Why Gen Z Revolutionaries Need to Add Parliament-Funkadelic to Their Playlists
Today’s youth are living through cultural, political, and societal realities unlike any generation before them. I was born in the year 2000, cementing me as a product of the new millennium, a bonafide baby of Generation Z. Young people’s politics today are more radical than ever before. Not only have we challenged the conventions of race, gender, and class, we have also taken into account the importance of spirituality, mental health, and self care as essential to the mobilization of societal change.
This summer, the significance of Black rest and joy have become indicative to the new wave of activism being led by Gen Z in the wake of the recent institutional violence perpetuated towards Black people in the United States. When it comes to the sound of Gen Z’s revolution, songs like Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 track “Alright” or Childish Gambino’s 2016 release “This is America” might come to mind. But there is one group I believe aligns much closer to the socio-political goals of Gen Z than any artist out today. That group is Parliment-Funkadelic.
If you are a Black person, it is very likely you grew up listening to Parliament- Funkadelic. Throughout my childhood, it was a common occurrence to hear tracks such as “Give Up The Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker),” “Flash Light,” and “(Not Just) Knee Deep” playing from my mother’s car radio. It was not until I was much older that I became aware of how incredible Paraliment-Funkadelic truly is. I listened to all of Maggot Brain during the final week of my freshman year of college while writing a paper about Black people’s relationship with capitalism in the United States. The more I listened, the more I found familiarity with the positive and uplifting messages pushed by both groups. My love for Parliament-Funkadelic only became stronger as Black Lives Matter protests surged across the country in June. In my most acute moments of stress, where the weight of my Blackness felt more like a burden than a blessing, I blasted the music of Parliment-Funkadelic until all of my anxieties melted away.
Parliament-Funkadelic began as a doo wop group called The Parliaments formed in the mid 1950s. George Clinton, future front man of both bands, joined The Parliaments as a teenager and continued to work with them into his early 20s. For the first several years of The Parliaments’ career, they tried very hard to appeal to the clean cut standards of the doo wop sphere. On the group’s movement towards experimentation, George Clinton said in the 2005 documentary One Nation Under a Groove, “We couldn’t keep our ties alike. We couldn’t keep our suits clean. Our hair was always undone. You realize that the reality of that was actually quite silly.”
If there was anytime for an individual to be unconventional it was during the mid- to late-1960s. In 1967, thousands of youth who did not ascribe to the restrictive traditional values of the post-war United States moved to San Francisco, California in a migration now referred to as the “Summer of Love.” Many of these young people belonged to the hippie subculture and embraced alternative lifestyles such as commune living, open relationships, spirituality, and higher consciousness through psychedelic drugs. These folks also promoted radical politics like racial equality, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and worker’s rights. This “free love” ideology bled into all aspects of pop culture from experimental film to abstract art to — most significantly for the future of Parliament-Funkadelic — music.
The same year as the Summer of Love, Jimi Hendrix revolutionized rock music with his seminal album Are You Experienced? George Clinton, then 26, was fully enveloped in a radical cultural moment unlike anything that had come before it. Before his eyes, the zeitgeist became more and more open to self expression and valued novelty over normalcy. By the end of the 1960s, George Clinton had shifted his focus from The Parliaments and ventured into a new sound, aesthetic, and philosophy: Funkadelic.
In 1970, Funkadelic released their self-titled debut album. The opening track, “Mommy, What’s A Funkadelic?” quite literally introduces the world to Funk. In the smooth words of Eddie Hazel, he says that Funk is not of this world, is not here to cause us any harm, and will even do us good. The tracks is carried by a sultry baseline, sexually charged lyrics, and psychedelic guitar riffs. Near the end of the song, Hazel references a shift in his character since finding Funk and developing his “groove.” Mommy, What’s a Funkadelic was completely opposite of what was expected of musical acts at the time.
After Mommy, What’s a Funkadelic? Funkadelic continued to release projects, each one more daring than the next. The following album, Free Your Mind…And Your Ass Will Follow subverted the prevailing Christian ideology that one can only achieve salvation through surrendering to an external entity, by devoting one’s life to God. On the title track, the mantra “Free your mind and your ass will follow/The kingdom of Heaven in within you” is repeated throughout the song’s ten minute runtime. The theme of self-actualization would become a defining feature of the P-Funk aesthetic that would come to fully develop at the height of the group’s fame some years later.
