teaching mark s a *LESSON* response three: FUNKADELIC

Proposed by Nate Patrin

"I'm trying to think of a musician that ?got religion? and didn't make an ass of themselves (and said religion) and I'm having a hard time," says Shakey Mo Collier on the Papa Dont Preach Kaballah thread.

OK, so here?s the musician I thought of when he said that (except I was already thinking of him), and if this seems a less serious answer to Shakey than it ought to be (or indeed more serious than it possibly actually can be), then just tolerate that as a flaw which goes with the territory. The flaw we visit the territory to use? (I don?t know: I forgot if I was talking about me or my answer?)

ANYWAY, the musician is George Clinton and the religion is the (once-notorious) Process Church of the Final Judgement. Clinton?s flirtation with this mob ? like William Blake?s embedment in the zanier end of English dissenting mysticism ? elevates them way above any value they remotely achieved on their own. He is their redemption and retro-justification. His passage along and exit from their ahem "intellectual" orbit gave him useful lines and habits to adapt into funnier, better ideas of his own, later.

Now Clinton is pretty well read, especially when it comes to nutball arcana, and since half the point of the P-Funk thang is that portals to booty-utopia are accessible to all (not least because they can be found all across everyday trash Americana) it?s surely a bit risky pinning down his "influences" to any single prior org. Nevetheless, it?s the Process Church gets quoted, at length, on the sleeve of two of his earliest releases, the horrid (except are they?) portraits of America unmasked really on ?Maggot Brain? and ?America Eats its Young? ? well, this honour is more than can be said for the belief systems of any other sect ? and besides, Process ideas and words are all over the strongest songs on these records. For example, "Miss Lucifer?s Love"...

In a way, the earliest great P-Funk mantra "Free Your Mind and Yr Ass Will Follow" and the latterday chant "All that is good, is nasty," are both recognisably Processian ideas. Kinda sorta. Anyway, let?s quickly sketch how they are, before we get to how they aren?t. The Process Church was a mid-60s British offshoot of Scientology, which is to say, it made a fake-science initiation ritual out of the precedures it insisted would free your mind from repression (in Scientology, this is a pop scifi version of psychoanalysis called auditing). The founders of the church ? Robert DeGrimston, born English and well-off in the soon-to-be-former colonies and Mary Ann McLean, born dirt-poor in Glasgow, former wife of Sugar Ray Robinson, who after the divorce had for a while run a sophisticated network of London callgirls ? combined the controlling milieu of the audit with the chi-chi trappings of nouveau riche bohemian Satanism, in black turtle-necks and capes, with silver crosses and goatshead-badges. Convention and repression, sexual and social, were demons to be exorcised (the Process was called ?Compulsion Analysis?): these were West End swingers parties with revolutionary pretensions...

By the late 60s, the sect had fled and returned to the commercial Babylon of Swinging London, after time spent in a commune in Xtul on the Mexican Coast, where they encountered a major hurricane and embraced the demonic destructive powers immanent in Nature Unchained. Their cosmology divided mankind into sheep (the lukewarm consumerist grey-men of so so much kneejerk countercultural ideology) and leaders ? those prepared to dare to confront who they truly are, who have the will to be who they are, free of mind and body yada yada. There were four "types" of leader: Jehovah-types (authoritarian and ascetic), Satan-types (violent and chaotic), Lucifer-types (self-indulgent sensualists) and Christ-types (ALL THE ABOVE) (no really!!). For a while the Process sigil was an interlinked mandala of four Ps: which by no accident looked a lot like a swastika. Processeans are very attracted to Hitler chic, and enjoyed predicting apocalyptic social breakdown any minute now. After the Manson murders seem to evidence a bit embarrasingly much Processean thinking among the convicted Mansonistas, the Church won a major lawsuit against Ed Sanders, whose book on Manson in early editions entirely blamed the Process Church of the Final Judgement for the thinking behind the murder spree. Later editions removed any mention of the Church apart from an official disclaimer. All that is nasty, is good. Free your mind and body, everything is permitted. Erm ahem except....

