Maggot Brain is the greatest album of all time.
This was already true before Childish Gambino released “Awaken, My Love!” yesterday, but Gambino reminded me of this very important and frequently unacknowledged fact.
[“Awaken, My Love!” refers to Maggot Brain visually and sonically – I especially hear the “Maggot Brain” guitar solo in “The Night Me and Your Mama Met.”]
Maggot Brain is funny, brilliant, and inventive, lyrically and sonically. Like so much of Funkadelic and Parliament’s work, it feels just as politically urgent now as it must have when it was released. It’s incredible on its own, but the album’s sound and iconography have inspired generations of black excellence. (See, for instance, Erykah Badu’s “Honey,” where Maggot Brain is part of the video’s music history lesson.)
I’m a stan for Maggot Brain and for Funkadelic generally for so many reasons, but I feel compelled to write about them now because I’m reminded today of how easy it would have been for me to miss out on them as a white person.
I was a music history obsessive as a teen. I wrote papers about U2 for high school English classes. I read and watched basically everything ever produced about the Beatles (which, in the late 1990s, post Anthology, was a massive amount). I ate up every anecdote I could find about Janis Joplin’s vocal abilities. I dug through old copies of Sassy looking for any tidbit of information I could find about Liz Phair and Courtney Love and PJ Harvey. I studied The Wall and Stop Making Sense and Purple Rain (which should have been a gateway to Funkadelic, but was not) and This is Spinal Tap. I watched a disgusting number of “history of rock and roll” documentaries on VH1 and avidly read Rolling Stone. I mainlined MTV2′s steady supply of old music videos day and night. I read so many web 1.0 fan sites. (Seriously, so.many.fan.sites.)
In all of this obsessive research about the history of rock, I never came across Funkadelic. Not once. Nothing made me aware of how foundational they are to modern music and of how incredible their body of work is. It wasn’t until I left Iowa to go to college that Funkadelic came into my life. George Clinton played on my campus during my junior year, and I was hooked. I started dating someone who loved 70s funk, and a deep dive into Funkadelic and Parliament led to Sun Ra and Betty Davis and Bootsy Collins and Shuggie Otis. When I think about how long it took me to get to these absolutely foundational figures, I remain overwhelmed. It shouldn’t be possible to miss out on that much music history when your sources are popular media and music journalism. (Even now, the Wikipedia article for Maggot Brain focuses on an idiotic Rolling Stone assessment of the album rather than on the album’s hugely important impact and legacy. Pitchfork at least does a decent job of highlighting the album’s importance.)
So here’s to Funkadelic. If you haven’t listened to Maggot Brain, get your life right.