Come Fly With Me On The Mothership

    While the mythologies of Lee 'Scratch" Perry and Sun Ra are very interesting, the overall concept of Parliament-Funkadelic and George Clinton is much more intriguing to me. George Clinton and his P-Funk is, at least in my eye, the most influential of the 3, as well as the most well known to me. While George Clinton and his very large band do seem to have a very polarizing aura, they are the most accessible out of the 3, compared to the more experimental styles of Sun Ra and Lee Perry.

George Clinton had originally began his career with The Parliaments, a place very far away from where he ended up with P-Funk. After he lost the rights to The Parliaments, the spiral towards his maniacal master piece began. He immediately moved away from his Doo-Wop style of music to Funk-Rock with his new band Funkadelic, which put the instrumentalists of The Parliaments at the forefront instead of the singers, which were still included in the new band. Eventually Parliament was created which would focus on the singers rather than the instrumentalists. After years of making records, Parliament finally created whats regarded as the band's best album ever, The Mothership Connection. With this album, George wanted the concept to be of putting black people in a situation that society hadn't ever really considered. The only other time the public had seen black people in space had ever been in was Star Trek, which was an inspiration for the album. The album became a cornerstone of Afrofuturism, becoming one of the first large scale Afrofuturist examples. George and P-Funk fully embraced this, setting the Mothership as their main stage piece for years, although nowadays the band generally just performs with a few costumes instead. George and P-Funk put Afrofuturism on the main stage, figuratively and literally, pushing the movement forward as a whole.

    I will admit, P-Funk is one of the main reasons I decided to take this class, which speaks to how much influence the band still has. I got to see the band perform live during winter break before the semester began, which heightened my want to learn more about the band and their albums in this class. The energy in the concert hall during the show most definitely shows their influence is not dying out anytime soon.