Day 114: Parliament – Mothership Connection
Album cover courtesy of Casablanca Records
Work-wise, I only have about 245 minutes to slog through tomorrow before I’m on my Christmas break. Very rude to make me work on Christmas Eve when I have a pretty unessential role in society, but such is life. I’m not going to say what I do for a living, but imagine the level of necessity of the Baskin Robbins mascot during covid. I need something to help me push through to the end of the year, and I think Parliament’s Mothership Connection might be just what I’m after – you had me at space-themed funk.
At the early stages of this project, I reviewed a Funkadelic album and mentioned George Clinton’s Parliament, who Funkadelic toured with as a part of the P-Funk collective. Parliament is the flagship group of the collective that has a more commercial, upbeat and danceable sound, while Funkadelic focuses a bit heavier on rock. Parliament have forged a path as a band that’s been at the forefront of Afrofuturism, and their 1975 concept album Mothership Connection imagines a future where Black aliens come to earth in a Cadillac-shaped ship to make life on earth better:
We had put black people in situations nobody ever thought they would be in, like the White House. I figured another place you wouldn’t think black people would be was in outer space. I was a big fan of Star Trek, so we did a thing with a pimp sitting in a spaceship shaped like a Cadillac, and we did all these James Brown-type grooves, but with street talk and ghetto slang.
The album opens with “P-Funk (Wants To Get Funked Up),” which tells you exactly what you’re in for: Mothership Connection is an alien transmission coming to save us all from a joyless, funkless humdrum life. It starts off saying “Good evening. Do not attempt to adjust your radio. There is nothing wrong. We have taken control so as to bring you this special show. We will return it to you as soon as you are grooving.”
The whole thing is tongue in cheek and more than a little bit camp, from the space suits to the lyrics to the whole theme of it, but it never feels cheesy or try-hard. It’s very much a record that does its own thing, and it’s all pulled together by just how good it sounds due to the talent of the people playing on it. It’s the first P-Funk record that has saxophonist Maceo Parker and trombonist Fred Wesley from James Brown’s backing band, and the saxophone especially is a stand-out.
From the spoken word lyrics on the opener onward, the record is propelled by the music rather than the lyrics, with one song consisting of only “Gaga googa ga ga googa / Ga ga goo ga ga” repeated 33 times. An exception to this is “Handcuffs,” which is so groovy that I’m willing to pretend I don’t hear the slightly questionable things that they’re singing. Other than that, a lot of it is fairly repetitive, which doesn’t take anything away from how much you enjoy it. On the contrary, actually: the biggest song from the record famously repeats “Ow, we want the funk / Give up the funk” Lord knows how many times, and that song has gone down in history.
Mothership Connection is something to put on when you want to exorcise the bad stuff and just have a good time. It’s among the top albums I’ve discovered during this project. Not quite a ten, though, but a very solid 9.5/10, it’s going into the rotation. And in case you’re wondering, no, I did not count the gaga googas myself.