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!
