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Funkadelic
Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow

(Westbound, 1970)

George Clinton's funk-rock seers take all the acid, break their shackles.

Funkadelic

Freedom never sounded quite so hair-raising as it does throughout the first ten minutes of Funkadelic's mind-frying second album. Ostensibly, its epic opener is Clinton and Co's argument for LSD-enabled liberation, but as scratchy electronic noises wriggle like black worms in your brain and a weird woman wails "the kingdom of heaven is within!" and Eddie Hazel's axe-mauling pans sickeningly from left to right, up and down and back again, it's clear that what's on offer is not the serene enlightenment promised by other acid-rock texts, but a celebration of anarchy, entropy and chaos. Good trip, bad trip: what's the difference, Funkadelic seem to say, when The Man has you by the short and curlies?

The rest of Free Your Mind... lurches wildly, like a drunk wading through a swamp, sometimes waving, sometimes drowning. The mix is bonkers - the group made the whole record on acid - but the groove impeccable, while the lyrics delineate a struggle between good shit and bad karma that peaks on the nasty blues-funk lope of Funky Dollar Bill. "You don't buy a life, you live a life," instructs rhythm guitarist Tawl Ross, noting that money makes junkies of us all while Bernie Worrell sloshes out a random piano solo that Les Dawson would surely have applauded. Then the dirty sex-fug of I Wanna Know If It's Good To You descends and we are made clean again.

Free Your Mind... ends aptly, as it begins, in a barmy freak-out. Eulogy And Light is Clinton's satirical prayer to the great god Mammon, our father "which art on Wall Street", but even by Clinton's freewheeling standards the blasphemy is daring and startling, and made more disorientating by anti-gospel vocal intercessions and woozy tape-manipulation. "Hysteria holds the room in sway," he declaims. "I back away, I run, I back away to hide / From what? From fear? The truth? The light? / Is truth the light?"

But here' s another question. What if you didn't stay away from the brown acid? What if you took it? All of it. And you liked it? You'd be George Clinton, and you'd be one fabulously freaked-out dude.

Danny Eccleston

Posted by Ross_Bennett at 3:02 PM GMT 16/07/2010

Further Listening

Funkadelic – Maggot Brain (Westbound, 1971)

Butthole Surfers – Locust Abortion Technician (Blast First, 1987)

The Flaming Lips – Zaireeka (Warner Bros, 1997)

Related MOJO content:

Funkadelic , George Clinton

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