Afrofuturism
About the album, Mothership Connection, Clinton said “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.” Like Sun Ra, Clinton wanted to see black people in space – but Clinton wanted to do it in a much more inclusive way. When Bootsy Collins started working with George Clinton, he brought the “on the one” philosophy – the idea that everyone is on the same pulse with the rhythm of the universe, that everything will be together and that that makes all connections stronger. Clinton’s music definitely had a message, but where Sun Ra almost handpicked the people who were allowed to go with him into space, Clinton was all-inclusive. His music is evidence of that.
It is important for these afrofuturistic works to play with and almost recreate mythology as we’ve come to know it because with black people, it’s virtually impossible to know exactly where they come from and what their history is. In his music, Clinton takes that idea, internalizes it and immortalizes it with his music but completely changes the meaning in doing so. There is no kind of stigma that comes with mixing of voices, instruments, personalities and background as Clinton uses them in his music and in that kind of inclusion he’s removing the stigma of being black in America and not knowing your own history. That’s what puts Clinton in a category with Ishmael Reed, Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler and their use of technology to comment on the experience of black people. Music is the technology Clinton has chosen to employ and like all three authors, he has used it to make a comment on what happened in the past and also to change its context to allow people to have more agency in changing the present and shaping the future.
The music Clinton produced with the Parliaments and the Funkadelics engaged all peoples and it carried a message. All the sci-fi aspects of p-funk are what situate Clinton’s work in an afrofuturistic setting, but also the idea that he took the shared experience of a people – a negative one, at that – and gave it back to those people therefore giving them tremendously more agency than they’d had before. But he did more than that. He connected groups of people and performed in front of mixed audiences where it seemed like the problems that had been keeping these people apart for so long didn’t exist.
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