Friday, October 14, 2005

Funky Friday - Muppetstylee


Funkadelic = The Muppet Band on Acid?

Funkadelic - I Wanna Know If It's Good To You

Funkadelic - Can You Get To That?

It's almost the weekend and I'm in a Friday-type mood today. If you know me well, you know that I've got the funk pumpin through my veins. White blood cells, red blood cells, a couple T cells, some plasma, and funk. After years of contemplative study in the temple of funk, reading the old scrolls and listening to the old records, I've come to realize that the lyrics in a funk song can be about anything. They can be happy, angry, funny, melancholly, political, sad, or simply nonsense. But, through it all, it keeps a funky beat that you're meant to dance to. So, funk music could be said to be a model for how to get through life. No matter what's goin on, you just gotta keep dancing along. As the theory goes, if we can all get together, pretty soon the whole place will be groovin. As the cracked-out George Clinton (my favorite Clinton) said, "Free your mind and your ass will follow." I think it works vice versa, too. Which brings me to today's posts...it really doesn't get much funkier than Funkadelic. Both these songs contain some of my favorite hip hop samples and I'm sure you'll recognize some of the beats from other songs. These two tracks capture the Funkadelic collective on a moonless night, at the crossroads of funk and psychedelia, right after their midnight meeting with the devil. If I had to describe what Funkadelic used to be like, it'd be something like, "Think of The Muppet Band, except instead of being puppets, they are a bunch of black dudes, operating on copious amounts of psychedelic drugs."

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