Where the hell do I start with Parliament/Funkadelic?

Funny that I just listened to a podcast on him 2 or 3 days ago
https://www.designfreakspodcast.com/episodes/2019/2/22/pedro-bell
comes from February this year. One of a series on art5ists mainly to do with music.

Pedro did something that is really rare imo, he made sitting down to listen to an album a real absorbing event. I can remember getting those mid-period Funkadelic albums, sitting down to listen to the album, and just poring over the liner notes and comic panels and hyper-detailed portraits and sleeve designs while listening, it was like entering another world for 35-40 minutes, not doing anything else. A proto-"multimedia" magic marker experience. From record to record there were references, running jokes, characters, recurring themes - a narrative. And not a narrative like today's where the focus is on the performer and their persona, but on this whole other weird alternate universe that mashed together horror movies, comic books, science fiction, blaxploitation, mysticism, conspiracy theories, African American lit, pornography, made-up slang, it's just so rich. There are not a lot of times I can recall where I would listen to an album and *not do anything else*, because it wasn't just an album, it had this whole other hyper-detailed (and funny!) aspect to it. Clinton got other guys later on that did their own version of this, but Bell was the originator and the best imo.

Totally agree, A+ post.

Seconded

H/T to Ned for sending this to my Twitter feed:

Funkadelic LP artist Pedro Bell once told me a woman, Cathy Abel, designed the official Funkadelic logo. When I shared this years ago with folks, misogynists & non-believers thought I was making ish up. Last wknd, while looking in “El-Lay”’s P-archives, look what I found (‘72)... pic.twitter.com/DMXESax2Re

— DJ Soul Sister (@djsoulsister) October 7, 2019

Cool.

Saw 82 years old George Clinton and current version of Parliament Funkadelic at the Lincoln Theatre in DC . George was having fun, and the band was too. Sure I could nitpick them doing House of Pain “Jump Around “ rather than a PFunk deep cut , but George seemed into that cover . When I first saw em way back when I was bored a bit by instrumental solos , and decades later the same. One horn player did riffs from Fiddler on the Roof and Hava Nagila . But when they got funky, and the woman vocalist was singing well, and the horns, keyboard, guitars were grooving , it was one nation under a groove .