Funkadelic

Guitarists fall into three categories: those who jerk off, those who fuck, and those who make love. Eddie Hazel, in the title track that opens "Maggot Brain", does all three at once. But as if the human race were about to go extinct tomorrow. At Detroit's United Sound Studios, before starting the recording, George Clinton gave him just one instruction: "Play like your mother just died." Art is always the representation of something else, often the authentic construction of sincere fictions. Imagining a bereavement that didn't exist, immersing himself in a borrowed state of grief, meant putting himself in debt to pain. Given the historical context, it wasn't so far-fetched that from this act of make-believe Hazel would pull out one of the most cathartic guitar solos of all time. The fragile, acid-built levees behind which an entire generation had believed it could take refuge from the assaults of a treacherous world were starting to crack; memory - both collective and individual - was falling prey to screaming valkyries. According to Rickie Vincent, the title "Maggot Brain" refers to the moment Clinton discovered, in a Chicago apartment, his brother's corpse with its head blown open. Macabre anecdote aside, "Maggot Brain" was, tellingly, the curtain falling on an entire era - one opened by the brash vitality of the beat generation and propelled by flower-power utopias, soon run aground in the seas of blood of the Kent State shootings and the Manson murders in Beverly Hills, of Kennedy gunned down live on television, of Martin Luther King and Fred Hampton assassinated for having woken up Black America by telling it a dream.

By 1971 times had already changed, for America and for the world. And so had Funkadelic themselves, who had opened their self-titled debut with a metaphysical apology for carnal love ("If You suck my soul, I will lick your funky emotions", the opening line of "Mommy, What's A Funkadelic?") and its follow-up with a messianic proclamation ("Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow"). This time, they placed at the incipit of their third album a kind of requiem, introduced by a brief sermon in which Clinton announces that Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time (because men have screwed her over). It took just one take to immortalize this free adaptation of the prophet Hendrix. But while Hendrix's guitar seized on the burst of machine guns in the hell of Vietnam, Hazel's on "Maggot Brain" lifted up the limbs of Marines shipped home in coffins and the carcasses of Viet Cong left to rot on the asphalt. Hendrix was the war, the catastrophe, the apocalypse. Hazel was the day after: counting the damage, the mourning, the fear and the distrust of rebuilding. "I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe," Clinton intones. The echo of these words fades into a storm of wah-wah distortion, a shipwreck with no land in sight. The background arpeggio - sometimes likened to that of the famous "The House Of The Rising Sun" - sways resignedly between fuzz jolts measurable only on the Richter scale and caressing delay-drenched turns. After all, every dream that ends still leaves a sweet aftertaste: the sweetness of having dreamed at all. Now even the deluded had their own national anthem. Solemn like all national anthems. Heartfelt like the farewell of someone who has only just found themselves. Inconsolable, like a fire alarm ringing uselessly in the heart of a deserted town.

Only aliens could have given birth to a track like this, and in a sense Funkadelic really were aliens. Their extraterrestrial look (metallic vests and bikinis, ethnic headdresses, feathered tunics) would come to be recognized as a forerunner of the Afrofuturist aesthetic of the Nineties, a cultural movement aimed at reinterpreting, through a science-fiction lens, the condition of Black subordination to white society, whereby the genre's key elements are loaded with racial symbolism (robots enslaved by white men, spaceships deporting them just as slave ships once did). An aesthetic virtuosity that adds to the many tiles of a truly one-of-a-kind artistic mosaic. This pioneering role of Funkadelic is shared with another giant, Sun Ra, hailed as the guiding spirit of the long space-funk bacchanal that closes the album, "Wars Of Armageddon", whose frenzied polyrhythms echo the warning of a Process Church of the Final Judgment manifesto printed inside the vinyl sleeve: "Fear is at the root of human self-destruction. Without fear there is no guilt. Without guilt there is no conflict. Without conflict there is no destruction." It's the call of blood rising from the depths of one's own consciousness. There are no rules. The relentless passing of time is mocked by the sudden chime of a cuckoo clock. It's organized chaos marking out possible new voodoo rituals. Barely ten minutes of pure madness. Tiki Fulwood spiritually soars over the Atlantic to join Yoruba masters Babatunde Olatunji and Haruna Ishola, while Hazel electrifies everything with his usual adrenaline rush.

For George Clinton and co., funk becomes a full-fledged religion. A new sonic ideology. The rhythmic canons of the most energetic soul take on new trajectories, enriched with rock acid and blazing psychedelia. The live show turns into an explosive ritual that warms both body and soul. A staggering stage presence generating shows that are literally out of the ordinary. Participation is total and all-consuming. Everything spins wonderfully. Each member follows their own funk swarm in a vividly colored carousel of vibrant harmonies and red-hot rhythmic outpourings. It's a succession of delightful soul pirouettes, sudden hard-rock lightning bolts, with good old Eddie increasingly cast as the supreme ringleader, reeling off solos that will simply make history ("Super Stupid"), and seductive, lopsided disco-funk grooves ("You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks"). The mood is playful and feline. The mocking backing vocals, the repeated vocal layering, the gospel attitude of Garry Shider, Calvin Simon, Grady Thomas, Ray Davis, and that refusal to ever take themselves too seriously despite everything, act as essential fuel ("Can You Get To That"), while Hazel and Ross's guitars keep interlocking wonderfully with Bernie Worrell's shimmering keyboards, in a repeated, ostentatious hypnotic dance ("Hit It and Quit It"). The intoxicating, irreverent flutter of "Back in Our Minds", the only track penned by Clarence "Fuzzy" Haskins, effectively closes out the central part of the record, sandwiched between the two gems placed at its opening and close.

From this precise moment on, Funkadelic would be hailed as pioneers of an unmistakable style, laying the groundwork for entire generations of Black entertainers and haters alike, and not only Black ones. Their spectacular insights would provide vital, precious lifeblood for the Black movement and for the most disparate groups, none of whom hesitated to raid them at the first opportunity: from Killer Mike to Lil Wayne, from Busta Rhymes to Ant Banks, on through Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, De La Soul, Eric B. & Rakim, N.W.A, Massive Attack, A Tribe Called Quest and Public Enemy. Lenny Kravitz and Red Hot Chili Peppers owe practically everything to records like this one.

After "Maggot Brain", Funkadelic would still be great, but they would turn into something else. Hazel's role would become increasingly marginal, to the point of total absence on "One Nation Under A Groove" (1978), caused by a one-year prison sentence handed down to him in 1976 for assaulting a flight attendant. He would redeem himself by releasing a solo album in 1977 ("Games, Dames and Guitar Thangs") and collaborating, more or less continuously, with Clinton and his two bands throughout the Eighties. He died on December 23, 1992, at the age of 42, from internal bleeding caused by liver failure. "Maggot Brain" was played at his funeral: he had written his own eulogy twenty years in advance, catching death off guard. But not us - we who keep jerking off, fucking, making love to that solo. As if it were the last time, once again.

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26/04/2015