Funkadelic — Funkadelic

I’m right here admitting that for many years, my record collection was unfunky. Funkless. Free of the funk. An old Ohio Players record and George Clinton’s “R&B Skeletons in the Closet,” and neither one got much play.

There were some reasons for that. For starters, when I was a teen, only a small selection of funk songs got any airplay or other exposure, and even the ones that I liked didn’t seem like songs I needed to own. They were songs to hear at school, in the car, at a party maybe – but it didn’t seem like funk was something I would go home, put on the turntable and flop on the bed to listen to for a couple of hours. It didn’t seem like deep listening music. It was more moving music, akin to dance music, and that wasn’t really my thing. And, in my ignorance, thought every song on a record by a group like Funkadelic would be a thumper like “Give Up The Funk,” and I just didn’t know how much of that I’d want to listen to. So, dumb teenage/twentysomething me mostly passed on the funk.

But slowly, the idea that I had missed out formed. There was a period of time when “Maggot Brain” was being consistently lauded among the best albums of all time (hey, there’s lots of albums on those lists that I would never, ever listen to), and I was intrigued enough to get it digitally, and found that it was not at all what I expected – more of a psychedelic odyssey than thumping groove music.

Then I found some friends who loved their funk, and I started hearing it more, understanding it more. When I started playing electric bass a year ago, an understanding of funk became essential.

Listen, this album opens proclaiming, “If you will suck my soul, I will lick your funky emotions.” There was no part of ’70s suburban white boy me that was ready to process that. Then it moves into slow grooving funk – no verse, chorus, verse stuff here. My brain was actually trained, in 7th grade music class, to dissect the parts of a pop song, and I had some passing familiarity with classical forms. This: there was no precedent. It just went on as it pleased. I’m telling you, my teen mind wouldn’t have understood what to do with this music, how to listen to it, how to let it in.

So, very suddenly in the past few years, there has been an absolute onslaught of funk into my collection, partly encouraged by the fact that my wife loves it as well. If I want to see her dancing around in the house, all I need to do is put on some funk. I know she’s playing Sly or The Soul Motivators when she’s painting in her studio. I recently discovered that, far from being too intense for the morning hours, a little Funkadelic can be the perfect breakfast music. Who knew?

Ironically, the first album in the Funkadelic discography was the last of their records I bought. I had stayed away from this one a little bit out of fear that maybe their first album, released in 1970, wasn’t fully formed, didn’t have that certain something that characterized the rest of their ’70s output. Well, that was incorrect – they were Funkadelic from the start.

I keep calling it funk, but let’s be clear: this is psychedelic funk, with a little less focus on the 1 and a little more on the trippy. And while George Clinton gets (and takes) all the credit, the rhythm section is so tight (hard to do when you’re playing this slow in places), and Eddie Hazel’s guitar is just everything.

This is also psychedelic and exploratory in a way that psychedelic rock usually just wasn’t. It’s really out there, and really good.