Read Online Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (33 1/3) by Christopher R. Weingarten - Free Book Online
Authors: Christopher R. Weingarten
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had run away to join George Clinton’s P-Funk circus. Over the next decade, Parliament and Funkadelic would leave an acid-soaked trail that ushered in the second wave of funk, providing hip-hop with enough low-end theories to wear out a generation of woofers. (Old George would be sampled so reliably in the ’90s that he eventually released his own series of snatchable snippets called
Sample Some of Disc, Sample Some of D.A.T
.) But before Digital Underground and Dr. Dre made their Mothership Connection, the Bomb Squad was borrowing Funkadelic’s gnarliest transmissions.
Funkadelic was the hard-rock branch of the Clinton legislature. Evolving from a ’60s doo-wop band,Funkadelic turned into a fuzzed-out monster after borrowing Vanilla Fudge’s Marshall stacks at a college show. From then on out, Parliament were smooth and Funkadelic (same members, different label) were crunchy — a band synonymous with swirling clouds of feedback, Black Cheer crunge, cartoon voices and infectious chants. Like the Bomb Squad, Clinton produced Funkadelic records for maximum headfuck: “You turned on a Funkadelic record with earphones on, drums running across your head, panning the foot, we panned everything . . . We went to colleges where they wasn’t taking anything, but they was tripping on the records.” 46
But Funkadelic were Public Enemy’s forefathers for reasons well beyond their affinity for noise and hard rock. They had a visual aesthetic that spoke as loud as their message, something Chuck would allude to in a London interview when he talked about Public Enemy’s bold stage presence. “We wanted to be identified visually because we knew sonically a lot of music would not be understood . . . We knew that when people came to a concert, the No. 1 reaction was based on what they saw, and what they heard second.” 47 Public Enemy surrounded themselves with arresting gold and black banners, one of the highest-visibility color combinations available. The unforgettable Instamatic icon of Flavor Flav’s clock pendant was a signifier at once simple and loaded with meaning, something that evolved naturally from Funkadelic stage wear likeBootsy’s sparkling star glasses or Gary Shider’s diaper. P-Funk did it all first. They would flank themselves with a logo onstage: a massive skull that would, at show’s climax, smoke a six-and-a-half-foot joint. And hey, there were guns onstage too, even if the kitschy, strobe-lit “bop gun” held by Shider wasn’t exactly the Uzis toted by the S1Ws. Years after Alice Cooper and Kiss started packing semi trucks with explosives and guillotines and fake blood, this may not seem like a big deal, but remember that the only black groups with huge production budgets for theatrical stage shows in the mid-’70s were P-Funk, the Commodores and Earth, Wind and Fire. And only P-Funk had their own spaceship.
Funkadelic paid attention to album art, which surely drew in Chuck, who had studied graphic design at Adelphi University. While there, Chuck drew a comic for the school paper called “Tales of the Skind” — short for “Takes of the Spectrum Kind.” Every day in the cartoon, Chuckie D and the members of the mobile DJ crew Spectrum Crew would assume the role of superheroes from outer space that battled Ronald Reagan or drug dealers or whomever from their Funkadelic-styled spaceship. Keith Shocklee credits the use of characters in the group’s aesthetic — from the Spectrum days all the way through Terminator X, who “speaks with his hands” — with the group’s love of cartoons, television and comic books. The closest antecedent to “Skind” was Pedro Bell’s artwork onthe Funkadelic albums, a busy Technicolor world of Afro’d Amazons, cyborg warriors and space warfare. By the ’90s, cultural critics were retroactively calling Bell’s cosmic slop and the P-Funk intergalactic mythos a defining moment in “Afrofuturism,” a way to explore the black experience via tales of
Sample Some of Disc, Sample Some of D.A.T
.) But before Digital Underground and Dr. Dre made their Mothership Connection, the Bomb Squad was borrowing Funkadelic’s gnarliest transmissions.
Funkadelic was the hard-rock branch of the Clinton legislature. Evolving from a ’60s doo-wop band,Funkadelic turned into a fuzzed-out monster after borrowing Vanilla Fudge’s Marshall stacks at a college show. From then on out, Parliament were smooth and Funkadelic (same members, different label) were crunchy — a band synonymous with swirling clouds of feedback, Black Cheer crunge, cartoon voices and infectious chants. Like the Bomb Squad, Clinton produced Funkadelic records for maximum headfuck: “You turned on a Funkadelic record with earphones on, drums running across your head, panning the foot, we panned everything . . . We went to colleges where they wasn’t taking anything, but they was tripping on the records.” 46
But Funkadelic were Public Enemy’s forefathers for reasons well beyond their affinity for noise and hard rock. They had a visual aesthetic that spoke as loud as their message, something Chuck would allude to in a London interview when he talked about Public Enemy’s bold stage presence. “We wanted to be identified visually because we knew sonically a lot of music would not be understood . . . We knew that when people came to a concert, the No. 1 reaction was based on what they saw, and what they heard second.” 47 Public Enemy surrounded themselves with arresting gold and black banners, one of the highest-visibility color combinations available. The unforgettable Instamatic icon of Flavor Flav’s clock pendant was a signifier at once simple and loaded with meaning, something that evolved naturally from Funkadelic stage wear likeBootsy’s sparkling star glasses or Gary Shider’s diaper. P-Funk did it all first. They would flank themselves with a logo onstage: a massive skull that would, at show’s climax, smoke a six-and-a-half-foot joint. And hey, there were guns onstage too, even if the kitschy, strobe-lit “bop gun” held by Shider wasn’t exactly the Uzis toted by the S1Ws. Years after Alice Cooper and Kiss started packing semi trucks with explosives and guillotines and fake blood, this may not seem like a big deal, but remember that the only black groups with huge production budgets for theatrical stage shows in the mid-’70s were P-Funk, the Commodores and Earth, Wind and Fire. And only P-Funk had their own spaceship.
Funkadelic paid attention to album art, which surely drew in Chuck, who had studied graphic design at Adelphi University. While there, Chuck drew a comic for the school paper called “Tales of the Skind” — short for “Takes of the Spectrum Kind.” Every day in the cartoon, Chuckie D and the members of the mobile DJ crew Spectrum Crew would assume the role of superheroes from outer space that battled Ronald Reagan or drug dealers or whomever from their Funkadelic-styled spaceship. Keith Shocklee credits the use of characters in the group’s aesthetic — from the Spectrum days all the way through Terminator X, who “speaks with his hands” — with the group’s love of cartoons, television and comic books. The closest antecedent to “Skind” was Pedro Bell’s artwork onthe Funkadelic albums, a busy Technicolor world of Afro’d Amazons, cyborg warriors and space warfare. By the ’90s, cultural critics were retroactively calling Bell’s cosmic slop and the P-Funk intergalactic mythos a defining moment in “Afrofuturism,” a way to explore the black experience via tales of
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