George Clinton, rainbow-haired “Prime Minister of Funk”, is, after James Brown, the most sampled artist in the history of recorded music. You don’t need to remind him of the fact.
“People keep coming back to my music ‘cos it’s got the spirit, it’s got the soul, it’s got the truth,” explains Clinton. “In the ‘70s, when I was making those records I had no idea they would live for so long. But I sure knew that funk would endure. Of that I was certain.”
Reclining on a leather swivel chair in an airless San Francisco recording studio, Clinton is explaining why the dozen or so funk albums he cut with his bands Parliament and Funkadelic between 1970 and 1980 defined the sound of black music in the decades to follow. “Funk – you know funk was the start of it all, of hip-hop, soul, disco. At the end of the day, they’re all funk. That’s the thread that runs through ‘em. People are amazed when I tell them I used to write doo-wop songs in the ‘60s and later went and wrote for Motown. I tell ‘em ‘it’s all funk, baby’ – deep down, it’s all got the vibe.”
Clinton is 67 now, and while his multi-colour mohawk is as vibrant as ever, the memories can be a little soggy at the edges. Still, he remembers the things that matter – such as his long standing relationship with Brown.
“I was never friends with James Brown, exactly. There was enormous respect there, between the two of us. On the other hand, we were very close with the people in his band. We used to hang with Fred Wesley (the trombone player on Brown’s ‘Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud’) – Fred played with the band (Parliament) for a while. In the ‘70s I spent a lot of time down in New Orleans. Back then, it really was the scene. Folks talk about San Francisco in the ‘60s and Woodstock and all of that. Man – it had nothing on New Orleans. The joint rocked. It was the centre of it all.”
As the era’s pre-eminent funkateer, Clinton also helped lay the foundations for hip-hop.
“In the ‘70s, disc jockeys talked a lot of shit. They talked over our records and they spouted a whole bunch of nothing. So we – that is, the musicians – decided that if people were gonna talk over the records, then at least they should talk in a meaningful way. It was exciting, ‘cos at the time everyone knew we were involved in a new kind of music.”
As disco and funk morphed – imperceptibly but inexorably – into rap, young rhymers would use Clinton’s dense psychedelic rhythms as rudimentary background beats.
“All those kids in the Bronx, they was doing the hip and the hop over my music. You’d go to one of those big street parties and people were free-styling over Parliament records. LL Cool J used to sell tapes of himself free-styling over my stuff.”
How does he feel about what followed: hip-hop’s descent into flashy sexism and crotch-thrusting gangsta cliche?
“Gangster’s a much misunderstood word,” he says. “In my community, a gangster meant someone in your gang, someone you were close to – a friend, a relation. There were no negative connotations. Gangsta rap – I hear those words and it doesn’t sound menacing to me.”