Can You Get To That. Funkadelic. 1971. Westbound.

 After experimentation with conventional song forms became a commercially viable practice of making records sometime in the nineteen sixties, the trend quickly became a recording norm across genres. It proved especially fecund in the rapidly metamorphosing rhythm and blues market. American artists were in a fever of innovation, from Sly Stone in California to James Brown in Ohio, from the in-house songwriting staff at Stax in Memphis to the wildly talented bon vivants of Hitsville USA. This was the creative dynamic whose combined genius fused rock and roll’s rhythmic aggression to the manifest eroticism of urban, electric blues, and polished their product with the high sheen appeal of marketable pop sensibilities. Radio listeners and record buyers would soon find themselves transfixed by a radicalized form of rhythm and blues. Another prime mover in Detroit was George Clinton, who, with  Funkadelic, recorded their third album Maggot Brain in Motor City’s United Sound Systems. What’s remarkable about Maggot Brain’s material is how stunningly little of it comes with an expiration date. Sung with an almost gospel candor, Can You Get To That pulses with a measured exuberance that—especially given the flood of sampling to come—anticipates the forthright hard rock tenor of hip hop. Clinton, like Jimi Hendrix, was gifted not only with an ear for turntable prophecy, but also with a Nietzschean will to surmount nihilism; both were stalwarts of their contemporary age, attuned to discovering the hidden rhythms modern life itself is often deaf to. A great deal of the excitement of listening to Can You Get To That is the sense of discovery heard in the singing voices of Raymond Davis and Hot Buttered Soul, as if discovering for themselves, in the new and expansive rhythms Funkadelic and others were adding to the canon, the newly revealed secret of the mystery of life itself: “Well I read an old quotation in a book just yesterday; said you’re gonna reap just what you sow; the debts you make you have to pay. Can you get to that?” An appeal for personal accountability no more pedantic than the moral logic behind “Stop all this weeping and swallow your pride; you will not die; it’s not poison!” How do our musical heroes complete the trick of dazzling us with  poetic and moral formulae without succumbing to either condescending or moralizing platitudes? George Clinton once advised, Free your ass and your mind will follow.

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