Maggot Brain

I have written and rewritten this week’s entry, and have edited out all kinds of weird angles: dosing Trumpers into psychedelic awakenings, further treading on my progressive utopian dreams, love as an interdimensional ally. I want to come out on the other side of this (and hopefully have) less resigned to the fact that our lives as Americans are the bizarre end result of generation violence, mass murder, and sinister plans unfolding regardless of who is in office. It’s easy to intellectually know that that is something we must live with and then to shrug it off as an unchangeable truth. It is unchangeable, but it does not mean that we have to let only that define us; we can, and should, let it inform how we move forward. Even if Biden wins, we have to push, and keep pushing, because the same corporate interests that put money into the Republican coffers, put it into the Dems’. We need to break this cycle of profit over people. I want to suggest a new strategy to push for: for every dollar that is spent on the military, one must also be invested in education and healthcare. What would this country look like if everyone could have access to these two things? How would things change? Why can we only dream about a just and equitable society? Why do the Republicans fight so hard against this being a reality? Just some questions I’m asking myself as I steep in the existential dread of the day before the election. 

What album could possibly work to either stiffen our jaws for another four years of destruction, or speak to the hope of Trump and his cadre finally tossed overboard? It’s got to be Funkadelic’s third lp, Maggot Brain. Some reviews of this album have said that it perfectly captures the despair of America at its lowest, which I think presents us with a perfect parallel to what we are going through now. For a lot of people, Trump has presented the first time that it was impossible to ignore the cold indifference of this society, which has trained folks to lap up bravado and noise rather than to value substance and empathy. The first track, which shares its name with the album title, is a thoughtful, searing, mind-bending guitar solo by Eddie Hazel, that for some reason, to me, evokes a oner, focused on a single raindrop, following it from its inception within a cloud, through thermals and winds, the bustle of a city street, catching on the bumper of a car and then slowly falling to the ground, and finally disappearing. Apparently, before recording it, George Clinton told Hazel to imagine he had just found out that his mother had died; and speaking of substance of empathy, I think that it’s safe to say that there aren’t many other musical expressions as moving and heavy as this solo. To play that, to tease those notes out of himself, amidst Nixon, Vietnam, and the ugliness of an actively racist society, is a poignant example of why this country is great. That in spite of all of those things, people can still find full, thick ropes of beauty coursing through the ground, our DNA, and the airwaves. We have it within us, and it’s accessible, and really, emitting it alongside the turmoil and uncertainty is a political action. Maybe a devastating funky rhythm and blues masterpiece isn’t what you would immediately identify as being political, but this music flies in the face of corruption and wickedness. When you emerge from the first cut, it will be like waking after a meditation, and it will bring you along through a cavalcade of soul and weirdo psych freakouts the level of which have arguably not been seen or achieved again. 

So, I hope when you put this record on, that it’s a celebration and a moment of introspection, and then dancing, before buckling back down to do more work toward making this country fulfill the promise that it has constantly touted as its purpose: freedom. And much to the conservative right’s chagrin, freedom does not mean getting to say whatever you want or deny other human beings rights and comforts that you enjoy. I want to enumerate all the ways in which the Republican Party has it wrong, but it makes me sick to have to type out the plethora of methods they are using to keep people from voting, to keep people disenfranchised. If you are a person who voted in that direction, ask yourself this: why don’t your political choices want folks to know what’s going on; why don’t they want us to vote? 

I want to call on folks to start writing a letter a week to Joe Biden; thank him for helping to end Trump’s idiotic jag into history, but then tell him what you want to change. Money out of politics, human rights for all people, purge the government of Trump appointees and lapdogs. And let’s buck up and eradicate the other virus running rampant. “I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe, I was not offended, for I knew I had to rise above it all…” Well, I have been constantly offended, and I hope that when you read this, the results are coming in for hope and love, and a sound rejection of the huckster in chief. You can get lost in this record, but when it’s done, it’s time to get up and head toward love; to recognize that patterns in the past don’t have to be patterns in the future - build your life as you want it, even if it’s hard to do. If we can get rid of Trump, we can do the next thing too; and the next, and so on. Whether or not Eddie Hazel was on acid, or George really did get him to tap into some supernatural vein of emotion, that solo was drawn out of his humanity. We all have access to that mighty conduit, and we need to dig deep now, and live.

Funkadelic - Maggot Brain

Saturday November 7th 2020, 7pm

Just put it on at your house using a stereo or the internet or whatever you want.