Mothership Connection, the fourth album by Parliament is a damn perfect album. It only has seven tracks on it and it clocks in at under forty minutes long. It is the Dark Side of the Moon of funk albums: it is iconic, and its efficiency is a primary factor of its iconography. Sure, there is some meandering that occurs on the album, most notably with the first track “P. Funk (Wants To Get Funked Up)” and its willingness to be a little too easygoing, but the other 95% of the album is a no-bullshit, move your ass, put-a-glide-in-your-stride-and-a-dip-in-your-hip type of funksmanship that few other albums can compete with. Mothership Connection is like taking the best qualities of James Brown and Isaac Hayes, and mixing it in with the best quality LSD. It’s funky, it’s trippy, and it’s fun as hell.[1]
Parliament began as a doo-wop quintet called The Parliaments, named after the cigarettes that members George Clinton, Grady Thomas, Calvin Simon, Ray Davis, and Fuzzy Haskins enjoyed smoking. In 1970, Clinton, who had already re-named his entire ensemble of musicians to Funkadelic and was manager of Funkadelic and The Parliaments, re-named The Parliaments to Parliament.
Parliament has always had a tinge of psychedelia in their music and their debut album was almost completely psychedelic funk, followed up by their next two albums Up For the Down Stroke and Chocolate City which had more straight-up funk elements to it (but still allowed its psychedelic roots to emerge in spots). Next came Mothership Connection, the band’s masterpiece and progenitor of an entire mythology between Parliament and Funkadelic (and George Clinton as a solo artist).
And so because Mothership Connection is such a totemic album and entity for all artists within the P-Funk roster, it is a no-brainer that the song that singularly defines Parliament should come from this album. “Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker)” is the penultimate track on the album and it is, quite simply, one of the greatest funk songs of all time. Clocking in at just under six minutes, “Give Up the Funk” has some of the most freakish (but still danceable) bass lines ever pressed onto vinyl. Everything about this song is catchy and polished beyond all get-out. The intro is cool personified; the chorus is not only singable, but its repetition never reaches a point of sounding stale; the horns throughout are a perfect touch and bring with them an added energetic texture; the kaleidoscopic keyboard in the background, keeping the space concept of the album anchored throughout.
From an individual song perspective, Parliament is probably also defined by “(Mothership Connection) Star Child” or “Flash Light” (or maybe even “Atomic Dog” even though that song was released by George Clinton on a solo album), but “Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker)” is the real soul and essence of the Parliament half of P-Funk. It is a perfect mixture of funk, fun, oddity, and drug infusion. And the fact that it pulled all of this off effortlessly is a testament to its indelibility.
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[1] And, yet, even with its LSD-inspired sound this album also provided a large influence on gangsta rap artists like Dr. Dre. “(Mothership Connection) Star Child” was sampled on “Let Me Ride,” which was one of the best and most accessible songs on The Chronic, and The Chronic as a whole was littered with samples by George Clinton/Parliament/Funkadelic.
