THE GEORGE CLINTON INTERVIEW

If James Brown is the King of funk, and Prince the Prince, George Clinton is the Court Jester. And, like all court jesters, he gets away with telling more plain truth than his peers. Wrapped in persistently brilliant Afro-American vernacular, and wrapped by the hardest funk imaginable, Clinton might not sell as much as his crossover comrades, but what he does record pins your ears to the wall and sets your heart and feet pounding.

Highly prolific (he’s worked on 56 albums), and with a commune of likeminded musicians, Clinton remains as much the guiding light of funk in the common-denominated ’80s as he was in the progressive early ’70s and discofied mid-’70s.

You might not know Clinton by name, but the chances are you’ve heard of one of the numerous names he works under: Parliament; Funkadelic; P-Funk Allstars; Bootsy’s Rubber Band; Parlet; etc. Even if you haven’t, I’m sure you’ve mumbled one of the phrases he’s coined: One Nation Under A Groove, America Eats Its Young, Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow (all album titles), to quote the most obvious.

I hadn’t planned it this way, but you can’t ask Clinton a rhetorical question. So what follows, rather then a rundown of his career, is the World According To Clinton.

DRUGS

“The society is a drug society, there’s a pill for everything depending onjwhere you stand in the society. And that’s the dilemma. They teach us doctors have all powers to cure, and they’ve convinced us so well, if the doctor don’t give you a prescription you get mad at him.

“The hassle is, they don’t stipulate all drugs are bad. They convince you their drugs do everything, without mentioning, say, the withdrawal from Valium. Or any of the side-effects from so-called legal drugs.

“Drugs are fine as long as they’re legal, because that’s how society makes the tax dollars. The others are black market, they don’t make any money off them. It’s the only criteria the goverment uses, there is no other moral issue.”

GOOD THOUGHTS/

BAD THOUGHTS

In Funkadelic’s Standing On The Verge Of Getting It On, you wrote, “Good thoughts bring forth good fruit/Bullshit thoughts rot your meat/Think right and you can fly. ” Now you’re talking about the end result of bad thoughts as a physical ailment, literally an ulcer rotting your body. I thought you meant the end result of bad thoughts as a political handicap, the inability to think correctly stopping you from freedom.

“I don’t [think people thinking correctly] exists, because ‘correctly’ would have to change too much. I change all the time, what’s correct today might not be correct tomorrow. There are certain thoughts I believe are bad.”

For instance, rape is bad.

‘‘Sure, but only since we’ve become intellectually able to control our instincts. Before, we were like any other animal— the female in heat was the only signal. We’ve evolved, and we’re supposed to understand because we have a bigger brain.

“Supposed to. Some people haven’t evolved yet. So, yes, it’s a bad thought in our society. But where the bad thought comes from still has to be recognized. When advertisements use a naked girl to sell a car, they must take responsibility for the man who can’t differentiate between the girl on a car and grabbing a girl off the street.”

We must assume there’s a certain level of intelligence, otherwise you’re propagating censorship.

“Not censorship, but what happens to the person who doesn’t reach the level? You have to accept if society does this, the result will be that. Don’t lie and say this man is the one in a million who rapes.

“Society spends millions on human behavior, they’ll sell you anything, but they don’t figure out what it’ll do to you. They just punish you if you go too far. ’Specially if it gets deep, like touching children. Society will not only punish you, I you can’t even think about it. You should 1 be able to talk about your problems—like f confession. To somebody who won’t call J you a nut but will listen to you. Maybe then you won’t do them. Otherwise these problems will continue to multiply.”

BLACK HOSTILITY On an LP like America Eats Its Young, there appears to be racial hostility.

‘‘Humanity hostility, not racial. It was about all people. I said ‘We’re just a biological speculation/Sitting here vibrating/And we don’t know what we’re vibrating about/lt’s just the animal instincts/That makes me want to do these things/That makes me want to live this kind of life.’ That’s my poem; it’s very harsh and very realistic.

“So when you say, ‘Why does a person rob or kill?,’ it’s because he doesn’t have enough to eat, and his computer makes him think, ‘As a creature, my life is threatened.’ Not simply that he doesn’t have a place to sleep.

“I can understand black anger very well. But to be as pissed as I know we have a right to be, I know killing the next person isn’t the answer. I will stay out of your way, but I will not let you make me as afraid, or angry, as you must feel to put me in this position in the first place. Human beings, no matter where they’re at or at what time, are creatures of their enviroment.”

