Track of the Week: Funkadelic: One Nation Under A Groove (1978)

The Platonic ideal of a pop group, if such a thing existed, would probably bear more then a passing resemblance to George Clinton's Funkadelic/Parliament: after all, they made incredibly popular dance music whilst absorbing and mutating avant guarde ideas, they were open to influences from every range of popular music both black and white, they were stunningly original, they had social and political concerns but their wacky sense of humour prevented them ever taking themselves too seriously, they sucked up and spat out every staple of pop culture from conspiracy theories to religion to aliens, and they understood the importance of daft stage props and dressing up in outrageous costumes. Of course the reality was often a bit messier: having two bands with a collective pool of 35-odd musicians to draw from brings obvious problems without chucking in truckloads of drugs and a tendancy for over-ambitiousness into the equation. But both Funkadelic and Parliament had a remarkably high hit-rate, all things considered, and this song is certainly a hit.
As soon as the song starts, you're forced right into the action: without any introduction, Bootsy Collins is playing one of the most propulsive bass lines you're ever likely to hear, accompanied by solid, funky drumming, rhythmic guitar playing, keyboards, George Clinton's vocals and a host of backing vocalists and, to top it off, an utterly manic cowbell part. Despite the sheer amount of stuff going on, nothing feels extraneous - every part is serving the groove. The end result is one of the funkiest, most compuslively dance-able tracks ever recorded. The song is certainly rooted in funk, but there are traces of everything from psychedelia in the fuzzed-out guitars to jazz in the unusual chords. The next thing that strikes you is how freely structured the whole thing is: a fair amount of extemporisation appears to be going on. Although most parts stick more or less to playing variations on a theme, not even the bass-line or the cowbells play the same part all the way through the song. The chorus pops up at irregular intervals, and Clinton's sporadically repeated exhortations feel even less structured. Yet the whole thing never even comes close to falling apart.
Lyrically, the song works as a manifesto: the 'nation' in question is simply Clinton's followers, united under the power of funk in his crusade for freedom, fun, sex and equality and against boredom, conformism, repression and government control. Clinton sees music as a unifying power for good in the world, and as a result the music is utimately its own end, rather then a means for preaching. Which is part of the reason this song works so well: though it has political undertones, at the end of the day, it never loses sight of its role as fun music for dancing to.
And of course, the reverberations of both Funkadelic and Parliament's work is still being felt in music today: Prince's fusion of sex and politics owes an obvious debt, and samples from both bands regularly crop up in hip-hop and dance records to this day, not to mention the influence these records had on the emerging post-punk scene at the time. But very few, if any, of their followers have proved capable of producing such a bold musical mix as the original.