Blame It On You-This is all about swagger, much more raw than other tunes here.ĩ. Want Some, Need Some-A bit more commercial, but the guitars still have enough crunch to give this some cred.Ĩ. The band seems to having a good time here, and CC's solo is just over the top guitar playing goodness.ħ. Talk Dirty To Me-The big breakout hit, with speedy guitars. Look What the Cat Dragged In-A fan favorite with heavier guitar playing than anything else on here.Ħ. Play Dirty-Kind of has an AC/DC vibe to it, though Bret's voice is too light to really pull off the "tough guy" act.ĥ. They'd have others, but this one is still properly sentimental, if a bit sappy.Ĥ. I Wont Forget You-Their first power ballad. I Want Action-Irresistibly catchy tune, with some pretty dicey lyrics.ģ. Cry Tough-Odd that they'd start with an atypical poppy song, but it is a great upbeat motivational tune, and my favorite song on the album.Ģ. Most likely finding kinship with its mix of underground weirdness, naked emotion and timeless rock bravado, many guitarists of the alternative rock boom have tried it live, including Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready, Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis, Wilco’s Nels Cline and the masked wheedler Buckethead.1. Hazel died in 1992 at 42, but the “Maggot Brain” legacy has survived. The result is one of the most powerful and influential guitar solos ever etched into wax. The source is very rarely used on the record,” Clinton said. “What you hear on the record is basically the second echo. Clinton claims the professional engineers in the studio didn’t want their names on the record because of his wild mixing. Clinton removed most of the instruments from the mix and saturated it with echo, leaving a desolate, ethereal landscape. “Yeah, I knew we needed one of those serious sad songs, so I told Eddie, ‘Imagine your mother died’ - and me and his mother, Grace, are real close - ‘and then you find out she ain’t really dead,’” Clinton recounted to Spin in 1985. The conversation that led the shy, sensitive guitarist Eddie Hazel to play the epic 10-minute soul cry of a solo on “Maggot Brain” is one of the most repeated stories in Funkadelic lore. Here’s an audio guide to the album’s seven songs, plus what came before, and what came after. In 2021, its legacy is felt even stronger, in the ever-evolving protest music of artists like Kendrick Lamar, D’Angelo, Solange and Brittany Howard. But “Maggot Brain” holds a unique place of influence among rock bands, R&B songwriters and jazz artists thanks to its Blacker-than-Sabbath atmospheres and transcendent soloing. The work that Clinton and his band released in the next decade would transform the base of modern hip-hop: You couldn’t turn on a radio in the ’90s without hearing a slow-rolling rap song built on a P-Funk sample. The album art is provocative - a screaming Black woman outside the gatefold, and inside, text from the Process Church of the Final Judgment, the religious group rumored to have ties to Charles Manson. It is unleashed id refracted through the lens of LSD: 36 minutes of swirling jams, apocalyptic sound effects, heavy metal riffs, hard funk and lyrical mash-ups of the Beatles and Martin Luther King Jr. The album arrived 50 years ago, in July 1971, during a summer bookended by the release of two other ambitious masterworks of protest-soul: the introspective reportage of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” and the brooding disillusionment of Sly and the Family Stone’s “There’s a Riot Goin’ On.” But “Maggot Brain” exists in a different astral plane. The band emerged screaming from the shadows cast by Vietnam, the racial uprisings in their old home of New Jersey and their new home in Detroit, a heroin epidemic, poverty, Kent State and the death of Hendrix himself, whose passing was rife with symbolism. It was the sound of the Woodstock dream deferred. However, Funkadelic’s third album, “Maggot Brain,” wasn’t a Technicolor romp. “Free your mind and your ass will follow,” they famously sang. They were turned on by psychedelic rockers like Jimi Hendrix and Cream they hung out with punks like the MC5 and the Stooges they enjoyed Black Power, free love and underground comics. The Parliaments transformed from a Motown-aspiring, matching-tie-and-handkerchief vocal group into tripped-out hippies in bell bottoms, headdresses and the occasional American flag diaper. Ultimately they absorbed the culture of the late ’60s like sponges. Formed by singers in the orbit of a New Jersey barbershop in 1955, the group started as a Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers-style doo-wop act before leaning into Detroit soul. On more than three dozen virtuosic, genre-blurring studio albums released from 1970 to 1982, George Clinton and the members of his rollicking Parliament-Funkadelic collective shaped the backbone and shook loose the booty of modern groove.
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