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These groups helped lucidify and intensify my way of dealing with life without darkening it. There's darkness in funk, an awareness of life's pain, but it's dealt with, usually by belly-laughs. And sometimes by bittersweet melancholy, a melancholy richer than the anger that was snarling robotically from the stereos in those days. I remember listening to the rest of One Nation Under a Groove sitting on that dock, and at the end of the album, a live version of "Maggot Brain", Eddie Hazel's guitar odyssey inspired by George Clinton's urge to "play like your mama just died", came on. By the end of the track I was sobbing with my head on my knees. The beauty of sadness in the music went so deep, and was so unexpected after the other tracks on the album, so unique, that it shocked me into a new kind of awareness. People could be colorful and silly, wild and sensual, without sacrificing any of their depth, something you wouldn't have known from seeing so many music icons of the time glaring and trying hard to look wounded in photo after photo. When I raised my head, the frustration of years of internal sickness from being too polite and afraid to stick up for myself pouring from my eyes, I knew that I would never have to approach life's problems in a cliched way. I could throw away all the books, both the ones given to me by my ludicrously dull and self-important (if not self-centered), guides in the church, and the overly studied, depressed one given me by my peers at school.
When I see the humorlessness of so much of the world we live in, the rigorous manners that pass for kindness, especially under the current administration, I'm reminded why the spirit of funk music is so important. The only photograph I've seen of our President dancing is one (that's haunted my nightmares for years) of him doing a clumsy version of The Chicken next to Ricky Martin, the two of them grinning at each other like cellphone commercials. I'm not being glib when I say that the obvious inability to groove, to really shake ass and whoop with glee, of most, if not all of our world leaders, worries me. And what of our citizens? The stiffness and mannered emotion of the average person in our society is barely relieved by the modern dance floor. The music is too methodical, just as disco was when it usurped funk's popular appeal by cheapening funk's rhythms and uncomplicating them for a larger public. And the gleaming, inhuman sexiness of our MTV stars makes sex seem about as stimulating as a used-car commercial. Funk's smell, for me, is the odor that happens immediately after a man ejaculates into a woman. It is the smell of life happening out of pleasure. That sweet, freshlyhusked-corn odor will always be on my mind whenever I hear the music. With funk pulsing in my veins, I went to school dances with a tall, striped felt top hat, wearing a bright red leisure suit, a bright blue long-sleeve shirt with ruffles fluttering on my chest. I fully expected to be mocked, but instead I was embraced by most, albeit bemusedly, with rolling eyes, and those who still wanted someone to pick on eventually looked elsewhere, after shaking their heads and half-heartedly flipping me off. Most abusive, sarcastic people simply don't know how to deal with someone who takes an open joy in cultivating their own style. And that's what funk's all about. Soon, the lyrics of Funkadelic's self-titled first album (discovered,with fitful joy, at a nearby used record shop) would ring in my mind whenever I'd find myself wanting to throw abuse or criticism at other people the way they had thrown it at me when I'd been an outcast: I got a thing, you got a thing, everybody got a thing--when we! get together, doin' our thang, honor, trrrr-uth, and lu-uv. I have tried not to forget the message, though I sometimes do.
When I lived in Schenectady, New York with my good friend Ben (whose drumming in the great band Death to Tyrants undoubtedly owes something to Sly's drummer), we both worked miserable jobs; I lifted furniture and appliances all day and often during the night, often delivering 70-inch screen TVs to people who couldn't afford them, whose entranceways were too narrow to allow the TVs to pass, developing a irritated cramp in my right testicle that I was convinced was cancerous (it wasn't), while he spent his day dealing with rude, impatient and very tan rich people at a ritzy nearby bagel shop. When we'd get home at night, the first impulse was to put on some angry music, and for a while this worked. But one day we couldn't feel it anymore, and I dug into my LPs for an old remedy--I put on Stand by Sly & the Family Stone. We danced to the hard-earned joy of the entire album, even the whole 20-minute flogging of the senses known as "Sex Machine". That song in all its variations really is like the rhythms of sex--it even eases its pulse perfectly at the end to simulate the gasping slowdown during orgasm, and simmers to a halt like the afterglow that immediately follows. There's a really special moment contained after the ending, too: the band members, immediately after allowing the last throb of bass, the last shrill keyboard note, the last high-hat explosion and the last strummed guitar to ooze from their bodies, let out a collective hooting laugh, and one of them says, with total, egoless elation, as if incredulous at what he and his band-mates have just created: "we just blew your mind, man".
