One final blast of Funkadelic, before the fall.The Electric Spanking of War Babies might be a mess, but as George Clinton says near the end, “This is equal-opportunity nasty.” It starts with a bang, in the title tune: Uncle Jam listens to the new wave kids and responds with this synth-pop stomp, full of Junie Morrison vocoder hooks and Michael Hampton’s hardcore guitar jollies. It jumps off with the festive party chant, “You can walk a mile in my shoes, but you can’t dance a step in my feet!” “Funk Gets Stronger” appears twice, once with Zapp’s Roger Troutman, again with the long-lost Sly Stone—a bridge between the old and the new. (Sly and Clinton also got busted for drugs together.) But the P-Funk empire was falling apart—even Pedro Bell’s cover design got censored.Electric Spanking became the last Funkadelic album for the next 33 years.

Thanks to Prince and hip-hop, Clinton was back on top, more famous and influential than ever, finally the legend he’d always deserved to be. He had the most sampled catalog in hip-hop this side of James Brown; the G-funk sound of the early Nineties was a ride in St. George’s swinging chariot. So he picked the right moment to return to fighting form, on Prince’s Paisley Park label, with the anthem “Paint the White House Black.” Snoop and Dre, Public Enemy, Yo-Yo, Ice Cube, Humpty Hump, all pay their respects to the originator here. Clinton kept his Nineties roll going with 1994’sDope Dogsand 1996’sT.A.P.O.A.F.O.M. (The Awesome Power of a Fully Operational Mothership),before a long studio hiatus.

Clinton poses as Black Panther leader Huey Newton on the cover, with a mock-militant vow to “rescue dance music from the blahs.” The first 20 minutes of the album—just two songs—is nonstop funk, with “Freak of the Weak” and the 15-minute “(Not Just) Knee Deep,” which became one of their most famous riffs after De La Soul sampled it for their 1989 hit “Me Myself and I.” Secret weapon: Philippe Wynne, the velvet-voiced love man who crooned so many Philly soul classics with the Spinners, finding a whole new groove as a commando on Clinton’s Vocal Assault & Funkatition Team. New guitarist DeWayne “Blackbyrd” McKnight also takes flight. Over the next year, Clinton stretched this formula into two more quickies, Parliament’s Gloryhallastoopid, or Pin the Tale on the Funky (where the drummers are credited as “African Telephone Operators”) andTrombipulation. 

After the success of “Atomic Dog,” Clinton called the All Stars together and madeUrban Dancefloor Guerrillas for his own Uncle Jam label. The prodigal sons and daughters return to the Mothership for more of that funky stuff, with all sins forgiven (at least for the moment). “Hydraulic Pump” is a real Motor City groove, all heavy machinery and industrial repetition, channeling the post-Kraftwerk man-machine sound—it sounds like it’s reaching ahead to the Detroit techno that would arrive a few years later. Sly Stone joins in, for his final moment of musical glory. 

George Clinton likes to boast that Funkadelic cut their second album in one day, while everyone was tripping on acid. Believe the man.Free Your Mind…And Your Ass Will Followis not only their finest sloganeering title, it’s the Funk Mob at their most out-there. Especially when you go deep into the 10-minute title jam, a proto-dub freakfest full of echo-chamber feedback, while he preaches, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within!”Free Your Mindis more downbeat than the debut, with meditations on religion and capitalism. But “Funky Dollar Bill” is a metal spotlight for the great Tawl Ross, who briefly held it down on guitar and vocals until the drugs did his head in. New keyboard guru Bernie Worrell gets his first show-stealing moment with his funked-up piano raunch.

After finally scoring a hit with his 1960s Motown group, George lost the rights to use the name “the Parliaments.” So he just changed the band’s name to “Funkadelic”—then cranked out another album with the same band, for another label, under the name “Parliament.”Osmium has the same acid-fried rock concept as Funkadelic, as well as the same acid-fried lineup. It’s named after the heaviest metal on earth—twice the density of lead. (Take that, Jimmy Page!) “I Call My Baby Pussycat” is a lost classic, a garage-funk ode to feline bloodlust with guitars in heat. The reissue adds the essential noise-blast single “Red Hot Mama.”

One of the most delightfully bizarre P-Funk side projects: The Brides of Funkenstein. The trio of Dawn Silva, Sheila Horne, and Jeanette McGruder dish out their hard-earned party-girl wisdom, while the band builds the splashy roller-disco groove, with loads of Michael Hampton guitar. They quote their Granny’s advice: “Without humps, there would be no getting over.” The Brides were the second P-Funk girl group—lighters up for Parlet, who did the lost gem “Huff ’N’ Puff.”

