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.