Last year, Clinton had a huge hit, at least in the metropolises, with "Atomic Dog," whose thundering bass notes barked… Read More
"Woof! Woof!"
Urban Dancefloor Guerillas, by Clinton's P.Funk All-Stars, is more the follow-up to that infectious dance track than his new "solo" album,
You Shouldn't-Nuf Bit Fish. In fact, it's the P.Funk record that contains "Copy Cat," a reprise of the hit that moves from woof to meow: "Yakety yak, bring in the dog, let's put out the cat." The solo record is a fine album, too, but it's no match for the unstoppable good spirits of the P.Funk LP.
You'd think that the album credited to Clinton alone would be more of an individual effort and the P.Funk record more a collaboration. But everything Clinton does is a group project, and the same players, composers and themes pop up on both of the new LPs, which could well have been released as a double-album. The lines are so tangled that when Clinton goes "nuclear fishin'" on You Shouldn't-Nuf Bit Fish, he "catches a keeper" on Urban Dancefloor Guerillas.
The P.Funk lineage can be traced straight back to James Brown, whose funk is the bottom line of Clinton's music. (In fact, P.Funk has long included players from Brown's own early bands.) Another influence is Sly Stone, and when nothing much was happening for Clinton a few years ago, he joined forces with Stone. The two went into a Detroit studio in '82, accompanied by musicians in the P.Funk axis (Clinton himself is a producer and vocalist, not a player), and came up with the '83 LP Computer Games and a couple of terrific singles, which are included on Urban Dancefloor Guerillas.
But Sly is just one catalyst for Clinton's genius. By now, the P.Funk All-Stars have some real stars, like guitarists Eddie Hazel and Michael Hampton, bassist Bootsy Collins and keyboardists Bernie Worrell and Junie Morrison, and they contributed as much as Sly did to the new albums.
Clinton teamed with Morrison on Urban Dancefloor Guerillas' "One of Those Summers," an incredibly lovely R&B ballad, to which Clinton adds his characteristic good humor. The song has a pretty, wistful melody and a nostalgic lyric: "Out of the window was one of those moons/On the radio playin' was one of those tunes/I was in one of my moods/And it looks like it's gonna be one of those summers again." But one of what summers, what moons, what tunes? The oddball vagueness about the memories becomes funny; and while the melody wafts from Morrison's synthesi