586 Parliament - Mothership Connection (1975)

Studio Album - Funk

About the Act:

Parliament were were not strictly a band in the classic sense, nor were they a "collective", they were a sub-section of the Parliament-Funkadelic collective run effectively by George Clinton. Live performances seemed to involve an indefinite number of musicians, vocalists and hangers-on wandering around stage, and somehow the sounds were funk. The list of people involved is quite long, including some luminaries of Funk like Bootsy Collins, Fred Wesley, and Maceo Parker. A good number of albums were released under this name. Oh, they were American, they started around 1968, and have popped up for various periods since.

About the Album:

This was the fourth album under the Parliament name, and is a kind of funky sci-fi concept album.

My History with this Album:

I think it was about 10 years ago that I made a conscious decision to investigate Funk in more depth, and this was one of the albums I got around that time. I have played it occasionally, and know a couple of tracks reasonably well.

Review:

Classically, we are taught that as humans we have 5 senses. You know the ones I'm talking about. Psychologist now claim we have more like 8 or 9, and that one of the "new" ones is a sense of the passing of time. This sense is actually incredibly important to our perception of the world, otherwise we wouldn't be able to predict cause and effect, parse speech or possibly even have memory. 

One of the side effects is a sense of rhythm. No doubt it is something we learn, and I have observed my own kids developing the ability to hold a rhythm. Our sense of time is so fine tuned that we can detect subtle changes in timing, where beats are actually slightly behind or ahead of when they should be.

It would seem that there are some beat speeds and rhythms that have a special effect on at least some of us. One of those is the Funk. This is made up of a certain set of speeds and grooves, and is finely tuned to hit some kind of pleasure centre in my brain that other music doesn't hit. Here's the thing that I don't know, whether this is some kind of learned response by me, or if the Funk taps into some innate brain response to those speeds and patterns. It's tempting to think that the Funk was always there, just waiting for James Brown to discover it, much like Columbus discovering MacDonald's.

Well that was all very interesting, for me anyway. Let's review the album. This is one of the purest expressions of funk that I know of. All the tropes are here, funky drums (a slow groove with little extra hits that hint at beats between the beats, a laid-back delivery and a special place for the open-to-closed hi-hat sound), funky bass (a floaty collection of short notes, making sure you hit the root on the "one" - the first beat of the bar, or more often every other bar), funky brass (stabby hits in the gaps between other things), funky keyboards (synth, clavinet, often with a funky sound like a saw wave, or a slight crunch like Stevie Wonder's Superstition) funky guitar (high chords again in gaps like the brass, often with a wah, giving that Boom-chikka-wah-ah effect), funky harmonies (sometimes all on one chord, sometimes chord sequences, based on a pentatonic, bluesy minor root), funky singing (lots of different voices hitting the extremes of black music cliché growl, float, gospel and soul sounds, elements of proto-rap), funky words (mostly nonsense, but certainly light subject matter, in this case focusing on the sci-fi theme) and general funkiness.

And that about describes this in a nutshell. It's a collection of great funk. It's like a kind of magic. There's got to be a certain attitude behind it to pull it off, which starts with a great musicianship, and then injects a corporate appreciation of the Funk. It's dancy, light-hearted, sassy and it tickles my hindbrain. If you are not that bothered by the Funk, don't bother. If, on the other hand you get that tickle, no matter how "white" you are, you need to hear this album.

8.8/10

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/4q1HNSka8CzuLvC8ydcsD2

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8EtWTVglL0FPoGb-CiZK7DY6lT9rQKHZ

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothership_Connection