Mothership Connection

In high school, my friend Aubin, who was much cooler than me, told me I needed to go listen to some Parliament. I bought a cassette of The Clones of Dr Funkenstein, probably just because of its title. I liked it immediately, how could you not? But thirty-ish years later, I am still struggling to wrap my head around its implications. George Clinton’s playfulness can easily mislead you into thinking he’s a clown, but he is really more like a prophet.

There’s plenty of good analysis out there of the P-Funk mythology and its place in Afrofuturism. That is fascinating and important material. But I don’t see enough written about the actual music. So here I will do my part to rectify the imbalance, starting with the song that calls down the landing of the Holy Mothership.

For proper context, check out this live version of “Mothership Connection” from Halloween 1976–start at 37:25. It’s almost twice as long as the studio version, even though the tempo is faster. The lead vocalist is the incredible Glenn Goins, who died of cancer just two years after this was filmed.

I also love this remix, because it lets you hear Bootsy’s soaking-wet Mutron bass more clearly, and that is always a good thing.

“Mothership Connection” is effectively a rap song, so no wonder it gets quoted and sampled in hip-hop so often. The main point of reference for my age cohort is “Let Me Ride” by Dr Dre.

There’s a more subtle sample in “Escapism (Gettin’ Free)” by Digable Planets.

Speaking of samples, “Mothership Connection” is itself based on an interpolation of the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” More specifically, it quotes an irreverent version of it made famous by the Golden Gate Quartet.

P-Funk songs do most of their expression via rhythm and timbre, but there’s harmony and melody in there too. Here’s my transcription of the A section of “Mothership Connection.”

This section is in D-sharp Phrygian mode, with its characteristic flat second scale degree–I colored it red in the transcription. Usually when American musicians use Phrygian, they do it to sound exotic. But “Mothership Connection” doesn’t sound Middle Eastern or Andalusian at all; it sounds like regular minor-key funk. It was only when I was learning the main keyboard riff on guitar that I noticed the flat second. Click the image below to play D-sharp Phrygian on the aQWERTYon.

This scale contains the same pitches as the B major scale, but the tune is definitely not in B major. It’s hard to tell exactly what the tonality is, though. The root notes aren’t in the metrical locations where you expect them, and there are no chords to anchor you either.

My transcription of the vocal melody has two problematic notes in it, the ones I colored blue. (One is on the word “noise”, and the other is on the word “me.”) I notated these pitches as A naturals, the flat fifth from the D-sharp blues scale, because that’s as close as I could get to the correct pitches within twelve-tone equal temperament. In reality, those pitches are blue notes, falling in between A natural and A-sharp.

Here’s the B section:

The tonality here is a more conventional funk sound, F-sharp natural minor:

While the A section contains no chords at all, the B section has a clear chord progression, alternating between F#m and Bm, the i and iv chords in F-sharp minor.

So that’s the harmony. But this is a funk song, so the rhythm is doing most of the musical heavy lifting. There’s a subtle but crucial difference in Jerome Brailey‘s drum pattern between the two sections. In the B section, the pattern is a simple “backbeat cross,” the same one you hear in Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” In the A section, however, the second kick drum in each bar is displaced a sixteenth note early. You can see both patterns on the Groove Pizza below–it alternates between the A section and B section grooves every two bars.

Displacing one kick seems like a trivial difference, but it transforms the groove. To understand why, you need to know a few things about the math of syncopation. Beats and subdivisions exist on a continuum from strong to weak. The more times you have to subdivide the circle to reach a given beat or and subdivisions, the weaker it is. You naively expect the main rhythmic events to fall on the strongest beats or subdivisions, and when they fall on a weaker beat or subdivision instead, it’s a surprise.

Beat one (slice one on the Groove Pizza) is the strongest beat in the bar, because you divide the circle zero times to reach it. The next strongest beat is beat three (slice nine on the Groove Pizza), because you divide the circle once to reach it. To get to slice eight on the Groove Pizza, you have to divide the circle four times, and that makes it an exceptionally weak subdivision. Furthermore, because it’s so close to a strong beat, that makes it feel even more surprising when you hear a kick drum on it. That kick is the key to the off-center feel of the entire pattern, and all the other parts (vocals, keyboards, horns, bass) align with it.