And they did. It remains one of my favorite moments in recorded music. By the end, my skinny roommate and I were gliding around the floor like Michael Jacksons on some serious amphetamines, had splinters in our feet from the beat-up floor, and didn't care a bit. Our fury at our tense, beat-up industrial town had momentarily disappeared, and our little hatreds were forgotten.
I also owe my love of experimental music in large part to funk. The wildness and eccentricity inherent in the music prepared me for listening to, and enjoying, things like Can, later Tom Waits, Flaming Lips, Captain Beefheart, His Name is Alive, Public Image, Sonic Youth, and My Bloody Valentine, when I got out of high-school and had time to blow all my money on records, getting evicted from apartment after apartment due to my inability to pay for anything but pasta, gasoline and music. And funk also continues to enhance my sex-life--whenever you feel self-conscious or overly vulnerable about being naked and wild with someone you love, just put on some P-funk and grind-dance with your significant other, preferably against a refrigerator or other large kitchen appliance. If you let it, this music will slide its tongue up your ass until you can't help but squirm and giggle with pleasure.
I'm happy, in my time, to have seen already the seeds of funk blooming all around me, especially in Outkast, who obviously grew up on some serious P-Funk. It's no coincidence that they've made the rest of mainstream rap (even Dr Dre, who admits to owing his entire aesthetic to P-Funk), and most of the underground, look feeble and monotonous in comparison. Without the likes of them, popular music would be completely dead. It is indeed time for us all to start funking again. The world is becoming overcrowded by the cynical, by warlike dry-bootied fundamentalists who can't seem to dream of standing on the verge of getting it on. Funk tells us that we need each other, even those we dislike, for mutual amusement, if nothing else. Yes, it is time for us to funk, time for us to funk harder than ever about what we really want to do with our lives.
And since I hate to end with a moral, I'll end with a beginning--a moment from my life that funk propelled: I am driving my first car, a Dodge Dynasty, at approximately 80 miles an hour on a narrow uphill road next to Mount Monadnock in upstate New Hampshire, and the red sunset is becoming visible at the top of the hill like a flame licking its way over the crawling tar as I pilot my fine craft, which is purring like an aggravated kitten from the sawdust in the transmission deposited there by the chopshop-supplied used-car lot where I bought it. The car has a cross-shaped sticker on the windshield that says "REVEREND" because some small-town preacher owned it last, and my friends have taken to calling it "The Lord's Chariot". Sawdust reinvigorates a dying transmission for time, then completely destroys it. But I don't know that yet--all I know is that the engine is humming smoothly. The car leaps into the air for a pulse-quickening moment as I reach the top of the hill, and for a moment it seems that I'm about to soar off the planet into the hazy red sun in the distance. Then the tires meet the tar smoothly and I coast down the long hill, barely able to contain the giggles as I swerve around curve after curve. The road is deserted, it's twilight dinnertime and I have the world to myself, and my new copy of Hardcore Jollies, bought earlier that day, is playing on the stereo. George Clinton's raspy voice is crooning given the chance, I would love the hell out of you, little girl-- give me a whirl...and though I haven't yet sniffed that husked-corn smell that ignites between two bodies, I believed that those words were, and still are, my own psalm to the earth.
Yours in The 63rd Year of Our George,
Luke Buckham
Luke Buckham says, “Current poetry, despite the fact that people like Simic & Sapphire have published great work, has become cluttered with cowardly, cliched, unmemorable verse. One of the most admirable features of humanity is that while the general public does it's job to keep fads & advertisers comfortably alive, the counterculture usually manages to preserve superb art. We can access work by Hieronymous Bosch even though he died nearly 500 years ago. Still, the work of great poets like Micheline & Norse has gone out of print, and this is shameful. It means that the counterculture could be doing a much better job.”