<b<KNEE DEEP IN THE COSMIC SLOP, the Parliafunkadelicment
Thang handmade a funky lingua franca for post-deseg black
generations, and deployed Pentecostal-bred harmonies to the end of
deconstructing the many ways the Devil lurks in this amber-waved
Babylon. So why did Clinton & Co. delve into America’s religious
lunatic fringe via a flirtation with Swinging London-era Scientology
spinoff the Process Church—a faith best known for drawing ire due
to their dual worship of both Christ and Satan?
It was one thing for golden Beach Boy Dennis Wilson to pal
around Los Angeles with Charlie Manson—or even Manson admirer
Neil Young to extol his actions and late-’60s LA malaise on the great
“Revolution Blues.” However, the ambitions of good colored boys in
shiny suits with conked ‘dos and precision dance steps were only
supposed to extend to crossing over to White America—or the River
Jordan to the Promised Land in the afterlife—not the hellfires of
the old Delta bluesmen the doo-wop singers’ parents had abandoned way
off Route 66 before their Great Migration to Detroit’s assembly lines.
The split between the sacred and the profane, between Saturday night
fish-fry folks and upstanding Sunday morning parishioners, has been
very stark in
African American history, such that there was likely
little to no method of kenning the erstwhile Parliaments’ shift from
lye processes to the Process tenets as laid out in the album art for
Maggot Brain and America Eats its Young.
Way before the White Stripes declared “get behind me Satan!”
their freaky-deak Motor City forbears in Funkadelic were
tripping out at United Sound and rapping about lowdown folks
pimping Mother Nature to produce biracial trick babies in the form of
myriad societal ills. America Eats its Young‘s title track
sports a doo-wop-ing deus ex machina waxing about “A luscious
bitch/She is true/It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature,” replete with
spectral howls and high lonesome whining guitar riffs, before “Miss
Lucifer’s Love” renovates the time-worn blues trope of a
Devil-in-a-red-dress for the Metal Age (“She’s the Devil and I like
it!”). And the LP’s best song, “Biological Speculation,” essentially
hinges on the rootsy-ness of African retention and Afrofuturism.If
anyone should embrace the Good God’s adversary/America’s Public Enemy
#1 it’s enslaved Africans and their descendants, for the imperial
agents of Islam and Christianity brought death and destruction to their
native civilizations and constricted them in the West.
America’s never truly gotten past the imagined haunting gaze of
inscrutable redskin savages watching settlements from the woods. And
it’s this American gothic, the primal horror to which Americans
ritually sacrifice that Funkadelic limned on its chaotic answer record
to Sgt. Pepper and Exile On Main Street by
displaying a lily-white vampiress Lady Liberty gorging on multiracial
babies, and opining on everything from segregated hipster culture
(“Philmore”) to clowning Mick Jagger’s Bantu-philia on “Miss Lucifer’s
Love.” This was the original Black Sabbath. In the wake of James Brown,
George Clinton and his black rock peers were repping for the O.G.
Ethiopian rocker, Dionysus, and prophesying that we shall overcome
aboard ancient Kemet’s Ark of a Million Years, escaping America’s hell
on earth for black folks in “A Joyful Process” (ripping the kiddie
Christian song even an Atheist like me was raised singing: “Jesus Loves
Me”). So why not shake down Satan?