•
Rating: Strange things happen. For example, you call your parish priest to wish your father a happy birthday, and of course, he takes the opportunity to say a couple of words to you, a little lecture never hurts. But you hear the sound of the phone by miracle, it's a drop in an ocean: Eddie Hazel covers everything.
His Hendrixian-derived guitar, in cahoots with Bernie Worrell's screeching organ (still a long way from the spacey sound he would develop later), makes quite the racket. By golly, it does! And to think I've listened to plenty of noisier music, and in spades: metal, hard rock, classical, jazz, the Dillinger Escape Plan. Yet what the Funkadelic bring out on the title track of "Free Your Mind...And Your Ass Will Follow" is a peculiar intertwining of beautifully screeching and penetrating sounds that leave your ears bleeding, indeed. Not that the entire album is like this (but almost), there's room for some gentler sounds, within the limits of funkadelicism (one of my new religions, so long to the parish priest). In any case, what emerges from the album is an aggressive sound, scrappy. A deliberately rough diamond. As with any respectable album of the Parliafunkadelicment Thang, there is melody, of course: "I Wanna Know If It's Good To You" (BABE!!!), "Funky Dollar Bill", "Some More", or the nice 2005 bonus track "Fish, Chips And Sweat" (fish and chips all over the place!), but it still remains surrounded and seasoned with the wild energy of the ensemble.
The group wanted to see if they could record an album entirely under the influence of acid. They could. Not a masterpiece (it's in that vast limbo between three and four stars, which we'll call 3.5 to make life easier), but a good album, yes, a good album with some bursts of genius. In this second album by Funkadelic (year of our Lord 1970), the wandering discourse begun a few months earlier with the eponymous debut continues; it's black rock, it's psychedelia (at its peak in the conclusive "Eulogy And Light"), it's soul, it's funk, it's Funkadelic.
Tracklist Lyrics Samples and Videos
03 Funky Dollar Bill (03:17)
Funky dollar bill
U.S. dollar bill
Funky dollar bill
U.S. dollar bill
You go to school
To learn the rules
On how to love and life your life
But think about it twice
The pusher push, the fixer fix
The judge acquits
The junkie leads his life
For the dollar bill
Funky dollar bill
US dollar bill
Funky dollar bill
US dollar bill
You don't buy a life, you live a life
A father learns much too late
He was a-never home
He worked two jobs, never stayed at home
He had to, 'cause
His love life was gone
For the dollar bill
For the dollar bill
For the dollar bill
US dollar bill
It'll buy a war
It will save a land
It pollutes this air
In the name of wealth
It'll buy you life
But not true life
The kind of life
Where the soul is hard
My name is dollar Bill
Funky dollar bill
US dollar bill
Funky dollar bill
US dollar bill
Funky dollar bill
US dollar bill
Funky dollar bill
US dollar bill
Funky dollar bill
US dollar bill
Funky dollar bill
US dollar bill
Funky dollar bill
US dollar bill
Funky dollar bill
US dollar bill
06 Eulogy and Light (03:30)
Our father
Which art on Wall Street
Honored be thy buck
Thy kingdom came
This be thy year
From sea to shining sea
Thou givest me false pride
Funked down by the riverside
From every head and ass, may dollars flow
Give us this pay
Our daily bread
Forgive us our goofs
As we rob from each other
He maketh me to sell dope to small children
For thou art evil
And we adore thee
Thy destruction and thy power
They comfort me
My Cadillac and my pinky ring
They restoreth me in thee
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of poverty
I must feel their envy
For I am loaded, high and all those other goodies
That go along with the good god big buck
To your horse
A ? grows there
Ahead in time, the unexpected soul-searching beam of the strobe
But now, the stairway looms
And as I rise
The cries of kittens, gray, make way
For there, now near
Here now, gone, alone
I feel my wrist, it flicks the switch
No lights reveal the room or me
She sees, then panics, grabs a light
I scream, silent comforts that are not heard
I panic, for I have not said a word
Hysteria hold the room in sway
I run, I back away, to hide
From what?
From fear?
The truth, the light?
Is truth the light?
Loading comments slowly