With Funkadelic a success, Clinton revived his side band Parliament, with the same musicians, but a more R&B mission of conquering the dance floor. “No psychedelic guitars for Parliament, and no horns on Funkadelic,” he told Rolling Stone in 1990. “We broke those rules a couple of times, but for the most part, that was the main difference.”Up for the Down Stroke defined the Parliament sound as we know it, with keyboards, horns, Bootsy’s space bass, and soul harmonies. “Testify” was a remake of the 1967 one-shot hit by his old doo-wop group the Parliaments, with all four of his fellow Parliaments bringing their mighty voices: Fuzzy Haskins, Grady Thomas, Ray Davis, and Calvin Simon. It was a nod to his past as he struck out boldly into the future, only a year away from the glories ofChocolate City andMothership Connection.

People figured he was washed up at this point, with his P-Funk empire in ruins, after years of legal and chemical chaos. But Dr. Funkenstein just went back to the lab and came back strong with his surprise solo hitComputer Games, bow-wow-wowing into the hearts of a new generation. He has a blast playing around with youth culture—video games, synth funk, drum machines, Sugarhill rap—with a playful spirit way beyond his generational peers. His canine freestyle on “Atomic Dog” came after a night of heavy partying—as he said, “I walked into the studio blind as a bat and out of my head.” But producers/writers Garry Shider and David Spradley held him upright while George made history on the mic. “Atomic Dog” blew up into one of the Eighties’ defining hits, with its backwards drum loop and synth-bass hook. It became his signature song, countless hip-hop producers based entire careers on it (*cough* Dr. Dre), and nobody ever counted this man out again.Wooof!

If you ain’t gonna get it on, take your dead ass home. This was Funkadelic’s version of a Steely Dan album — a slick, jazzy, chillingly zonked-out vision of pimps and hustlers living the high-end low life. “Undisco Kidd” is a tour of the 1970s singles-bar scene, featuring groupies with too much rump to bump. The live killer “Take Your Dead Ass Home” has Clinton crowing “It’s only rock & roll!”—but he likes it.Kidd Funkadelic was their contractual obligation album, thrown together to fulfill their deal so they could sign with a bigger label for bigger bucks. Yet the when-in-doubt-vamp methodology suits the cynical but sybaritic sleaze vibe. It’s a companion toHardcore Jollies, which they recorded at the same time. 

Hardcore Jollies came out just a month afterKidd Funkadelic, from the same sessions. It’s a showcase for new guitar stud Michael Hampton as well as his elder Eddie Hazel, who zones out in a demolition of the campfire folk song “Comin’ Round The Mountain.” “There wasn’t much of a concept for Hardcore Jollies other than what the title says,” Clinton says in his memoir. “It’s about playing the shit out of your instrument—or, if you’d prefer, getting your rocks off by getting your rock & roll on. That’s why I dedicated the record to ‘the guitar players of the world.’”

P-Funk always had a child-like sense of fun, so it makes sense that they finally made a straight-up cartoon kiddie-funk record.Motor-Booty Affairis about life under the sea, a psychoalphadisco “Aqua Boogie” fantasy where Moby Dick swims after Octopussy, to the motion of the ocean. (It came out the same year as the B-52s’ “Rock Lobster,” using many of the same fishy puns.) But as in so much P-Funk music, there’s also a sense of diaspora—the drowned city of Atlantis represents another lost Black motherland. So in the 9-minute “Deep,” the party people dive to the bottom of the sea to raise Atlantis to the top, with a bump and a bop.

One of the weirdest singles compilations ever.Parliament’s Greatest Hits might seem like a pointless idea, since every track was designed to fit into an essential concept album. But stripped from their far-flung surroundings, these 10 bangers add up to a whole different concept: Parliament as the dynamite pop band they never bothered to be. The groove is linear, cohesive, succinct—in other words, nothing like any other Parliament album. Yet not only is it an ideal introduction, it’s one to keep playing forever. Go for the 42-minute vinyl/cassette over the 51-minute CD/streaming version: faster pace, more punch.