So OK, yes, true: like ProgRock, so vulnerable bcz to hindsight eyes so unguardedly naked in motive and drive, the Process prototype of these P-Funk ideas very easily comes across as silly-ass whitebread parody: scary because scared, sexual-as-in-hysterical, uptight, sectarian-hipster divisive, contemptuous and self-destructively paranoid and brittle. Many radical sects and micro-parties after 1968 became terrified of diluting their purity with the sluggish sheeplike conformisms of the uncool reactionary masses responsible for everything bad ever. As the 60s become the 70s, radical sects/cults/parties, aware that pop culture at this time entirely endorsed the idea of liberation in every possible form, went to bitter knotty tiny war against one another, battling to the death over the means of the production of liberation. Policing themselves from the taint of everything "bad", they became intolerable to live in, when not actively a danger to their own, or bystanders. The Church eventually collapsed in on itself when DeGrimston proposed that a pert and devout young Process disciple join him and Mary Ann in hallowed threesomes, and she said fuck off.

By the close of the four long sides of ?America Eats its Young?, it?s obvious Clinton?s gamesplaying is as much about the embrace of daftness as the embrace of darkness, and pretty much exactly NOT about siding plainly with tiny, beleaguered, self-cannibalistic, puritan-despite-all sects.

"Proof" #1 as follows: The sleeve, famously, is a redrawn dollar bill. Beside the spooky eye-in-a-pyramid iconoraphy, launch-point of a hundred lamoid conspiracy theories, Liberty is redrawn as a cherub-eating vampire, and the Imperial Eagle grasps a hypodermic syringe and a starving naked child with distended belly. So far so easy: Amerikkka the Ugly blah blah, about as insightful as a Harold Pinter poem (yes, of course better drawn). Then there?s the Process Church sleevenote: it says America is awful, America is us, we did this, it?s up to us to change it...: ""What can we give our enemies? Love? Love our enemies? Love Satan? Love Satan?????"

The Latin on the dollar bill is generally also a dense of source loser quasi-politics ("Nova ordo saeclorum = new world order DO YOU SEE!!")*: but the Latin on Funkadelic?s dollar has been changed (because it can be!!). Well, I googled all over for translations and discussion of this: wherever these might be found, it isn?t currently findable on the net (by me). So here goes (warning: these are v.rough):
"Fac ita esse, quod est" is translated on the sleeve: "AS IT IS, SO BE IT" ? a central Process motto (the first cut on side two is an instrumental called ?The Joyful Process?). "Te exsuscita commutato" means "Wake up, transformed"; "In praesentia futurorum vive" means "All of you, live in the presence of your futures" (combined and simplified, these are the opening couplet of the final song "Wake Up"); "Unusquisque nunc demum eventurus est" means something like "Each one now at last shall come to be" (maybe this is the same as "Everybody is going to make it this time", the final cut on side one)

[*conspiracy theory is the fever-dream of sleep-life under capitalism: the nightmares we?re torn between, that the whole show is run by a hidden cabal, matrix-style, or that (cf terminator 2) actually NO ONE?S IN CHARGE any more, and the entire cultural-political-monetary machine programmes and finetunes itself, evermore split from sense or reason or off-switch... "Loser politics" bcz if yr projecting superpowers and perfect knowledge-transmission on yr enemies, then yr bascially providing excuses for yrself to give up now?]

Anyway, the effect of the dollarbill and the latin and the collage etc is this: just a you think Clinton?s saying "there?s horrible official america and there?s this cool underground better wisdom", you think, "no, he?s saying, official america is secretly RUN by this stupid vampirish underground secret anti-wisdom", except then you think, is he saying "the horribleness of it all is us all along after all"? (ie "the secret lizard cabal is YOU AND ME foax, see it and shape up?") ("If nasty is good then vampires are great") ? and so on, round and round till you actually use the stuff you like to think your way out of the riddle (well, maybe). (I mean, maybe not ? I actually tht there?d be stuff all over the net about what the latin meant etc, like Clinton?s equiv of obsessive zappology, but it?s more like, I?m the first person who ever thought to look?) (I don?t remotely believe that) (but still?)

