Un-Cut Funk?
“Make my funk a P Funk.
I wants to get funked up.
Make my funk a P Funk.
I want my funk uncut.
I want the bomb.
I want the P Funk
Don’t want my funk stepped on.”
There I was young, dumb and naive. I left home in the big city for a small college town on Michigan’s tundra like Upper Peninsula at 17 in 1977 when George Clinton’s Detroit based band The Parliament & Funkadelics, on their Mother Ship Connection road show, was topping the soul music charts with bass guitar thumping dance trans inducing cuts like “Tear the Roof of the Sucker” and “P-Funk, I Wants to Get Funked Up.”
I was a crab with crabs, my freshman year, and one of the group’s tunes, “Funk’n for Fun” on their 1976 album “The Clones Of Dr. Funkenstein,” had a refrain in it that went, “When you see my mother, tell her I’m alright. I’m just funk’n for fun.”
I seriously missed my mama and home and P Funk funked me up completely. Hauntingly there was a background vocal riff that sounded incredibly like my mother’s voice, calling my name when I was a child from a far off distance or from somewhere in the house I grew up in on Detroit’s West side (not far from the small bungalow where the up and coming group once practiced for stardom). I played that song over and over again while I studied astronomy and freshmen composition in my dorm room.
I had just flown the coop, a green horn and desperately trying to make it away from home, but I was homesick too and missed my roots, friends and family left back in Motown. The Mother Ship connection, it would seem, was my connection away from home, my connection to my mother’s ship, soulful, gospel, Motor City music.
George Clinton and his ragtag mob of psychedelic funksters were this young boy’s home away from home, my roots transplanted with me. Oddly, through their star hopping, I came to accept that the Universe was going to be a lot friendlier than I anticipated, and a lot more familiar too. People everywhere loved funk and Detroit’s funk music was going to follow me everywhere. And it has. In the twenty-seven years since leaving home Clinton’s Mother ship has landed its funk in one guise or another everywhere I’ve been.
The genius of George Clinton is his hearing the musical in our everyday life, the TV commercials, the cartoons, the nursery rimes, pop culture, political rhetoric, current events, colloquialisms, street parlance and playing it back to us synchronized with the funk, soul and gospel and the voices and instruments of his often mind altered musicians. Urban drug dealers risk retribution by often ‘stepping on,’ or ‘cutting’ their merchandise by mixing in impurities, (sugar in cocaine, parsley in marijuana, flower in heroin) diluting its potency to reap greater profits. The Mother Starship served up an un-cut funk.
George is the most sampled musician giving a musical beat to today's Hip-Hop.
Recently, I heard the Mother Ship was landing on 42nd street in New York City’s trendy club BB King. (see photo gallery) I had never seen them in concert. Now I wanted to see this maestro of funk and soul music perform while he was still on the planet. George ain’t getting any younger, or any healthier.
I was warned beforehand to expect a different crowd than those with whom I came of age listening to P-Funk. The crowd was much younger than me and a whole lot lighter. 98%percent of those who braved the winter storm to see that performance were young, white and Asian. It was evident by the gyrating hips and fired up blunts that they were as much into the funk as I had been when I was their age. And as he did for me, Clinton’s band decidedly served up for them something familiar -- Rock versions of his strictly funky sound.
Has the funk finally been stepped on?
The long guitar riffs they played, at times, seemed more Led Zeppelin than William Bootsy Collins, a one time Parliament bass guitarist who some people credit as the inventor of ‘Funk’ music. It was Bootsy’s thumb blistering bass ‘thu-wang,’ still added to soul and gospel like songs such as the Staple Singer’s “I Take You There,” The Gap Band’s “Early In The Morning” and Tupac’s “California” that make them easier to find a dance beat and shake your disco booty to. Bootsy birthed Funk, and The Parliament & Funkadelics successfully built a career on it. Their shows even had funk wars between two outlandish characters, Starchild and the Anti-Funkster Sir Nose deVoid-of-Funk, who vows to never dance. He inevitably loses and like everyone in the audience Sir Nose succumbs to the seduction of the beat. (see photo gallery)
The 2005 version of Sir Nose has no body fat, sports wash board abs, and shows more pubic area and gyrating hips than George can get away with now a days.
Now, like George Clinton, Funk music has aged. But will it every die?
In his band’s waning days I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Clinton when we were both getting off an airplane landing in New York from Detroit. We both had aged. He bummed a ride off me into the city from LaGuardia. I thanked him for being the genius he is and for playing such an important role in my development. This was before Hip-Hop discovered him and long before young white rockers revived his funk.
Today the P-Funk All-stars, far from the happy nappy crew of the seventies, are a multicultural mix, with white girls playing violins and singing new funk songs like “Bounce With Me,” and “Never Gonna Tell It,” instead of ghetto glorifying tunes like “America Eats it Young,” and “Nappy Dugout.”
Has the funk finally been cut? Or is it just laced, not weakened but infused, not cheapened, but energized with Rock’s guitar riffs?
With all the contraband shared between crew and audience during the very nice Hip-Hop tune, “Something Stank and I Want Some,” maybe the funk has just been kind of ‘cranked,’—like a methamphetamines, ecstasy, speed cocktail. Judging from the buzzes and glazed eyes on and off stage, there has been little to no diluting of the connection between audience and band, no “Placebo Syndrome,” in effect.
Is the funk that the All Stars serve up for today’s young, more pale concert goers pure? Who's to decide. Hopefully, as long as there are young folks leaving home, star gazing and wanting to dance their way into a trans and, according to George Clinton, “out of their constrictions, “ Sir Nose will continue to give in to the grove, and dance.
The Funkadelics still asks their audience, “Do you promise to funk, the whole funk and nothing but the funk?”
George Clinton, it seems, truly has finally created “On Nation under a groove, getting down just for the funk of it.”
© 2005 Cody Williams