In her book Presence and Pleasure: The Funk Grooves of James Brown and Parliament, Anne Danielsen distinguishes between a song and a groove.”Mothership Connection” is a killer groove, but it’s only marginally a song. Danielsen explains that every popular song for the past hundred-ish years has had a groove underneath it. In a conventional song, the groove is the lowest level in “a hierarchy of sequences that order the basic units into larger groups of four, eight, sixteen, and so on” (p. 174). Those sequences include drum and bass patterns, guitar riffs, chord progressions, and vocal melodies. In a pure groove, that hierarchical structure is minimal or absent. Instead, there are two-bar cells that repeat to infinity, without necessarily being organized into verses, choruses, or even phrases.

Danielsen points out that if you are expecting a song, then the groove’s lack of evident hierarchical structure can make it seem “boring” because nothing “happens.” In songs, your conscious attention is wrapped up in verses and choruses, while the groove is acting more on your unconscious mind. In a groove like “Mothership Connection,” there is nothing for your attention to focus on except the groove itself. This mode of listening is unfamiliar to many white people, and we need to learn and practice it.

The lack of song structure in a P-Funk groove is not a deficiency, it’s a deliberate choice. George Clinton was perfectly capable of writing a song when he wanted to, and he wrote some good ones. But in his open-ended grooves, the repeating rhythmic cells contain enough depth that they don’t need any higher-level structure to sustain your interest. The point of all that repetition is to keep you focused on the details and nuances of the rhythmic cells.

A potential tendency toward organizing the musical progression into an overall form gradually fades away. The focus turns inward, as if a sensibility for details, for timing inflections and tiny timbral nuances, is inversely proportional to variation on a larger scale. The senses process information with an even better resolution in time (p. 189).

If funk musicians are going to keep your attention so tightly focused, then they had better deliver an extremely satisfying groove.

[T]he relation between the pure form of a groove, with its repetitive structure and cuts and breaks, and funk’s main musical “challenge,” namely the subtle perfection of the basic two-bar pattern, is not accidental. However, this also means that, as a musical form, the pure groove hides no weaknesses. When all attention is on the groove and almost nothing else is happening, even small mistakes become distinct. The pattern has to be kept steady and relaxed all the way through, and this requires quite extraordinary musical skills (p. 190).

Compare the musicianship of song-based artists to groove-based artists. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones have great songs, but their playing is sloppy. It just doesn’t necessarily bother you, because you’re usually busy listening to the song structure. In a P-Funk groove, on the other hand, the playing has to be laser-beam tight, because there is nothing else to pay attention to. In African Rhythm and African Sensibility, John Chernoff says that a drummer “uses repetition to reveal the depth of the musical structure” (p. 112). If you can listen to a two-bar cell over and over for two or five or ten minutes (or hours!) without getting bored of it, that indicates a structure of extraordinary depth.

The cliche says that Afrodiasporic musics like jazz and funk combine African rhythm with European harmony. This is not completely true. These musics use African harmonies too, or at least, the closest approximation to them that can be played on European instruments. Dr Kofi Agawu argues that Western tonality has been a colonizing force in Africa.

The same is true for African-descended people in America as well. In 1925, James Weldon Johnson wrote in the preface to The Book of American Negro Spirituals that Black American music has clear structural and harmonic parallels to African music, not just rhythmic similarity. These parallels were as strong in 1975 as they were in 1925, and they remain strong today. Funk’s rejection of harmonic linearity and closure is not just an arbitrary aesthetic choice. It’s an overt rejection of the white European musical value system. Some white listeners find funk anxiety-producing or even enraging–I have known several people who feel threatened by the challenge to their musical values.

Let’s think a little more about that chariot. It’s the one that carried the prophet Elijah to heaven. It symbolized the Underground Railroad during slavery, and then it symbolized a more metaphorical escape from oppression during the Civil Rights movement. In P-Funk mythology, the Mothership is a science fiction version of the chariot. A white guy like me hasn’t experienced a tenth of the hardship that the members of P-Funk have, but there is still plenty in this world that I want to escape from. Funk is a better escape vehicle than Netflix or video games. It helps you dance, and connect to other people, and to your own body. Like Dr Funkenstein says, funk is its own reward. When white people deprive ourselves of this crucial emotional survival tool, we suffer unnecessarily, and we inflict that suffering on others.