A guitar tour de freak for Eddie Hazel, back with a vengeance after a couple of years away. (Clinton had a long history of losing bandmates by not paying them — though Hazel also did a year in prison after biting a flight attendant on a plane while on angel dust.) He runs wild onVerge, with gonzoid rockers like “Alice in My Fantasies.” There’s even an empathetic — and prophetic — pro-queer statement with “Jimmy’s Got a Little Bit of Bitch in Him.” On the cover, Clinton credits himself as “Supreme Maggot Minister of Funkadelia; Vocals; Maniac Froth and Spit; Behaviour Illegal in Several States.” 

Despite the title, it’s not a live album—just the Funk Mob at their tightest, with slam-bang nuggets like “Good to Your Earhole.” In the title track, Clinton takes comic shots at the rival bands he accuses of faking the funk, like “Fool and the Gang,” “Slick and the Family Brick,” and “Earth, Hot Air, and No Fire.”  But the killer is just two minutes flat: “Get Off Your Ass and Jam,” which rhymes with “Shit! Goddamn!” It has one of their most legendary guitar solos, from an anonymous junkie who sneaked into the session. Clinton writes in his memoir that the legendary guitar solo came from an anonymous junkie who sneaked into the session. “A white kid had wandered into the studio, a smack addict,” Clinton recalled. The kid offered to play for $25, then “started to play like he was possessed.”  Clinton loved it so much he paid him $50 — but then the kid disappeared, without even giving his name. They never saw him again.”

Cosmic Slopopened a new era, introducing two crucial funkateers who would help define the franchise: axeman Garry Shider and cover artist Pedro Bell. The title classic is a showcase for Shider’s Hendrix-gone-uptown guitar, as he sings about being haunted by his mama’s deal with the forces of evil—to feed her kids, she sold herself to the devil. He hears her voice in his head (“Would you like to dance with me? I’m doing the cosmic slop!”) and mourns her with his guitar. At the other emotional extreme, “No Compute” is Clinton’s funniest (and friendliest) sex song, with proverbs like “when in doubt, vamp” and “spit don’t make babies,” over a proto-Pavement guitar groove. (It sounds like the 1972 Jerry Garcia crashing theWowee Zoweesessions to jam on “Deal.”) It’s the only rom-com in the P-Funk catalog, even if it’s the kind of rom-com that ends with George looking over at his bedmate, “wig half off, snoring, breath smelling like a 1948 Buick.”

Chocolate City is where the Parliament groove really took off—Clinton formed an unholy trinity with synth wizard Bernie Worrell and bassist Bootsy Collins. The title song is a spoken-word love poem to Washington, D.C (70% Black in the Seventies), over jazzy piano. “They still call it the White House,” he declares, “But that’s a temporary condition.” His Black Power fantasy looks forward to President Muhammad Ali, Stevie Wonder as Secretary of Fine Arts, Richard Pryor as Minister of Education, and Aretha Franklin as First Lady. It’s a classic of the P-Funk obsession with lost Black homelands, both on and off Earth—as he says, “We didn’t get our 40 acres and a mule, but we did get you, C.C.” The album explodes at the end with “Big Footin,’” a monster party chant opening up the future.

Uncle Jam sets out to unite his people, with the groove as his only guide. For a couple of years, Funkadelic went on hiatus while Clinton focused on Parliament. But he combined both musical visions onOne Nation Under a Groove. It was Funkadelic’s biggest hit, with a boost from new recruit Junie Morrison, from the Ohio Players. The title smash is the ultimate P-Funk anthem, a call to arms saluting “the funk, the whole funk, and nothing but the funk,” with a West African poly-percussive flow. There’s also the guitar blowout “Who Says a Funk Band Can’t Play Rock?!” All over the album, they declare war on musical, sexual, and cultural constrictions, with the motto “Think! It ain’t illegal yet!”

Clinton’s wildest, freakiest, most festive space opera. All hands are on deck, with Jerome “Bigfoot” Brailey’s bop-gun drums and the Horny Horns and Bootsy’s rubber-band bass stretching across the universe. It’s a galactic battle between good and evil—in this corner, Star Child, fighting for the life force of “funkentelechy,” the power of free minds and free asses, with his anthem “Bop Gun (Endangered Species).” And in that corner: Sir Nose d’Voidoffunk, the arch-enemy of the party people, trying to stop the dancing with his Snooze Gun. But by the end, even Sir Nose surrenders to the funk and learns to dance, because everybody’s got a little light under the sun. The climax: “Flash Light,” where everything in the cosmos wiggles for six minutes.