he uses wordplay, jokes and asides rather than poetics to tease out links and contradictions. These things, however, just are the finishing touches - it’s the music,  bouncing along funky, funny and fluid reminiscent of the comedy that is both the human body and human condition, that makes it great.

The up-tempo funkers on the first three albums are among the best of the genre but the long sex ballads are justly famous too. Songs like ‘What’s a Telephone Bill?’,  ’Munchies for your Love’ and ‘May the Force be with You’ are little paeans of love and desire animated by a contemporary lexicon of pop culture and puns. Cannabis cunnilingus, Star Wars gags and obscene phone calls all figure as Bootsy maps out how he would like to get down in immediate terms as the music slinks and bubbles like a libidinal gunge slurping out of the speakers. It is rare and lovely to hear such sentiments free of true love idealism or crass misogyny.

Few artists are as completely unserious while being so pathbreaking, the character is not him but a projection on the world of an ideal. His subject is not taking life seriously being upbeat about men and women, culture and music, love and sex. It has a clearly physical disposition matched with an inquisitive intelligence. The music is more than illustrative of this it embodies it with claymation flexibilty, the great horn charts providing exclamation. The tunes bump along whilst Bootsy offers his best puns and personas – from the electrician who wants to fix your socket to the Hollywood actor fluffing his lines in the love scene, from the childrens toy with magnetic rump receptors to the funk Robin Hood who ‘robs from the rich and gives to poor li`l ol` me’.

Note to everyone in the world: be more like Bootsy!

You Scared the Lovin’ Outta Me

Apparently there’s a place in france where the ladies wear no pants. This seems a delightful thought, though no doubt if true sensitive souls would feel at least a little nervous as the plane touched down in Nice. Love may be a wonderful thing – and a route of personal survival for sure – but surely only the naïve or the most dead-brained conformist doesn’t find it a little scary. The emptiness, obsession, feelings of being used, abandonment, physical insecurity, fear of contact and intimacy are all the general currency of personal relations in our alienated age. So while artists, especially in rock or soul, will address the sorrow of love not so many will address the fear.
As we grow up we are sent a million signals of how to act in matters of the heart and body, you only need to open a magazine to see the  fearmongering, moralising and double standards: The objectification of women’s bodies combined with accusatory prurience. Sexual health issues treated as excuse for censorious panic. A focus on performance and physical perfection that comes close to the abuse of the young and insecure. It’s no wonder people get screwed up. The gap between the sold ideal and the social reality is a major incubator of psychological difficulties. 

Of course this blackmail, in service of power and profit, affects us all differently – we all stand in slightly different positions and this ideology (for that is what the sum of parts amounts to) is mediated in different ways and forms to us. Our different experiences and histories give us a specific reading, though it is a testament to the power and malignancy of the message, and the ubiquity of social life, that our stories are so similar. This song isn’t about that of course, but music should salve your wounds whilst being approximate and non-specific. You can have the love scared out of you, even if you thought you were above such neurosis, and I’d like to thank George, Gary and Glen for saying it.

The vocal arrangement of this song is particularly wonderful with the gang putting on some squeaky greenhorn voices and goofing around with some lustful longing moans. While the main riff (from ‘Streets of Cairo’) hits just the right anxious pathos.

Chant Songs #1 – Night of the Thumpasorus Peoples

Awesome live version

Chant songs are a staple of the Parliament-Funkadelic oeurve. These songs work in a simple way, take a liberatory, gratuitous or outrageous slogan and chant it until it takes on a new meaning of profound incantation, worthy of a ceremony at the dawn of Rabelaisian socialism. P-Funk was always a mixture of idealism and materialism, the philosophical idealism of their aspirations (‘Free your mind and your ass will follow, the kingdom of heaven is within’, ‘Free from the need to be free’) was mixed with sexual/scatological obsession and liberatory politics. The apparent gap between lyrical reference to bodily functions, bass heavy music that compels you to shake something and quasi-spiritual egalitarian/utilitarian intention (‘Funk is whatever you need it to be to get off’) is actually George Clinton’s contribution of the rubbishing of Cartesian dualism. Music writing often gets bogged down in a discussion of the lyrically literal as if that explained social use. However it is the the way things sound or our attendant physical and intellectual reaction to them that is the major way one finds value in good music. Lyrics should deepen and contextualise this notion. Is it worth noting when you consider great chants in the P-funk oeurve how in just a few songs that have little more than half a page of lyrics between them, the group completely transcends both the both the singer-songwriter confessional tradition, which relegates music to accompaniment of lyrical self-expression (which usually consists of little more than sub-literary cliche) and the chic so–called social observation of vapid poseurs of the Bowie mould. Far from being an attempt at the transcendental as some have argued they represent communal experience of a corporeal and sensual nature.

Night of the Thumpasorus Peoples predates the KLF’s idea of using daft notions of primitive and tribal cultures to create a communal music aesthetic. In this this track scatological keyboard squelches and incredibly heavy bass rumblings puts the focus right back on the body, subverting the mysterious, ecstatic guitar line. Again, the music mixes both forms and ideas that evoke both idealistic and materialistic feelings, melding them together to make a work of art that tells you to dance and think. Thumpasorus Peoples chant goes ‘gaga-googa gaga-googa-gaga-goo-gaga’ but rather than suggesting naivity in the cradle it says ‘unlearn what you’ve been taught since you chanted gaga-googa’. The counterposed voices at different times and pitches make it a hymn to the mystery of autonomous intelligence. A celebration of social life and togetherness that shows up avant-miserablist ‘free-thinkers’ for the conformists they are, having fallen hook, line and sinker to an bourgeois ideological individualist aesthetic.