FUNKADELIC/PARLI AMENT

“The way they exist, both of them, the content is probably the same. But there’s more anarchy in Funkadelic. The structure isn’t just tete-a-tete, the thought patterns and concepts are looser and more alive. With Parliament I think about it, I try to research it. When I talked about cloning I tried to find out what I was talking about. I make Parliament arranged and Funkadelic radical.”

EFFORT

There’s an effortlessness about your recorded work.

“You’re right. I think what they consider effort is overdone. The producer will sit, ‘give me more highs, give me more lows, give me more basics.’ Listening for the records’ end result is the main thing. If I’ve got good musicians, why fuck with them?

“I do my part when it comes to writing the lyrics, you can tell I do that. But if you come and watch me in the studio, you’d think I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t do nothing but listen.”

FILLER

“What you call filler, I’ll tell you my interpretation: part of the whole thing is to hook up and hit it. For whatever reason— psychedelic, psychotic, stupid—there’s somebody out there who likes it. We go through those tracks (the ones I call chaos) to reach the good ones, the orderly ones. And the filler makes the good ones sound better.

“You might think it’s stupid to cut so loose. It’s a reality thing, there’s a market of people who really like it, who don’t want us to play better even if we can.

“The concept is the same way we first came to Funkadelic. We don’t want to be slick, we can go to Motown for that, we don’t want to be correct. We want to be as psychedelic as possible. It’s the hardest thing to do on record, and some of our best stuff. The filler is the thing which brought a lot of people into the groove.

LOUIS FARAKHAN AND ANTI-SEMITISM

A girl once told me she thought the only hope for America is for blacks to stop feeling like defeated criminals and get angry again.

“Somebody always has to have that opinion. There’s always somebody who thinks we ain’t doing it fast enough and we should fight and die for it.”

What do you think of Louis Farakhan?

“He tells the truth. He’s like the song we were talking about, ‘The Message,’ without the track. He does it like that and it’s the truth.”

He’s an anti-Semite.

“I don’t know what that means, I don’t get it that way. He says, ‘Do like the Jews. Leave your money amongst youselves for a period of time, because it’s the way the Jews have been successful.” And that’s cool. ‘We’ve been fragmented,’ is all he’s saying. Since the Jews own all the stores in the black areas, it threatens them. But it’s no different than the Koreans or anybody else. Only because it’s us, and we have a habit of spending everywhere, it seems threatening.

“I know where anti-Semitism comes from, but I don’t know what it means today. Still, a person has the right to say anything—the Klan and all those people—I don’t like what they’re saying, but I respect their right to say it.”

REAGAN

Reagan can and does control many people’s thoughts.

“Not really. Not the way John Kennedy and Martin Luther King did. There are people telling Reagan what to think, they’re not his original thoughts. They’d get rid of him quick if he changed his thoughts to ones that didn’t suit them.”

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HUMOR AS A WEAPON

“I can say deadlier things if I make a joke out of them. The end result is they are funny if you put them together like this. I make it like a cartoon, because if you really know what you’re doing, you wouldn’t necessarily do it. I want people to think, ‘Is this what it really means? Is this what the Vietnam war means, we’re protecting 2,000 swimming pools?’ Yeah, and that’s all there was to it. And when you think about it, kids dying for 2,000 swimming pools has got to be funny.

“Today kids are convinced if we don’t fight, the Red Flag will bury us.”

LOGIC

“All the logic I hear don’t make sense no more. They’re selling George Clinton Fried Ice Cream in California. Satellites? What goes up doesn’t have to come down no more.”

THE ’60s AND THE ’90s

“In the ’40s and the ’50s we could bomb any country that threatened us and it would be OK. If the ’60s hadn’t come about when they did, we wouldn’t have taken shit from no one. Vietnam would’ve gotten blown out of the water. The kids in the ’60s had a different reality.

“Now they’ve got us back into it, Reagan’s made politics so bad we’re back into the money. It was over for that particular vibe, my friend. But you can be sure it’ll come back again.”

Besides his current solo LP, the very wonderful R&B Skeletons In The Closet, and the half-life Mothership Connection album, Clinton has recently finished the lyrics for the soundtrack to George Lucas’s justreleased Howard The Duck. He also promises a new Funkadelic album in the immediate future, along with collaborations with Vanessa Williams, Prince and Sly Stone.

A parting glance: George Clinton is a musical genius with a singular understanding of the dynamics inherent in modern society. Whether the vibe returns or otherwise, he will continue to free our minds and our asses. I, for one, will continue to let him let me free.