Popular Culture Review Vol. 25, No. 2, Summer 2014 | Page 80

76 “Recording Angels” means, by a kind of echo, the heavenly sweetness of their work as “recording artists,” but the older reference is an Islamic concept of angels who watch over each of us and record our deeds, good and bad. They are judges of our righteousness. The Mothership arrives as a party but also as a time of reckoning: toward the end of the song. Star Child says of “Getting’ it on, partying on the Mothership./ When Gabriel’s horn blows, you’d better be ready to go.” Good times await. Star Child tells us, but to enter the Mothership will require some reflection of our shortcomings, a conversion and a turn to uprightness. Our “unfunkiness” is on trial — a parody “everyman” figure would appear on the 1977 Funkentelechey vs. the Placebo Syndrome album, slinking through b