Proof #2 you can trace as well as anywhere in the song Nate actually picked (haha remember that?). ?Miss Lucifer?s Love?. The opening fuzzguitar line which relaxes from piercing-pinchy to wide-open: the lyric is hungry-yearning-gossipy-engorged-admiring, and if it can?t help reminding you of more than one Stones-song (the invocation of the devil, the word "satisfy", the jaggeroid phrasing of the non-chorus singing), the monolithic sludge-stoner boogie, a long but NON-building cycle, ends up being as matter of fact as a long-married guy simply and firmly stating how much he still adores and fancies his wife, and always will. It?s not about ugly hyper-idols you should be modellling yrself on, it?s about the louche wild beauty of the (not so) mundane. Writing about soul and funk and gospel, and far too much collective black music, often betrays it by sentimentalising just at the point where the music itself mainly resists this. Instead of an ideology of idealisation, the musicians involved make a pragmatic, unspoken ideology of getting on with making itself as strong as possible, in itself. They?re saying: look, if we try and think or talk in all the big-word languages of public belief and intention we fuck up bad, we sound like fools ? our politics works when we stick at what we know. And, yes, if you strip Clinton?s project away from the group body of itself, and *just* stick with the words and the sleeves images, then it?s easy to go gooey and lame, to start translating "on the one" or "funk" in sticky, religiose, touchy-feely terms. And yes, Clinton does (a teeny bit) encourage this: he makes a funk which is explicit about what funk represents, which sets some of its politics away from the body of the music, which insists on more dimensions than just the groove. BUT HE?S GOOD AT TALKING THE BIG TALK TOO: the religion he "got" he used, he didn?t let it use him. I like that it?s the same super-tiresome badboy undergrounder posture-sect that (say) some ninny like Boyd Rice also flaunts an "interest" in. I mean, at the minimum: "Nice save, George!" But actually a lot more.

On this thread I (extremely incoherently) begin to try to state something I value music for: which is that, in its concentrated focus on the protocols of its own best musicality it operates as a critique of the pretensions of Higher Politics to be the final important word about the baseline of everything. Not that "the protocols of its own best musicality" aren?t also political: not that ? as anyone knows who?s ever been in a band or an orchestra ? the dynamics of the collective (inc.wheter or not this includes the audience) aren?t a politics also, albeit one articulated far more by show than tell.

[Notes towards a counterstrike argument, probably chafing here at several readers? minds: when GC says "Free yr mind" he means PUT DOWN THE PENCIL AND START DANCING YOU DICK. STOP READING AND START BREATHING etc etc etc.]

"On the one" is often translated by (non-dancing?) yay-sayers as Clinton saying (something like) "Funk is the (mainfestation of the) godhead", at which point he?s praised for picking out a better ? because demotic, inclusive, accessible, human-animal, human-practical ? aspect of possibility to lock into. But the translation is (too often) another sentimentalisation, another betrayal (watch how he gets discussed when it comes to his openly MOR tracks: how these are made safe as "satires of the corny", not a flirtation-dalliance with the actual real corny itself...). "Afro-Futurist" interpretations of the P-Funk cosmology have a habit of switching off a bit safely: opting for compensatory, consolatory, consolidatory ad-copy. In the face of the ludicrous, the deliberately contradictory, the anything-goes playful, the endless cheeky bait-switch reversal, they suddenly take a stand on sententious drivel like "Life force" (ugh) ? the higher spiritual thinking on non-reductive non-linear non-Western philosophies, as if Clinton was aspiring to quasi-academic new age blahdom, and not saying YAY FOR THE MAGGOT BRAIN fuckers! If only we were all nice buddhist-egyptian hippies in touch with our touchy-feelie feelings, the earth, the earth?s mother, yo mama. If nature-stench is what-u-like, you can?t get all arsey with spiders and grubs suddenly.

