Parliament Funkadelic - Flashlight

When I was a young twerp working at Cisco, I turned to my cube mate, Lou Anthony, and told him how much I enjoyed the music from Pulp Fiction, which I had recently seen. I was especially enamored with the song "Jungle Boogie" by Kool and the Gang. The groovy beats and grunting made my ass twitch and wiggle. I compared it to a middle-part of the song "Echoes" by Pink Floyd, where Roger Waters lays on a B major vamp while David Gilmour's guitar screams, Rick Wright played jazz chords and Nick Mason kept a four-on-the-floor beat with syncopated hi-hat going strong. He said I was developing a taste for funk.

I didn't have the slightest idea what "funk" was at the time. You could have played me something by James Taylor, and I could have said, "Ooh, funky!"

Lou Anthony was an office-jockey by day and a DJ by night. He came to work the next day with a 90 minute cassette titled "UNCUT FUNK," which was a hodgepodge of tracks taken from his extensive vinyl collection. I remember putting it on, and being utterly, utterly confused. The sounds blipped, popped and screeched over thick and intricate bass lines and intense drumming.

I have to say that the first thing I noticed was that a lot of it was familiar. The grooves were the original tracks of samples taken for (at the time) current-day hip hop. "Atomic Dog" by George Clinton stood out at first, and I recognized a loop I heard in Snoop Dogg's "What's My Name."

One song made me stop and rewind more than any other, and that was Parliament's opus, "Flashlight." The funky chorus dug a barbed hook into my mouth, but George Clinton's delivery of these lyrics struck me in the gut:

"Can I get it on my good foot? Good God!
'Bout time I got down, one time!"

Oddly enough, even long after I knew what funk sounded like, I still didn't know what it was. Then, one day, while working at the Apple Store in the Stanford Shopping Center, I met Emille O'Connor.

Emille O'Connor was a man larger than life. Standing about 6' 6" tall, and weighing in at about 280 pounds, with bulbous features and impossibly tan, considering the fact that he was black. He wore a bowler hat on his curly head, a tartan scarf and a beige vest with buttons holding on for dear life. I used to see him riding his bike up and down Sand Hill Road, behind Stanford University; an iPod boombox strapped to his handlebars. On the day he introduced himself to me, he had ridden this bike straight up to the entrance of the store, PUMPING "Boogie On, Raggae Woman" by Stevie Wonder on his modern day ghetto blaster.

He immediately went up to one of the most powerful computers and pulled up a mathematics application I am only somewhat familiar with, then turns around and asks me something I could barely decipher. Something about a polynomial database, or along those lines. I told him I was unaware, but maybe we could look something up on Google... He wasn't interested, and proceeded to tell me he wanted to have something that would analyze his formulas. To this day, I don't know if he was serious, or just a little ill in the head. One thing he told me, and I was able to confirm: he was the session drummer. THE session drummer. He worked with Stevie Wonder (from the track he was playing on the bicycle contraption!), James Brown, and, of course, Parliament. I spent about twenty minutes talking to him, with most of the concepts he was trying to convey flying right over my head.

While what he was saying wasn't making much sense, I did learn what funk really was. It wasn't anything he said, but I immediately knew the truth from standing so close to him: Funk is *not* music. Funk is a smell. A very distinctive smell. I went back to my old funk recordings (which I had been collecting since that first casette from Lou Anthony piqued my interest), and listened again. Indeed, the sound was distinctive, but the only thing that the tracks all had in common was a sensation beyond the audible. It tickled my nose, like a tuft of wet dog fur stuck in my sinus. From that point on, I classify the genre by the following rule:

If you can't smell it, it ain't funky.