Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir by George Clinton

Author:George Clinton
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2014-10-21T05:00:00+00:00

Musically, Motor Booty Affair was an extension of Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome: funk as we had designed and refined it, but with an even greater sense of its own status as entertainment. Richard “Kush” Griffith and Junie did some of the arrangements, and they took them to the edge of what was acceptable for pop music. We had cabaret styles, Vegas-type arrangements. We had fanfares, like we were announcing a horse race. Junie had done some of that when he was with the Ohio Players, but on Motor Booty Affair he ran wild with it. That kind of thing might have sounded corny in another environment, but we were already so far out there that we weren’t interested in coming back. Other bands kept their distance from anything that smacked of pure entertainment: they wanted to be serious, or spiritual, or Afro-cultural. In some cases, they even worried that we were making a mockery of what black pop music was becoming, somehow risking its legitimacy. “Man,” they said, “don’t mess it up.” But we weren’t messing anything up. We were moving into territory that I associated mainly with the Beatles. Even though it was more than a decade old at that point, I was still fucked up from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It had so many styles, from avant-garde rock and roll to song craft that was almost like Rodgers and Hammerstein, that it became a style all its own. Motor Booty Affair is, for me, our Beatles peak: it’s the most ambitious record, the most layered, the one that’s most ripe for rediscovery.

That feeling extends beyond the music. We had always known that there was a strong visual element to the record: it says so right on it, “A Motion Picture Underwater.” And Overton went all-out with his illustration, starting with the way he incorporated little butts into the capital letters on the title: the M, the B, and the A. And he drew an incredible inside piece, a full gatefold mural of the world he had imagined. To this day, it’s one of my favorite moments in the history of P-Funk art. Everything about that album was fun. Everyone fell into the concept willingly, enthusiastically. Maybe the Beatles analogy needs a little fine-tuning. Maybe it’s not just that the record was ambitious sonically, or that it was stylistically diverse, but that it had a sense of humor that extended over the whole project, a kind of comic self-awareness. And maybe, then, in Beatle-speak, it’s not our Sgt. Pepper’s, but our Yellow Submarine. For me, that movie changed the game completely, as much as any Beatles record. It was a perfect monument of nonsense, a way to take grown-up topics and statements and play them off as kid stuff. There’s a monster in that movie that starts to suck fish out of the sea, and then it sucks up the entire sea floor, and then it sucks itself up. That’s the kind of creature that populates Motor Booty Affair, too: a playful darkness.

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