Abstract
Those of us who call ourselves “funkateers” march to the beat of a drummer whose beat is on the one; we worship at the altar of funk; we have witnessed the Mothership land and are ready to get on board. Parliament-Funkadelic’s style, sound, and message promote personal freedom through musical, physical, spiritual, and sexual release. Through their music, performances, lyrics, and image, P-Funk confronts and collapses white norms, creating a postmodern, post-civil rights black ideology. During the band’s peak in the 1970s, the mob of artists funk scholar Rickey Vincent describes as a “fifty-plus member aggregation of geniuses, lunatics, has-beens, wannabes, architects, saboteurs, and hangers-on”1 created a decidedly working-class black aesthetic, but one rooted in a philosophy that promoted freedom and equality in universal, consciousness-expanding terms.
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Notes
Rickey Vincent, Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996), 231.
Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Blues People: The Negro Experience in White America and the Music that Developed from It (New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1963), ix–x.
LeRoi Jones, Black Music (New York: William Morrow, 1967), 189, 210, 188.
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 10.
David Mills, Larry Alexander, Thomas Stanley, and Aris Wilson, For the Record—George Clinton and P-Funk: An Oral History, ed. Dave Marsh (New York: Avon Books, 1998), 1–22.
See Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
Funkadelic, “What is Soul?” Funkadelic (Detroit: Westbound Records, 1970).
Funkadelic, “Eulogy and Light,” Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow (Detroit: Westbound Records, 1971).
Funkadelic, “Maggot Brain,” Maggot Brain (Detroit: Westbound Records, 1971).
Robert E. Halcomb, Specialist 4, NY City Armorer, 4th Infantry, qtd in Wallace Terry, ed., Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans (New York: Random House, 1984), 208.
Funkadelic, “You Hit the Nail on the Head” and “If You Don’t Like the Effects, Don’t Produce the Cause,” America Eat’s Its Young (Detroit: Westbound Records, 1972).
See Pagan Kennedy, Platforms: A Micro-waved Cultural Chronicle of the 1970s (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 1.
Ken Tucker, “The Walrus is George,” Village Voice 29 (January 24, 1984): 65.
See Nelson George, Buppies, B-Boys, Baps, and Bohos: Notes on Post-Soul Black Culture (New York: Harper Collins, 1992).
Parliament, “Chocolate City,” Chocolate City (New York: Casablanca Records, 1975).
George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How People Profit From Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 160.
Iman Lababedi, “The George Clinton Interview: ‘Think, It Ain’t Illegal Yet,’” Creem 18, no. 3 (November 1986): 57.
Bob Gallagher, “Review: Parliament’s Chocolate City,” Melody Maker 52 (August 20, 1977): 18.
Parliament, “Chocolate City,” Chocolate City (New York: Casablanca Records, 1975).
Anthony De Curtis, “Lost in the Supermarket: Commerce in the Music Business,” in Stars Don’t Stand Still in the Sky: Music and Myth, ed. Karen Kelley and Evelyn McDonnell (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 32.
Paul Gilroy, Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Culture (London: Serpent’s Tail Press, 1992), 254.
Robin Grayden and Dave Ramsden, “Funk Wars,” Melody Maker 53 (January 14, 1978): 21.
Chris Charlesworth, “Funkadelic: It’s Just to Get People’s Attention,” Melody Maker 46 (May 8, 1971): 30.
See Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 25.
Manthia Diavara quoted in Richard Simon, “The Stigmatization of Blaxploitation,” Soul: Black Power, Politics, and Pleasure, ed. Monique Guillory and Richard C. Green (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 236.
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© 2008 Tony Bolden
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Wright, A.N. (2008). A Philosophy of Funk: The Politics and Pleasure of a Parliafunkadelicment Thang!. In: Bolden, T. (eds) The Funk Era and Beyond. Signs of Race. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-61453-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-61453-6_3
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