a while back—it was during that whole thing where some people apparently didn’t know who the beatles were, or at least didn’t know that paul mccartney was a beatle, and then some people flipped their shit over that and then it spun into a larger discussion of rockism/elitism/classism/the whole web of etc—somebody (i think maybe oldtobegin?) mentioned, i believe in the context of an implicit racism in rockist history (which it does illustrate well), “those stoners in high school who were really into pink floyd but didn’t know who funkadelic were”. i remembered that last night while i was listening to pink floyd and thinking about why i hardly ever listen to them anymore.
pink floyd and parliament-funkadelic have in common a conceptual bent and a belief that society, as it is, is messed up. but then the divergences! to start with, the form: the floyd always maintain this high&mighty performer/audience divide. they‘re on the stage/the record, they are the authors—and indeed, everything feels written to the nth degree—you’re just listening; like a lecture. (and if you don’t listen reverently enough, you might get spit on.) the wall is the ultimate case of “just read the sparknotes”: it’s so po-faced and heavy-handed that it can hardly be bothered to use music as anything more than a vehicle for its themes, to make a monument of roger waters’s issues. p-funk, on the other hand, is a party! it’s wild, it’s inclusive, and most crucially, it’s constructive. while pink floyd seem incapable of getting beyond a perpetual complaint about how wretched and decayed society is, parliament-funkadelic were transcending via their own mythology/philosophy/religion.
tl;dr pink floyd are pompous and crabby, p-funk is way more fun (also as a side effect of thinking about all of this for so long roger waters is now the image for sir nose in my head)
and a sidenote: p-funk also makes for waaaay better stoned jams than the floyd. i have a feeling anyone who finds the opposite would be dour and pretentious and not at all fun to be high around.
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purepopfornowpeople likes this
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wordsworthinc said:
I will take the concepts of P-Funk over Pink Floyd any day. Though misogynistic at times, P-Funk were about inviting you in, not recoiling in horror at you.
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wordsworthinc likes this
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murkytimeistimeschool posted this
