The P-Funk mythology is a group of recurring characters, themes, and ideas primarily contained in the output of George Clinton's bands Parliament and Funkadelic. This "funkology" was outlined in album liner notes and song lyrics, in addition to album artwork, costumes, advertisements, and stage banter.Bauer, Kurt. "The Mothership Connection: Mythscape and Unity in the Music of Parliament", Folklore Forum. November 22, 2012.Himes, Geoffrey. "'Uncle Jam': Fulfilling the Promise of Funk", The Washington Post. November 21, 1979. P-Funk's "Dr. Seussian afrofunk" is often cited as a critical component of the Afrofuturism movement.Dery, Mark. Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. Duke University Press, 1994. 182.La Ferla, Ruth. "Afrofuturism: The Next Generation", The New York Times. December 12, 2016.
Background
George Clinton's space-age mythology began to emerge with the release of Funkadelic's self-titled debut album in 1970. Later that same year, Parliament released their debut album Osmium. Clinton's cosmology was largely absent from the latter release, and it took longer to blossom in Parliament's output. Generally speaking, Parliament was a dance-oriented band, while Funkadelic was more serious and psychedelic.Hacker, Scot. "Can You Get to That? The Cosmology of P-Funk." Platforms: A Microwaved Cultural Chronicle of the 70s, edited by Pagan Kennedy. St Martin's Press, 1994.
The two bands shared personnel, and Clinton blurred the lines between them both by referring to his touring band as "A Parliafunkadelicment Thang". The shorthand for this conglomerate became "P-Funk", and it grew to include offshoots like P-Funk All Stars, Bootsy's Rubber Band, Parlet, The Brides of Funkenstein, The Horny Horns, and solo albums by Eddie Hazel and Bernie Worrell.Salant, Shelley. "George Clinton lays it all down: Uncle Jam still wants you", Detroit Metro Times. May 4, 2016.Tate, Greg. "Doin' It In Your Earhole", Tear the Roof Off, 1974-1980. New York, N.Y: Casablanca, 1993. Liner notes. By the mid 70s, P-Funk was a massively successful group of acts. A ranking of the top live acts of 1977 included three bands from the conglomerate in the top fifteen slots.
After the bands' earlier releases, Clinton began to feel that something more conceptual was in order, and he expressed deep admiration for The Who's Tommy and The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band as "the classiest two pieces of music I had ever seen where everything related to each other. So I wanted to do one of those kinds of things." Clinton settled on the extraterrestrial concept because of its originality, saying, "Put niggas in places that you don't usually see 'em. And nobody had seen 'em on no spaceships! Once you seen 'em sittin' on spaceships like it was Cadillac then it was funny, cool."Corbett, John. Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein. Duke University Press, 1994. 150.
The primary author of the P-Funk mythology aside from George Clinton was Pedro Bell, who illustrated the liners for many of P-Funk's releases. Bell's felt-tip illustrations included prolonged essays that expanded the mythos of Clinton's lyrics with a complementary syntax that "forged a new realm of black language".Vincent, Rickey. Funk: The Music, The People, and The Rhythm of The One. St. Martin's Griffin, 2014. 255. Though Bell coined terms like "Rumpasaurus" and made extensive contributions to the P-Funk mythology, his work has been largely overlooked.Shakur, Abdel. "The Natural Way To Dro (Part I)", MISSTRA KNOWITALL. June 30, 2009.
Clinton has pointed to the show The Outer Limits as an influence in his elaborate narrative, but more importantly, he and Bootsy Collins allegedly encountered a UFO together while driving to Detroit. Clinton recalls light bouncing from one side of the street to the other, and remarking to Collins, "The Mothership was angry with us for giving up the funk without permission." The bouncing light eventually focused on their car, and Clinton asked Collins to "step on it".
The P-Funk mythology was just one tool in the conglomerate's arsenal. By the mid-1970s, Clinton was rebranding funk as many things at once, "an aesthetic, a marketing ploy, a black cultural nationalist battle-plan and a way of being if not a spiritual discipline." He was drawing on everything from "hipster lingo of the beboppers, early black radio deejays and the apocalyptic anti-slavemassa edicts of the Nation of Islam" as well as the Yippies and the Black Panthers. Clinton was positioning P-Funk as a "radical response to the American police state" and "the antithesis of everything that was sterile, one-dimensional, monochromatic, arhythmic and otherwise against freedom of bodily expression in the known universe." In its simplest iteration, Clinton posited that "funk" was equivalent with the "truth".Friedman, Ted. "Making It Funky: The Signifyin(G) Politics Of George Clinton's Parliafunkadelicment Thang ". 1993.
Funkadelic
Funkadelic albums are generally more abstract than Parliament's. Rather than tell the story of a cast of characters, the mythology of Funkadelic is defined as a socially conscious spiritualism. One of the defining traits of the P-Funk mythology is that it is indeed a form of social commentary in that it "took all the cheese America had to offer and ran with it, taking the fashions and technology of the day to their ultimate, preposterous conclusions, amplifying the aesthetics of the 70s into a throbbing, fish-eyed cartoon of itself, and in so doing glorified American culture and their role in its continuing evolution."