Throughout the early- to mid-1970s, Funkadelic was Clinton’s primary group. Funkadelic’s sound was driven by a fusion of rock and roll and soul and the principle of Black liberation through self-enlightenment and Black joy. Funkadelic’s music encouraged Black folks to realize the power they have within themselves to transcend the psychological restraints put on them by white American society. Funkadelic made loving one’s Black self and having love for one’s Black community a truly radical act.
In the mid- to late-1970s, George Clinton brought back Parliament from his young adult years. Despite being placed on a different label and having a more R&B driven sound, Parliament contained all the same members as Funkadelic. Parliament’s seminal album at the time of their resurgence was Mothership Connection (1975). On Mothership Connection, George Clinton, Eddie Hazel, Bootsy Collins, and Bernie Worrell, among others, began to experiment with what become known several decades later as Afrofuturisim. Afrofuturism is an artistic and philosophical movement that imagines the future of Black folks in terms of Afrocentrism. First utilized musically by experimental jazz musician Sun Ra, Afrofuturism connects Black folks to both their past and future by asserting that Black people have always been magical, special, otherwordly. There is heavy emphasis on the Black bodies who built the pyramids being no different than the modern Black person, and that this awareness will lead us to a future that is so fantastical that it only exists beyond the scope of Earth, way out in the cosmos.
The album cover for Mothership Connection features a galactic George Clinton adorned in sliver from head to toe having the time of his life on a blue UFO spaceship among the stars. The Afrocentric “P-Funk mythology” solidifies itself with this album. The album introduces fictional characters like DJ Lollipop, Starchild, and the Thumpasorous people. On the opening track “P-Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up),” the “intergalactic brotherhood” has overtaken the listener’s radio frequency to spread the message of Funk to the masses. By spreading the message of Funk, the “intergalatic brotherhood” hopes to bring liberated Black folks onto the Mothership that will take them to a joy-filled Black utopia where everyday is a party. On the following track, “Mothership Connection,” the narrative of the Mothership expands further. In declaring the Mothership as a sort of abstract Black heaven, Parliament subverts Black struggle as Black liberation through riffing on the slave spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” for the refrain of the track. The group changed the lyrics from “Swing low, sweet chariot/Coming for to carry me home” to “Swing low, sweet chariot/Stop and and let me ride.” In the reimgaining of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” Parliament further pushed to associate a liberated Black future with something our enslaved ancestors never got: leisure time.
Parliament and Funkadelic continued to build on the P-Funk mythology until both groups dissolved in the early 1980s. However, many members of Parliment-Funkadelic went on to have successful solo careers and their music went on to influence acts such as Digital Underground, De La Soul, and Dr Dre throughout the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. Today, artists such as Thundercat and Flying Lotus keep the experimental nature of Parliment-Funkadelic alive with their eccentric sounds, personalities, and visual aesthetics.
Black youth and young adults of Generation Z may have more in common with the Boomers we so eagerly make fun of than we realize. When comparing the socio-political climate of the 1960s-1970s to that of the current day, the parallels are almost uncanny. In the same way that conditions such as war and corrupt politics mobilized the youth decades ago to flood the streets to demand change, Gen Z is moved by the same disdain towards the status quo and injustice to take action for a radical future. In the same way the Black folks of the 70s were encouraged to “go back to their roots” through wearing afros, dashikis, and gold jewlery, Gen Z is adamant about rejecting Eurocentric beauty standards and expressing yourself in whatever way you see fit. In the same way that the hippies promoted higher consciousness and ways of discovering the self outside of traditional religion, Gen Z is open to expressions of spirituality though crystal healing, herbalism, meditation, and astrology.
Parliament-Funkadelic was incredibly ahead of its time and remains today one of the most influential musical groups of the 20th century. As a self-defined radical and official member of Generation Z, here are the top five Parliament-Funkadelic songs I believe every young revolutionary needs to listen to:
- “Mothership Connection” (1975)
- “Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts” (1974)
- “Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow” (1970)
- “America Eats Its Young” (1971)
- “Chocolate City” (1975)
Happy listening, Starchildren. Let the music of Parliament-Funkadelic carry you home.
