The Funk has left the building.
“I need my massage,” George Clinton says.
At 77, his pre-concert ritual is a lot different than it used to be: No illicit drugs.
Just his wife Carlon Thompson-Clinton, who’s also managed his career for the last 10 years.
“This lifetime achievement stuff is getting ready to light up everything,” he says.
Everything hinges on future artists carrying on the musical DNA of the genre he helped pioneer.
“If they’re making people shake their booty,” he says.
“it’s got something to do with funk.”
Always a good party to dance your way out of whatever the interpretation of it is supposed to be.
Parliament-Funkadelic were the antidote to uptightness.
Now it’s flip-flopped and the times are actually funky.
You’re able to see it being painted and changed right in front of your eyes.
So we’re going to see a lot of [differences].
The whole planet is taking selfies and just looking at itself making all kinds of faces.
you’re able to participate in all of that now.
you could see that the sexes weren’t… Or it was changing, the way we looked at it.
We might have thought change was necessary, but not been able to even intellectualize it before….
But it’s still evolving.
We don’t know it all.
It could be like Sun Ra, but it would have to be way out there.
Or a guitar might end up on a Parliament song, even with horns.
But basically that’s the way we did it.
The loud guitars was on the rock, the Funkadelic.
And then the horns was on Parliament.
You have to survive because people just get tired of the name.
We don’t stay with them.
The radio stations don’t give it to you like that.
They don’t make it classic so you’ll be a fan forever.
They just force feed you the top things.
So how did you figure that science out?
How did you come to realize that reinvention was the key to keeping it going?I readBillboardandCashbox.
That was the art of it when we first started in the early ’60s, late ’50s.
You stayed up on the record business by knowing who was doing what.
You watched the Phil Spectors.
That’s what told you what to do, what was hot.
So I always did it whether I liked the music or not.
You learned that in Motown: If it’s working, it’s working.
You just gotta figure out what it is that’s making it work.
And you don’t get defensive about it.
I realized the music that gets on my nerves is basically new music.
Yeah, that’s your measuring stick.That’s the easiest route.
Cause your instinct knows, “No, this [new genre] ain’t getting ready to happen.
But yes it is.
From Young Thug to Future, all the way back.
Even with Outkast, that was the beginning of [music] going in a Southern [direction].
And I always say, when Southern people get on the dance floor, they ain’t getting off.
They’re going to figure a way to get on there again and that’s what’s happening.
There’s New York and there’s the West Coast and there’s different places all around.
But it ain’t never been like it is around here.
Since Bobby Brown came through[laughs].
Is it true that you were born in an outhouse in North Carolina?Yeah, that’s true.
I was born right there.
So you came about the funk honestly.Honestly, for real[laughs].
My mother always said that sounds about right.
Your father sang gospel and your great-great grandfather founded Mount Carmel AME Zion Church in North Carolina in 1866.
What was your relationship with church when you were a kid?I skipped it whenever I could.
[I was] falling asleep in there; it didn’t hit me.
That’s why you’ll never hear me do the gospel runs.
I told ‘em I didn’t go to church that day.
I came in after the Smokey Robinsons, Temptations, Clovers, and Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters.
I came along at that level, when there was harmonizing.
Aw, we do now.
I go more since we got married than I have in any time in my life.
I can get in there and get to shouting now.
They sound like Funkadelic in there.
Oh my god, get in there![laughs].
Fans tend to worship artists now like religious figures, particularly ones who have passed away.
Are you comfortable with that?Aw, hell naw[laughs].
They say, “Do you want to be a role model?”
Only for whatnotto do.
you could’t follow all the s that I’ve done.
I feel lucky and blessed that I got away with the things that I did do.
But there’s got to be an easier way to do that.
But I’m not taking no blame for it.
They say if you take the bow, you take the blame.
That s shook like hell.
I was high as hell.
My boots was nine inches tall.
That’s 25 feet up there.
I had every reason in the world to fall off.
One dude ran up there one time.
He hit me on the feet in front of like 20,000 people and nobody knew what happened.
I was holding on to that rail so tight.
When the smoke went down, he fell down and cracked his head open.
I was thankful every time I didn’t fall from up there.
Oh hell naw, your ass will fall.
Funk has always felt like a religion.
But you steer away from calling it that.
What scares you about that association?
‘Cause I ain’t trying to live up to all that s[laughs].
I’m still learning that s myself.
I’m not sure where that comes from.
I look back at it and say ‘Daaamn.’
I used to put it on acid.
I know that was the train of thought, but it had to be more than that.
The kids that we were around during 1968-69 flipped us.
We’d come from the ghetto thinking we were going to be pimps.
And everybody’s talking about free love and we’re in there feeling like the trick.
It was no big deal.
You didn’t even have to convince nobody [to believe in the free love movement].
It didn’t come easy.
But you knew when you felt it.
You start becoming aware of s like that.
Then you start writing about it.
That became a style.
I wanted to be a lot like some of the s I write about.
But you recognize it in other people.
That s that Sly [Stone] was writing about?
Like, you might’t do wrong at all if you know that much information.
But you’re free to’t hold nobody to what they write.
That s comes through you.
It’s just like people playing parts in a movie.
That’s all you had to do, just stay out of the way of the music.
Just talk s and sing the hook here and there.
We started out at Motown with Jobete [publishing], which was the epitome of songwriting.
And the Brill Building in New York, where songwriting went straight from the publishers for anybody and everybody.
You had to know how to pen a song for whoever needed a song.
Motown, being strict, [produced] perfectly balanced records.
You couldn’t get no better than that.
It was Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones and the Beatles.
You recently became sober.
That wasn’t even giving me energy.
Then there’s my wife, and of course she’s going to remind me.
But all of that, it just came to a natural [conclusion].
My thought was, if I change up now, ain’t nobody going to notice it.
They won’t be able to stop me because they won’t think I’m doing it.
Just getting around that.
We had to slow down and make a run at approach it from another way.
They’ve been mining that music.
It’s a business.
And even whatever they give you, you’ve still got a lot more coming.
But [young artists are] doing a lot better than we did.
That’s the new thing that they’ve got to deal with.
I knew I was going for it.
But I had a bigger plan.
This story appeared inEntertainment Weekly’s special double music issue, which you canbuy here.