On "Mommy, What's a Funkadelic?", the opening track of Funkadelic's 1970 self-titled debut album, Clinton's cosmology starts to emerge with the lines, "By the way, my name is Funk...I am not of your world...Hold still, baby, I won't do you no harm...I am Funkadelic, dedicated to the feeling of good.'"Clinton, George. "Mommy, What's a Funkadelic?", Funkadelic. Westbound, 1970. The same introduction of "Funkadelic" is repeated at the outset of the album's closing track "What Is Soul".Clinton, George. "What Is Soul", Funkadelic. Westbound, 1970.
On Funkadelic's second album, Free Your Mind... and Your Ass Will Follow (1970), funk is posited as a path to enlightenment in the title track: "Open up your funky mind and you can fly...Free your mind and your ass will follow...The kingdom of heaven is within".Clinton, George, and Eddie Hazel, Raymond Davis. "Free Your Mind... and Your Ass Will Follow", Free Your Mind... and Your Ass Will Follow. Westbound, 1970. This sentiment is echoed in subsequent songs like "Standing on the Verge of Getting It On" (1974) which contains the verse, "Music is designed to free your funky mind. We have come to help you cope out into another reality".Clinton, George, and Eddie Hazel. "Standing on the Verge of Getting It On", Standing on the Verge of Getting It On. Westbound, 1974. A more scatological iteration comes in the song "Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis Enema Squad (The Doo Doo Chasers)" (1978) where "funk" is defined as "the P-Preparation, The prune juice of the mind, A mental, musical bowel movement, Groove-lax...A psychological turd remover, A neurological enema".Clinton, George, and Garry Shider, Linda Brown. "Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis Enema Squad (The Doo Doo Chasers)", One Nation Under a Groove. Warner Brothers, 1978.
Many of the lyrics in P-Funk songs imply that the band is merely a medium for a godhead that takes the form of funk. At other times, the band or Clinton are cast as priestly beings tasked with guiding humanity through music. In the song "Phunklords", they sing, "We are the Phunklords...Sent to you from eons away just to spread some funk your way".Haskins, Fuzzy, and Billy Mims, Calvin Simon, Grady Thomas, Ben Powers Jr. "Phunklords", Connections & Disconnections, LAX Records, 1981. At the beginning of "The Electronic Spanking of War Babies", Clinton explains that he was "adopted by aliens" at the age of 17, and that "they have long since programmed me to return with this message."Bishop, Bob, and George Clinton, Junie Morrison. "The Electric Spanking of War Babies", The Electric Spanking of War Babies. Warner Brothers, 1981. The liner notes of Standing on the Verge of Getting It On explain that, "On the Eighth Day, the Cosmic Strumpet of Mother Nature was spawned to envelope this Third Planet in FUNKADELICAL VIBRATIONS. And she birthed Apostles Ra, Hendrix, Stone, and CLINTON to preserve all funkiness of man unto eternity... But! Fraudulent forces of obnoxious JIVATION grew...only seedling GEORGE remained! As it came to be, he did indeed begat FUNKADELIC to restore Order Within the Universe."Funkadelic, Standing on the Verge of Getting It On. Westbound, 1974. Liner notes.
The title of the band's third album, Maggot Brain (1971), became a lasting concept in the P-Funk mythology. The title track opens the album with the incantation, "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."Hazel, Edward, and George Clinton. "Maggot Brain", Maggot Brain. Westbound, 1971. Maggot brain is a "state of mind" with potentially disastrous consequences if nothing is done about it. The incantation on "Maggot Brain" concludes, "I knew I had to rise above it all or drown in my own shit.""Funkencyclo-P-dia", Tear the Roof Off, 1974-1980. New York, N.Y: Casablanca, 1993. Liner notes. The song "Super Stupid" links maggot brain to fear with lyrics about a protagonist who snorts heroin thinking it is cocaine. Super Stupid is said to have a "maggot brain" and to have "lost the fight and the winner is fear".Hazel, Edward, and Lucious Ross, William Nelson, George Clinton. "Super Stupid", Maggot Brain. Westbound, 1971. The album's liner notes reinforce the connection between maggot brain and fear by quoting from the writing of Robert de Grimston, "Fear is the root of man's destruction of himself. Without Fear there is no blame. Without blame there is no conflict. Without conflict there is no destruction."Grimston, Robert de. The Gods on Fear and Death . May 1968.
The liner notes for One Nation Under a Groove (1978) are a typical example of how the P-Funk mythology expanded on song lyrics to develop a sprawling, satirical narrative. The liner includes a summary of "The Funk Wars 1984 B.C.", which is a parody of Star Wars. Just like George Lucas' movie, the Funk Wars take place "ONCE UPON A TIME... in a faraway parallel universe". Instead of Darth Vader, the villain is "BARFT VADA", and his soldiers wield "Blight Sabers". VADA has outlawed funk in favor of disco to "maintain mental constipation" and prevent Funkadelica from "deprogramming the population". The hero, JASPER SPATIC, has invented a Throb Gun, which he unleashes at a disco, triggering an epic battle and defeat for Barft Vada. The story ends with Jasper pondering what would happen the next time Barft Vada caused trouble, hoping that someone would warn people to "THINK! IT AIN'T ILLEGAL YET!", which is a chant heard in the live version of "Maggot Brain" that closes the album.Funkadelic, One Nation Under a Groove. Warner Brothers, 1978. Liner notes.
Parliament