Besides, funk is not a monad (heh). Listen to this song, "Miss Lucifer?s Love": certainly a sound like this could be mimicked AFTER THE FACT by one man with many machines, one of them a multi-channel tape recorder... but it couldn?t ever have been INVENTED AS IS by one man... it?s the product of the face-to-face chemistry of dozens (if not hundreds) of minds in immediate or remembered contact. And those contacts are STILL ALL THERE: the more often you listen, the more the bodily fact of them returns to inhabit the whole song. (This double LP is a mess, everyone always says: well part of the reason for that is that Clinton hasn?t yet found his OWN post-Processean cosmomology to organise the vastness of the collective input...) (And part of the reason I like it is just that: the working still shows ? he?s developed no super-charming shtick yet to bridge us over the unfinished or halfbaked ideas...) (Of course I love super-charming shtick also, especially when it?s cartoony)

Funk is not a monad: what functions as Clinton?s Godhead is the ENTIRETY OF THE BASE-LEVEL OF SOCIAL ORGANISATION, as improvised collectively by everyone (= you and me ie, not some clean-dreamed other-prole angels "over there") to deal with whatever life happens to be throwing at us where we happen to be. The everything of everything it took to get this band started, this record made. Instead of cutting back, it opens out. Nevertheless, right at the surface of the music itelf, what you most hear is the sheer pleasure AND acknowledgement of the darkness and difficulty in EVERYTHING that went into it, the active involvement of all the minds and bodies concerned as they engaged with prior musics black AND white, or comics or movies or TV or tracts on the illuminati or _______. It?s so generous to its forebears in this: you can hear them there with you. But it?s calmly acute too, about their failings (if they hadn?t had failings, he wouldn?t need to have made a Parliafunkadelicment Thang at all).

Glom onto the surface of Funkadelic with any kind of sustained pressure and (boring fact alert) you discover rock AND soul, black AND white, addressing one another sometimes confusedly, sometimes cleverly, punching each others? buttons maliciously or admiringly. Like acquaintances who have to work together and get on OK, even if they get mad irritated sometimes also. Ordinary bandlife maybe be the funk godhead, but that includes ordinary squabbling, ordinary intra-band jealousy, ordinary selfish stupidity (doing the wrong drugs an hour before rehearsal), ordinary incompetence, and ordinary earlier geeky poseur-fandom etc. The Parliaments were maybe once upon a time named for a Detroit cigarette brand BUT the Clintonian Anglophilia sedimented into the word "Parliament" isn?t diminished or explained away by this fact (jump sideways, to the type of noun acceptable for a band name ? this species of unarticled one-word singular collective, not ___ and the ___s or The ___s or The ___, but just ___ ? as in Cream or Love or Tomorrow or Parliament, arose along with and right at the heart of the Great Underground Revolt). Parliament-Funkadelic seized on white rock?s recent new kink in the idea of the unitary poolitics-of-intention-of-groupdom: the group wasn?t just a reformed street-gang, or an unreformed street-gang, or a theatrical-circus troupe or a stock company or (even) the Justice League of America*... it was kind of the on-bridge crew of a starship, multivalent, technologically adept, on a moral-political mission of salvation-redemption, entertaining and attractive in quasi-hidden-camera interaction with one another. (This is a confusing way of saying the happening heart of rock had become prog**, which happened at the EXACT MOMENT the first rock group whose name was a singular unarticled noun arrived PROVE ME WRONG IF YOU CAN/DARE/FEEL LIKE IT!!)

[*Actually I think this specific Marvel Comic derived trope of the Being of Gangness really only manifests on a useable, effective scale within music, out of rap, after abt 1986... ]

[**Prog: double concept LP, every inch of it used to access ? or anyway point towards ? accessible-if-cryptic utopian philosophical depths beyond the mere pop commonality here and now this second being excitingly progressed beyond, by means of ultra-self-conscious formal eclecticism and uncertain open-ended experiment, progressive political-social-religious possibility, aesthetic impatience and ambition and naivety, not-yet-disenchanted intuition about huge new format possibility]

Subversion isn?t a zero sum game. Even turned against them, the opponents? tools carry in them the opponents? values: we subvert their machinery, they subvert ours, and in the 50-odd years of subversion and counter-subversion represented by "rock culture" (or call it "pop culture" and extend it back 150 years), every handed-down item has become a 1000-layered onion of conflicting values, massively and serially condensed and compressed around and into one another, and every possible effect released ? as magic always is ? by close repeated contact. You get the goods by rubbing, basically. Or by multiple replay: same diff. Soul is the name of the grime under yr needle.