136. Funkadelic, "Maggot Brain"

 


I strongly suspect that I am not cool enough for this album.  It is wild, and I fear I don't have the background or maybe the experience with hallucinogenics required to fully appreciate it.  Here's what we do know.

This was the third Funkadelic album, recorded by the legendary George Clinton in Detroit in late 1970 and early 1971.  It starts off with, and is most famous for, the title track, a 10-minute guitar solo played by Eddie Hazel; originally it had other instrumentation, which you can hear traces off, but it's largely just Hazel's inspired, incredible, obviously Hendrix-influenced guitar.  Clinton famously told Hazel to play like he had just been told his mother died.  Both of them were tripping on LSD, and Hazel turned in this piece of work that sounds alternately like wailing and crying and like someone wandering in the desert.  It's a harrowing, emotional piece of work.

Try as I might, I just can't love 10-minute guitar solos, so the album really kicks off for me with the second song, "Can You Get to That" which I immediately recognized as the source for the guitar sample in Sleigh Bells' "Rill Rill."  The original is itself fascinating, a blend of funk and folk and rock.  It's unlike anything I've ever heard, and it is great.  (Obviously I've never heard this album before.)  

In fact, the five-song stretch from "Can You Get to That" to "Back in Our Minds Again," which Pitchfork said might be the hottest five-song stretch in Clinton's body of work, is a total blast.  "Hit It and Quit It" is built on a great organ riff and has another sizzling solo from Hazel.  "You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks" sounds like a Sly & the Family Stone 45 played on 33, a langorous groove with slapback drums and wailing background singers.  And "Super Stupid" is a psych/funk mashup with Blue Cheer guitars and lyrics about a drug buy gone wrong:

Super stupid bought a five cent bag
Thought it was coke, but it was skag
Super stupid did a one and one
Then his eyes begin to water and his nose begin to run

(Not that I know anything about what drugs cost, but five cents seems very cheap for a bag of cocaine!  Is that slang or just 1970 prices?)  But it's not really about the lyrics.  The last song, "Wars of Armageddon," forms a bookend with the first song in that they're both not really "songs" but more extended meditations.  "Maggot Brain" is an inner journey of loss and pain, while "War" is a funk jam with all kinds of disturbing/weird vocal interpolations and sound effects.  Both songs would probably blow your mind if you were tripping; I'm not about to find out.

Is this album in my personal Top 500? I was originally going to say no, but 500 is a lot of albums and I can make room for this.

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