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!