The Mothership has Landed

George Clinton successfully harnessed T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M. with his funk attitude, and turned his original interests in Doo-wop into a whole new style of music that would lay the foundations for generations and genres to come. In the short documentary, Tales of Dr. Funkenstein, Clinton and other prominent musicians and artists reflect on how funk created a whole new vocabulary from which musicians who could not access a formal music education could build upon and sample from. His progressions, cords, and verses would go onto help inspire genres such as hip-hop. Clinton and his band members discuss the wide range of influences that led to Funkadelic. 

Originally inspired by Doo-wop, Motown groups, and singers in barbershops, combined with the turbulent changes of the 1960s and the free love movement, culminated in the mind of these artists to give rise to something they said sounded “sorta like Motown, but more nasty and psychedelic”, and “like the Temptations had gotten drunk”. They leaned into the crazy and offensive, and worked on putting black identity into black music at the same time when integration was a wider social theme. Funkadelic was shifting the paradigm, and Clinton had a vision for how black culture would look after integration. As he explains in the film, he especially embraced images and themes that showed people of color in places “you wouldn’t expect them to be”. The mothership had landed.

The album for the Mothership Connection was one of the first times an African American had been featured in space other than on Star Trek. Funkadelic’s super group combined theatrics, the first black spectacle concert, complete with full props, productions, and costumes, with classically trained hard core musicianship to transcend the notion of a black thing into a funk thing. Clinton explains that it was important for him to educate the fans without being too pushy. His envisioning of a speculative utopia in the Mothership Connection album, established Clinton’s work in the Afrofuturist genre, alongside his use of music technology, he created new mythologies and images of a prosthetically advanced future.