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"I had planned to stay here
before I ever got here!"
--George Clinton
It was 1995, my freshman year of high-school, and the airwaves were roaring with operatic misery in the form of grunge music, already being recycled by a new wave of imitators. Most of the upper-class kids who beat me up and made fun of me on a daily basis listened to "rebellious" angry stuff--Rage Against the Machine, Nine Inch Nails, Tool, Nirvana (they exchanged those groups, a few of whom I now listen to myself, for rap several years later, as soon as hip-hop started taking over). I wasn't inclined to listen to their forms of catharsis, since listening to those bands reminded me of getting my head slammed in a locker by people wearing their t-shirts. I had begun to discover on my own some music that I liked--Portishead and the Clash come to mind. But I was still just dabbling. I was unsatisfied with most of the music I heard, and even the bands I liked a lot seemed to leave me wanting some unnameable, unpredictable Other form, one that expressed my multi-dimensional view of life as it was developing.
One day I was nervously (everything I did in those day was nervous) pawing through the CDs in a used record store, and I found something. Cover-art that was cartoonish without quite being goofy, apocalyptic without being gloomy, and above all colorful and wild, bespeaking great energy. Funkadelic. I felt like I had heard the name but I couldn't remember where. Was it rap? The kids who picked on me at school, as I mentioned, were already beginning to exchange their "alternative" phase for endless 2pac and Dre, and for a moment I thought this might be another monotonous, simple-minded rap album like the ones they listened to, but it didn't look like anything I'd ever seen before.
After looking at it for a few minutes, and glancing at the original release date on the back (1978) I was convinced that this strange animal, One Nation Under a Groove, was something I had to have in my life. When I took it home that evening I rushed up to my room. It was the weekend, Saturday, and the following morning I would have to go to church, as usual, before gearing up for another round of bullying on Monday. I groaned inwardly at the thought of having to sit through those familiar droning hymns.
When I was very young, peeking over the pew to see the church band dutifully touching their instruments, I used to wonder what was missing there. We had an acoustic guitarist leading the worship, and an electric bass. But the lead guitar was always tuneless and dull, two chords galloping stupidly over one another, and the bass was never even audible. Sometimes the bass player didn't appear to be using his instrument at all. Apparently for these people the holy spirit was not a boogie man. Even when I was very young, as early as ten years old, I used to become frustrated with these dubious musicians--they seemed unwilling, or unable, to find out what these instruments could really do. They lamely plunked away, even the drummer using brushes rather than sticks. The congregation didn't have any rhythm either, and if they had any manic energy in their movements during the service it was usually in the service of prostrating, humiliating themselves before god--and they never acted that way when they weren't in church, that's for sure.
It was tame, and I felt tame, and didn't want to be tame. But I also didn't want to be angry or hurt about it anymore. So when I put on the Funkadelic CD and skipped forward to the title track, feeling the pulse of the bass, wild and playful, heavier and less monotonous than disco or rap but just as danceable, I knew that I had found a place where people played instruments the way those instruments wanted to be played. I had gotten the same feeling of exhilaration from Portishead or Smashing Pumpkins records, but this time it was downright goofy with the sound of obvious glee. Gettin' down just for the funk of it...a grin, self-conscious at first and then too strong to keep restrained, spread over my face. I was literally overjoyed, transported completely into the present. Gonna be freakin' up and down hang-up alleyway...love, glorious love, glorious love...
Suddenly, my life had changed. There was real fury and terror in it, and humor and bravery too. Trent Reznor looked frighteningly methodical now in comparison, his anger ridiculously over-emphasized and one-dimensional. I realized in that moment that what was wrong with the angsty music being pumped in my high-school that year was that no matter how powerful it was, the people playing it showed that the misery and repression of the world was getting to them, wearing them down. Funkadelic had tasted the same depth of misery, probably even more so, but managed to laugh at it, rather than putting a gun to their heads. This seemed a better approach. I put the headphones on and walked down the stairs, past my mother and stepfather, who looked at me with the grim, irritated suspicion that always seemed to be lurking in their faces whenever I showed up. Their frowns deepened when they saw me dancing, sticking out my tongue. (I was usually too terrified and self-conscious to dance in their presence, but something about One Nation Under a Groove pushed me over the edge.) Maybe they had never tasted this music.
