Funkadelic – Free Your Mind…And Your Ass Will Follow

I was thinking about pop culture and decades a bit last night. It seems odd to me now that wherever I go in public – grocery stores, gas stations, … well, those are the only places I go, to be honest. But when I’m there, I’m hit with music from 30, 40, 50 years ago. That simply wasn’t the case when I was young – for one thing, there hadn’t been what Bill Griffith called “the rock-n-rollization of everything.” Elevators and grocery stores played Muzak, not actual radio hits. It was awful, but I’m no longer convinced it was worse. Now, everywhere they go, young people are being assaulted by music I couldn’t stand when I was young (and, to be fair, some songs I did like). The best and worst of our times is very, very present in their times.

But when I was in my teens and 20s, I mostly had to seek out that past – I had to be listening to oldies stations to hear oldies music, as it was then called, and even then, it didn’t reach past the ’50s, barely even 25 years back, and did not stray from the rock ‘n’ roll format. Movies from the ’30s and ’40s were available, in terribly edited form on very late night television – but only certain types of weird kids (me) watched them, sought them out, actually stayed up late on Friday or Saturday nights hoping for a marathon viewing of something from the past – an inclination I’ve never gotten past.

And now, there are entire forms of music that I was only barely aware of in my youth that I’m discovering five decades on, discovering and weaving into my daily life, feeling almost as if it had always been there, but also feeling with a freshness. And so, Funkadelic, again:

Five months (five months!) after releasing their debut, Funkadelic released this monster, “Free Your Mind . . . And Your Ass Will Follow.”

Again, when this was current in the 1970s, my teenaged brain would not have been ready to receive an album that George Clinton said was an attempt to “see if we can cut a whole album while we’re all tripping on acid.” They could, and did, and unlike many others who tried the same, they made it work. But if the only single from this, “I Wanna Know If It’s Good To You?”, made radio play where I lived, it was gone by the time I was a Top 40 aficionado. And if I had seen the record cover in the album section of Apex Music Korner – well, like the Ohio Players, this was not something I could have brought home, even if I wanted to.

So this couldn’t enter my consciousness until decades later when I had some George Clinton and PFunk collections on CD, and even then – none of these songs show up on those collections. So, even though I knew the title phrase (it shows up elsewhere, and my unfreed mind always mixes up the order – I thought I had to free my ass first), I did have this until the last night of 2021, a New Year’s Eve buy. Now, like the other Funkadelic records, it’s one of my go-tos – when I don’t know what I want to hear, I go to the funk, and that often means the Funkadelic. And just like that, a record from more than 50 years ago can move from something I’ve never even heard into being a regular part of the fabric of my life.

Could this have happened at any time other than 1970? Probably not. But does it sound dated as a result? Absolutely not. Sometimes an exact moment in time can produce something that is, oddly, timeless.

Yes, once again, I have already written about this record – but it never came off the new acquisitions shelf and I didn’t realize that until I had done this – so now there are two reflections on this as well.