If popular music seems silent in the face of a global pandemic, it is always ready to offer its services to uprisings. Moreover, uprisings specifically tied to the civil rights movement in this country have been particularly soundtracked by popular music. It’s worth remembering that our first African-American president greeted the world stage as president-elect to Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.” As that example demonstrates, popular music’s willingness to be contextualized in different political and cultural movements is not without a certain mitigation of popular music’s revolutionary potential as it serenades and gives over its meaning to those in power.
This results in a simultaneous romanticism towards music that resists this social/political utilitarianism. I’m thinking of albums like Sly & the Family Stone’s There’s A Riot Going On, the Last Poet’s first two records, and Gil Scott-Heron’s albums. But if those artists chose to fight under no banner or remain ambivalent in their politics, they nevertheless form a kind of loose conglomerate of revolutionary musical politics that suggests, by the silence of Sly’s title track, there is no riot going on and that’s the problem.
The least important thing in the world right now is what one 46 year old white, heterosexual man decides to listen to within the context of current U.S. politics. There’s been an acknowledgement among my white friends that we should be listening to the long and varied history of African-American music right now. This is correct. But precisely because of this long and varied history the question of how or what comes up. For one of my friends, only spiritual jazz speaks to him and is the only music that explains the moment. For another, its disco, house and other music of queer black liberation.
For me, the music I keep coming back to and want to hear more of right now is early Funkadelic. The first Funkadelic record was released fifty years ago. What I find fascinating about the record is how much of it is taken up (lyrically at least) in defining its sound and how it sets up that sound in opposition to whatever was around at the time. The opening track, the erstwhile band manifesto “Mommy, What’s a Funkadelic?”, ends with Eddie Hazel telling the listener a story:
"I recall, when I left a little town in North Carolina, I tried to escape this music. I said it was for the old country folks. I went to New York, got slick, got my hair made (heh-heh- heh-heh), I was cool. I was cool. But I had no groove, no groove. I had no groove"
It’s a reverse northern migration, or the alienation produced by that initial migration: you leave the south, go north and lose your groove. Yet, what he/they fall into isn’t a return to some authentic southern blues, social or folk music. Instead what Funkadelic creates is an imaginary musical world wherein heavily treated production and Bernie Worrell’s already forward thinking electronics merge with an “ancestral” groove located in a more authentically black south.
It’s funny how the first album is filled with questions that hide manifestos. Besides the first track, there’s also “Music for My Mother,” lyrically similar to “Mommy, What’s a Funkadelic?”, it tells a story about another man who leaves or arrives at a town in the south infused with the rejuvenating effects of “authentic” funk and groove. Lest the previous “little town” in North Carolina be too ambiguous with regard to racial politics, the new setting is more explicit:
“Man, I was in a place called Keeprunnin’, Mississippi one time and I heard someone on my way back sounded a little something like raw funk to me so I slowed down and took a listen and this is all I could hear, baby.”
Interlude:
By way of context or contrast I listened to Gil Scott-Heron’s Small Talk at 125th and Lenox this morning, released the same year as the first Funkadelic record. As mentioned before, Scott-Heron is a deeply pessimistic thinker at this point, shooting both from the left and the right. It’s probably most famous for the original version of “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” a phrase so familiar that it has entered the language as shorthand for a number of contradictory messages: either censorship of the truth by the state and its corporate actors (arguably its original meaning), or its opposite, the spectacle of revolution right before our eyes broadcast on social media platforms (the Arab Spring version perhaps). I can’t help but think of this right now as people march and protest in hopes of ending the state sanctioned killing of black men, all sharing their hopes, politics and violent videos on social media, unaware or ignoring the fact that the state doesn’t give up power and property that easily.
But it’s impossible to listen to the record without experiencing the deep disappointment that comes with a piece like “The Subject Was F———-s.” I won’t bother to go into the lyrics, except to say the only positive qualities to the song is the very early brief glimpse of NYC “ball life” that would come to international consciousness in the 1980s. What is doubly disappointing about this song is that it comes before “Evolution (And Flashback)” a piece that contains the following lyrics:
“Yeah In 1600 I was a darkie until 1865 a slave in 1900 I was a N——- or at least that was my name in 1960 I was a negro and then brother Malcom came along…”
I quote this part of the song because Scott-Heron catalogues the violence done to the African American community through language and naming. Black people have been all of the things listed, but never a human beings. Why can’t the same respect and dignity be extended to “F——-s”? What is the blind spot preventing Scott-Heron to see, especially within the context of ball culture, that some of those “F———s” are his brothers and sisters to whom he extends respect when talking about their skin color and heritage.
Return to Funkadelic:
“Keeprunnin’, MI” is a fake town, the inversion of the NC haven imagined in the first song. Here the name of the town suggests the history of segregated towns in the south and the north where black residents had to “keep running,” lest they be caught in town after sundown. The narrator knows that he should keep running, but the music lulls him to stay. Again, the ancestral music of the south holds strong, but, as with the first song, “Music for My Mother” is just as concerned with the future as much as the past. They create a true utopia—an a topos—wherein the singer can’t say if he is in a romanticized past or a heterodox future.
The original album ends with its final manifesto posed as a question “What is Soul?” In the freaky, funky, non-geometric, geometric method of the album’s cosmology, this song is the corollary to the question posed by the first song “Mommy, What’s A Funkadelic?” Both songs are ostensibly sung/narrated by “Funkadelic” himself, someone who does not come from our world, but seems to have much to say about its music and its traditions. The answers to the titular question of “What is Soul?”—perhaps the most unanswerable question in the history of music and metaphysics—are necessarily nonsense, surrealist answers: “rusty ankles and ashy kneecaps” is my personal favorite. But, despite the promise of answers, there’s really only one ethos that informs all of these questions: “For nothing is good, unless you play with it.”