But I felt like I was riding on the back of the sun in a new saddle. We had a lake behind our house, and I walked down to the shore, turning the volume up to overcome the lapping waves and the wind. I stood on the wobbly, floating dock, and looked over the water and the mountains beyond, and as George Clinton and his friends wailed happily in my ear "who says a funk band can't play rock music who says a rock band can't play jazz," etc. I knew that I was free, forever. I might be subjugated for a few more years by the school system, the church, and my parents, but after that, I thought, this would get me through anything, and it would keep me from killing myself in the meantime.
I sat down and looked through the cover artwork, drawn by a man named Pedro Bell, (I had brought the CD case down to the shore with me in my baggy pants pocket) and I was gleeful upon glimpsing the contents. Rocket ships, writhing planets, naked, broadly grinning strong-limbed afroed women, jets and streamers of bodily fluids hanging in space like sperm-laced Milky Ways. All the warped majesty of human existence was celebrated here. The singers seemed to have inherited some of the "Sugarpie Honyebunch" Motown style of love-speech--women were more likely to be referred to as "baby" or "sweetheart" or "girl" than "bitch" in this music, unlike most rap. It was all about love, but not in a hippy-dippy way. It was about being smart without frowning, being funny without being stupid. It was about being very serious about the problem of life with a hand shoved down one's pants, the messy but ultimately worthwhile experience of being human. This music had energy and emotion stripped of sentimentality, and it celebrated sex and relationships as things wild and funny, unlike most of the theatrically torturous post-grunge crap on the airwaves. It also suggested that being more intelligent and emotional than one's propagandist media-drenched surroundings was fun, as opposed to crushing. "Our mouths neurological assholes, talking shit a mile a minute..."
Two things hit me as I stood there in front of all that lapping water, feeling about to erupt. One: I didn't want to be wearing my clothes anymore. I wanted to feel the spring wind on my body, and my feet in the moss and sand, and I wanted to hang free. I wanted to escape to a place where people could be naked and unashamed of it. And then the second, equally important revelation hit me: this was, finally, my music. I'm sure that someone else at my school must have listened to funk back then, but I didn't know them. I didn't have any friends who listened to funk (when I started high school I didn't have any friends, period, and until much later none of the friends I did gain ever listened to funk, damn them). My music. I was ecstatic, and from that day on George Clinton, Bootsy Collins and Eddie Hazel escorted me down the halls of my high-school, making me braver with every step. The next morning in church I no longer glowered at the preacher's proclamations of faith and the dangers of refusing to follow Jesus, who, judging from his solemnity, had never heard of funk, poor man. He had merely become an amusing part of the big goof, to be pitied for his inability to get down, though he came fearfully close sometimes when railing against the grim ecstasies of sin. When he wept about the glory of god, I finally knew what he was talking about, even if it wasn't in my language. And when the school bully came up to me the next day, smirking and readying to turn me into putty, I smirked back and warned him that he was taking part in the electric spanking of war babies. He looked utterly shocked, and seemed reluctant to mess with me from that day forward, probably convinced that I'd gone crazy from his abuse and that he didn't want to get involved with whatever had apparently been set loose in my head.
The periods flew by as I thought about how to save enough money to get all the Funkadelic albums, as well as all those by my new friends Sly and the Family Stone. When I started to build my funk collection, I was thrilled to find that many of Sly's best albums were a mere 7-8 dollars(!). This was neglected, if not forgotten, music, especially in my area of the country, and it consequently had become surprisingly cheap. Funk was simply too "weird" for most people, and so was I. But I started to notice something--the rap music becoming popular at my school was built from the blueprints that these guys had laid down. I'd hear break-beats and other samples that I recognized (especially when I started listening to James Brown) thumping from people's cars, and I knew that I was now older and wiser than them, at least in spirit, because they had no clue to the roots of what they were listening to. Like most young people, shit, most all people, I treasured the feeling of superiority that this gave me. I remember the snotty looks I would get, even from some of my friends, when I'd introduce them to funk. Even the kinder ones just laughed and shook their heads. Why didn't they understand my music? I was lonely. But my loneliness was getting progressively funkier. Lying in my bed at night, I learned to masturbate while dreaming of a curvaceous exchange student who would arrive (at my house, I suppose, fresh off the plane from Romania or wherever else they have sexy accents), wearing a form-fitting Parliament t-shirt and nothing else, to ask me for a personal tour of our school.
