Now with added zeitgeist
Ben Ratliff:SEVERAL weeks back, someone directed me to a Web site to see a clip of George Clinton and the Parliaments, in you-will-freak-out tones. I looked on the Internet at youtube.com and found my way to it. I was freaked out, though not just by the music.
There is Mr. Clinton, in 1969, on "Say Brother," a television show produced by WGBH in Boston. (This is early Clinton, even before Funkadelic's first album; the Parliaments would soon become Funkadelic.) He is wearing a purple jumpsuit with crossed suspenders over bare shoulders and a kind of rounded Mohawk, a shaved band of scalp below a bulbous crown of hair.
The band plays a series of vamps. The first builds on Sly and the Family Stone's "Into My Own Thing." "What is soul?" Mr. Clinton yells, in the middle of the song. "What, brother?" responds the band's other lead singer, Fuzzy Haskins. "Soul is the hamhock in your cornflakes!" Mr. Clinton intones.
After a break, the Parliaments stretch out at length, playing their acid-Motown for almost 10 minutes, going from vamp to vamp; at a climax, Mr. Clinton rolls on the floor. The band becomes a mob of rising fists and shaking hips. The sequence ends with the guitarist Eddie Hazell detuning his strings and distributing a cloud of feedback, with various band members whacking cymbals.
I am not a collector of music, or of video. I have had friends play me the best clips from their music video collections, in full, collectorish, this-will-freak-you-out mode, and enjoyed it. Still, I don't really love music on video, per se. It reduces a performance so brutally.
But a missing link of performance history as potent as that George Clinton thing? Even if on bad video? It's hard not to keep looking.
That's right, I scooped The New York Times.
In related news, I went to see The Constant Gardner at the fifty-cent movie theater the other day. The movie itself was made more interesting by the tourettic fellow a couple of rows behind me. But what stuck with me was the preview for The Family Stone. I've long complained about the producers' attempt to piggyback on the success of a well-known brand, though perhaps I should not overestimate the confusion created. After all, one of these things is not like the other:
The Family Stone
Wall-to-wall white people
(Pace Tavon, that is.)
What I hadn't known until I saw the trailer, though, is that at some point in the movie lily-white Luke Wilson counsels ceramic-complected Sarah Jessica Parker, "You have the freak flag . . . you just don't fly it," co-opting the other founding father of the black bohemian bourgeoisie, Jimi Hendrix.
But Rachel McAdams is cute.
There is Mr. Clinton, in 1969, on "Say Brother," a television show produced by WGBH in Boston. (This is early Clinton, even before Funkadelic's first album; the Parliaments would soon become Funkadelic.) He is wearing a purple jumpsuit with crossed suspenders over bare shoulders and a kind of rounded Mohawk, a shaved band of scalp below a bulbous crown of hair.
The band plays a series of vamps. The first builds on Sly and the Family Stone's "Into My Own Thing." "What is soul?" Mr. Clinton yells, in the middle of the song. "What, brother?" responds the band's other lead singer, Fuzzy Haskins. "Soul is the hamhock in your cornflakes!" Mr. Clinton intones.
After a break, the Parliaments stretch out at length, playing their acid-Motown for almost 10 minutes, going from vamp to vamp; at a climax, Mr. Clinton rolls on the floor. The band becomes a mob of rising fists and shaking hips. The sequence ends with the guitarist Eddie Hazell detuning his strings and distributing a cloud of feedback, with various band members whacking cymbals.
I am not a collector of music, or of video. I have had friends play me the best clips from their music video collections, in full, collectorish, this-will-freak-you-out mode, and enjoyed it. Still, I don't really love music on video, per se. It reduces a performance so brutally.
But a missing link of performance history as potent as that George Clinton thing? Even if on bad video? It's hard not to keep looking.
That's right, I scooped The New York Times.
In related news, I went to see The Constant Gardner at the fifty-cent movie theater the other day. The movie itself was made more interesting by the tourettic fellow a couple of rows behind me. But what stuck with me was the preview for The Family Stone. I've long complained about the producers' attempt to piggyback on the success of a well-known brand, though perhaps I should not overestimate the confusion created. After all, one of these things is not like the other:
The Family Stone
Wall-to-wall white people
(Pace Tavon, that is.)
What I hadn't known until I saw the trailer, though, is that at some point in the movie lily-white Luke Wilson counsels ceramic-complected Sarah Jessica Parker, "You have the freak flag . . . you just don't fly it," co-opting the other founding father of the black bohemian bourgeoisie, Jimi Hendrix.
But Rachel McAdams is cute.