In the glory days of Parliament and Funkadelic -- who were basically the same group under different
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recording contracts -- Clinton set out to do nothing less than rearrange the synapses of American culture, and he devised both music and mythology. His funk wasn't just a vocabulary of rhythms and sounds: It was, as George Clinton's processed voice intones in "Sir Nose D'Voidoffunk," the "protector of the pleasure principle." For Clinton, funk is the life force in all its sweaty carnality, oozing and squelching like a pool of protoplasm. On his albums, it dances and humps its opposition to all things polite and regimented.
Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome is Clinton's 1977 manifesto: a pitched battle between Dr. Funkenstein and Sir Nose D'Voidoffunk, who inexplicably prefers sinister mind-control plots to booty-shaking. The music is utterly polymorphous. P-Funk's basic beat is a march that also swings, bumps and grinds, and Clinton surrounds it with solo voices, choruses, horn arrangements and multilayered punning asides. Along with Clinton, the album's pivotal character is the keyboard genius Bernie Worrell. He's got the gospel organ, the jazz-harmony flourishes and, in "Flash Light," the slurping Moog bass line that spawned countless imitations. As if that didn't keep him busy enough, he tucks all kinds of dripping, cackling, hiccuping synthesizer sounds into the tracks. It's wacky, utterly unpredictable communal anarchy -- not a funk machine but a funk organism. The music proves its own paradigms and makes it almost unnecessary for Clinton to insist, "You will dance, sucker!" (RS 850)
Further Listening:
Parliament:
Motor-Booty Affair (Casablanca, 1978) FOUR STARS
Funkadelic:
Hardcore Jollies (Warner Bros., 1976) THREE STARS
George Clinton:
Computer Games(Capitol, 1982) FOUR STARS
JON PARELES
