Tag: George Clinton

Dr. Funkenstein

Eshun’s reading of Parliament’s 1976 album, The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, flips the script on Frankenstein. Funkenstein is a hero and central protagonist of the P-Funk mythos, much like the Star Child from 1975’s Mothership Connection. Benevolent intergalactic mad scientist and “Cowboy in the Boat of Ra,” he swings low to funkatize galaxies, hip equipped with Bop Gun.

Funkenstein’s science is an ancestral one. His sound machines liberate time from the master’s clock. His “Children of Production” are the fruits of P-Funk’s chronopolitical wager.

“P#Funk’s connection forward in time to the Mothership allows an equal and opposite connection back in time to the Pharaonic connection, both of which converge on the present,” writes Eshun. “The pyramids become examples of ancient alien technology which the extraterrestrial brothers ‘have returned to claim.’ Funk becomes a secret science, a forgotten technology that ‘has been hidden until now.’ […]. In Parliament MythScience, funk is genetic engineering and prehistoric science: ‘In the days of the Funkapus, the concept of specially designed Afronauts capable of funkatizing galaxies was first laid on Manchild but was later repossessed and placed among the secrets of the pyramids, until a more positive attitude towards this most sacred phenomenon — clone funk — could be acquired.’ Cloning funk in the 70s reactivates an archaic science. The futuristic feeds forward into the anachronic futurepasts of Atlantis and Egypt.”

“The Afronaut space program is launched by a narration shifted down into threatening pitch: ‘There in these terrestrial projects, it would wait along with its coinhabitants of Kings and Pharaohs like sleeping beauties for the kiss that would release them to multiply in the image of the Chosen One’” (More Brilliant than the Sun, pp. 08[141]-08[142]).

Funkenstein embraces his clones. He’s not Shelley’s Promethean scientist, stitching together monsters from dead flesh, nor is he the creator of Land’s Terminator. Funkenstein is the “protector of the Pleasure Principle,” the Master of Funk, the progenitor whose “funkentelechy” — a term George Clinton would coin on the band’s next album, Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome — animates the clones, turns them into star children, infuses them with joyous being.

Still, the specter of Frankenstein remains. “May I frighten you?” asks Funkenstein at the end of the album’s “Prelude.” Choruses of haters criticize him, accusing him of misleading and playing games, on “Gamin’ on Ya,” the track that follows. And there he is on “Dr. Funkenstein,” describing himself as “the disco fiend with the monster sound,” “the cool ghoul with the bump transplant,” “hung up on bones.” How can we not have sense enough to be concerned? The clones, after all, are us: born into the laboratory of the dancefloor, wired for joy, with ears that can hear, yet wary of the master’s games.

Yet the album ultimately valorizes Funkenstein, suggesting that to be frightened here is to feel the uncanny thrill of mutation: new life, new bodies, new collectivities. The funk does not reproduce the old. It multiplies the new.

Every act of creation risks ambivalence. As with AI today: to clone intelligence, to summon machinic companions, is to walk a double path. Is it to frighten — or to free? To play games of domination — or to spread rhythms of liberation?

The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein is less an answer to these questions than an opportunity for their staging. Funk is the pharmakon, the “big pill”: poison and cure. By the time of tracks like “Getten’ to Know You,” though, the arc of the album’s moral universe bends decidedly toward the latter.

Listening to it, thinking with it, we infer an Afrofuturist alternative to the Gothic trap: a Book of Thoth for the Age of AI.

Wednesday January 9, 2019

After a nap in a park under a sunny blue January sky, Parliament helps me loosen up and release stress I’ve been carrying in my shoulders, neck, and upper back. Time to blow the cobwebs from my mind with the Mothership Connection. That is where I’m at and it feels good.

P-Funk had its own mythology. George Clinton performed at times as his messianic alien alter-ego, Star Child. My first encounters with “Mothership Connection” came by way of Dr. Dre’s sample of it on “Let Me Ride” from his debut solo album The Chronic, released the year of my fourteenth birthday. Robin D.G. Kelley discusses artists like Parliament-Funkadelic and Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist brand of hippie modernism in his book Freedom Dreams. These were artists who “looked backward to look forward, finding the cosmos by way of ancient Egypt.” I love the idea of a revolution you join by putting “a glide in your stride and a dip in your hip,” projecting one’s body here and now into a 3-D realtime utopian Afrofuturist “world within the world” known as the Mothership. The P-Funk song’s reference to the famous spiritual “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,” used by members of the Underground Railroad as a coded form of communication to help people escape, reminds me of the Trystero group’s use of the posthorn symbol in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Other P-Funk tracks are also worthy of analysis and comment. The early Funkadelic song “Can You Get To That,” for instance, alludes to Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Dream” speech with its metaphor of the bounced check.

“America has given the negro people a bad check,” King intoned, “a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.” This stuff definitely ought to find its way into my course this semester — as should the work of jazz poet Ted Joans and illustrator Pedro Bell. The latter created the liner art for several key P-Funk releases. As George Clinton notes on his official website, “What Pedro Bell had done was invert psychedelia through the ghetto. Like an urban Hieronymus Bosch, he cross-sected the sublime and the hideous to jarring effect. Insect pimps, distorted minxes, alien gladiators, sexual perversions. It was a thrill, it was disturbing. Like a florid virus, his markered mutations spilled around the inside and outside covers in sordid details that had to be breaking at least seven state laws. […]. He single-handedly defined the P-Funk collective as sci-fi superheroes fighting the ills of the heart, society and the cosmos.”