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human emotion at its most basic. Borrowing from gospel, a religious
music with roots deep in African-American aspirations for freedom,
Mothership Connection repeats the refrain: “Swing low, sweet chariot,
stop, and let me ride.” In fimk, the moment has finally come to get out,
an opportunity hoped-for, but not to be expected, to be seized
immediately. “Once upon a time called right now,” as Clinton sings in
another crucial P. Funk jam from the Mothership album. In the sfinspired music of P. Funk, the fairy tale is right now, the future is right
now, once upon a time and the dream of the stars have arrived to carry
you away from everything that ties you down and away from the
realization of the real and yourself
What is alien is not alien, P. Funk comes to tell us, but is
embedded deep in our world and its meaning. That’s why the stage show
includes a Rolls-Royce and Clinton sometimes wears, along with the
silver lame of any respectable 1970’s alien-type spacesuit, a long ermine
“pimp” style coat and hat. “Let me put on my sunglasses so I can see
what I’m doing,” Starchild sings. Or, as he says in another song from the
album: “Let me put my sunglasses on./ That’s the law around here, you
got to wear your sunglasses./ So you can feel cool;/ Gangster lean.” Wear
your sunglasses always, even at night, especially at night, because it is
more essential to make a statement of hipness than to see. Because
hipness is style, what you want to show, what you want to be; as the
mirrorshades of cyberpunk in science fiction make clear, hip is a
representation of what the future needs to be.^ Dr. Funkenstein stitches
together the iconography of the ghetto gangster with that of the space
alien to create a modem outlaw figure of alienation and unutterable cool
— something deeper than the TV-numbed existence of most Americans,
an immediacy supposed to be found on the streets or in the pulsing stars.
Hear the beat, and you should give up everything and go with the
feeling, with the real, with the cool: “Free your mind, and come fly/ With
me/ It’s hip/ On the Mothership/ Groovin.” “Light year groovin’” far
away from the quotidian world. P. Funk appeals to the aesthetic, to what
feels right, to what was once called our sense of beauty, what SF called,
before it forgot, a sense of wonder. “You gotta hit with the band,” the
song repeats over and over. You must find the one, the beat so cmcial to
funk, hitting on the one of a four-beat bar, but also a one-ness: “I am the
Mothership Connection,” Starchild sings, the being and symbol of
interconnection between us and the alien, between this world and the
universe, a rightness between the now and should be — something like
the transubstantiation. “You have overcome,” Starchild says, “for I am
here.”