“My name is The One. Some people call me the funk.”
Now that Amazon.com sells downloadable MP3s, I was listening to “Theme from the Black Hole” and began to lament. I haven’t heard this song in years! Thanks white radio! This line jumped right out at me:
My name is The One Some people call me the funk
In these two lines, what you have here is anthropomorphic abstraction. When B.B. King talks about his guitar Lucille what you have again is anthropomorphic abstraction. You see, my n-words, anthropomorphic abstraction is a Black thang. It is not a “black thing”; it is a Black thang. It was not until the big-house enterprise adoption of Object Oriented Programming when the “wealthy” elites of the white world began to respect how an abstraction can become concrete, tangible and sentient-like. Black people was doing this shit out among the beasts of the field for thousands of years because we are specially-designed Afro-nauts, capable of funkatizing galaxies. You better stop reading now, Pollyanna, because today and right here it’s about to get Br’er Rabbit funky:
One classic misinterpretation of this Black thang is to assume that when George Clinton writes about “The One,” he writing about a “god” (fictional cartoon character) that lives in the clouds or some shit like that—that is an impoverished, literal, materialistic, one-dimensional interpretation of George Clinton’s poetic intent. Once this misinterpretation is in place and you find yourself too embarrassed to admit to “the public” that you are white and wrong then you have to erect with a series of flying buttresses a god complex of a pantheon featuring Sir Nose, The Long Haired Sucka, Star Child, The One, etc. Suddenly, George Clinton is a polytheistic worshipper of isolated cartoon characters and other debilitating narcotics. Like David Bowie says, “There is no sign of life. It’s just the power to charm.” And your bitchy charms even start to sway George Clinton himself—because even he has a little bit of Louisiana-red-hot bitch in him. The bigger the headache the bigger the pill, baby.
But for those of us who know just a little bit about music under the command of the late, great James Brown we know that The One is a beat of a tempo. When you hear this beat you get a move—and this move shows you what to do. The abstract class is derived and instantiated into an object that makes something mechanical happen—so what’s happening, baby? Your hip bone is connected to your thigh bone—but don’t get hung up on bones! Watch out! Are you hip to Easter Island? Do your awkward moves reveal inconvenient truths? Pay attention!
Jim Morrison warns is his fellow white people (and legions of educated Negroes) in “Texas Radio and the Big Beat” that Black beats (made with sweat that makes hip Black people look like “Black polished chrome”) are “hard to master.” George Clinton has one meaning for the “Black Hole” as the place you have to go to get this beat—and that is the place of The One. It should be no n-word accident that western science refers to the center of the Black hole as “the singularity”—The One. You see, kids, I never smoked one stank of chronic and I am sitting here writing this sober, dude! Now you gonna tell me that I am thinking too much again! Like your monkey ass can set the limits of Black Thought! You never will dance, Sir Nose! Can you dance underwater and not get wet?
So the lament goes like this: the opportunity for casual traveling into the Black Hole and back, “thy going out and thy coming in” is largely over (better luck next time, y’all). Like Darth Vader is more machine than man, George Clinton is more drugs than man. Too many youth of today use machines to take literal, physical, samples of George Clinton’s music instead of blending abstraction and concretion into a graceful, strong dance. Are you hip to Easter Island? Remember when Jazz musicians would jam all night just for each other and sample each other’s music “the hard way”? Most hip hop music today has lost interest in beats because soldiers need to march in simple, 4-4, lock step. Bills pile up sky high. Send that boy off to die. Three blind mice. The father, the son, and the Holy Ghost… See how they run, y’all. Have you ever seen such a sight in your life?
Let us in and we’ll turn this mother out…
By the way, “the trickster” is the African anthropomorphic representation of The Uncertainty Principle.
Let us in and we’ll turn this mother out…
I wants my funk uncut.
For more explorations into song lyrics “normal” people have ignored for decades, start with “lines in the rasx context: Afterbirth and 1970s” here in the kinté space…