parliament funkadelic hydraulic pump free sample

The video for Erykah Badu’s “Jump In the Air (Stay There)” featuring Lil Wayne — a rumored bonus track off her upcoming album New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh) — premiered on Badu’s official Website over the weekend. Considering “Jump in the Air” interpolates Parliament-Funkadelic’s “Hydraulic Pump,” it’s fitting that Badu’s kaleidoscopic vision for the track’s video would hint at the cover image of Funkadelic’s self-titled debut album. Multiple Badus weave in and out of the frame, as shapeless as an amoeba, until the cell explodes and several Weezys emerge to deliver his verse. If this is one of the dozens of videos Wayne reportedly filmed in the weeks prior to his prison sentence, the Rebirth star and his green screen are one for one.

While that introductory track showed the influence of Motown"s rhythm nation, once the former barber and conk creator from Plainfield, New Jersey began dropping acid, the visual sounds in his head bubbled to surface. He soon changed the music game by taking funk music to the extreme and spearheading the bugged collective known as Parliament-Funkadelic.

Connecting with a diverse audience that flocked to each release as though was it was funky revival, Parliament-Funkadelic"s mob of rotating musicians—including guitarist Eddie Hazel, bassist Bootsy Collins and keyboardist Bernie Worrell—inspired a generation of recording artists, writers, painters, and thieves.

This truly is an all-star affair. Parliament and Funkadelic alumni like Bootsy Collins, Eddie Hazel, Walter "Junie" Morrison, and Garry Shider, among others, resurface from various stages in the Mothership"s time upon earth to contribute to this stylistically sprawling and urbanely funky session; adding to the impressive roll call are high-profile soul and funk guest stars such as Sly "Sylvester Stewart" Stone, Bobby Womack, Fred Wesley, and Maceo Parker. And leading the charge is the master himself, George Clinton. Amazingly, considering all the egos involved, Urban Dancefloor Guerillas comes off sounding of a piece. And while the expansive funk found on Uncle Jams Wants You and One Nation Under A Groove is, for the most part, bypassed here -- this album adheres more to the compact and streamlined sound heard on The Mothership Connection -- Urban Dancefloor Guerillas still impresses with sophisticated charts, top playing, and a wealth of rich harmonies. The funk gets nicely mixed up with relatively straightforward cuts like "Pumpin" It Up" and the prescient "Copy Cat" (P-Funk"s output, of course, would become a veritable sampling library for the hip hop community), as well as more experimental numbers like "Catch a Keeper" (co-produced and arranged by Stone) and the Dadaist funk jam "Hydraulic Pump." And expanding the repertoire nicely, Clinton indulges in the updated doo wop of "One of Those Summers" and some breezy jazz and funk on "Acupuncture." The newer touches may not suit fans loyal to the group"s groundbreaking ‘70s albums, but Urban Dancefloor Guerillas is certainly worth checking out for its own brand of inspired funk.

Parliament - the best nonstop mix collection. I’m interested in your thoughts if you’ve heard this. Does it just force the starts and ends to fade into eachother or is it more creative than that? Is the meat of the songs any different?

Funkadelic - reworked by detroiters. I’m not certain this should even be billed as a funkadelic album. More like “Various Artists - Funkadelic reworked by detroiters”. Am I right or is this pretty dope?

Funk is what I grew up on too. Every album by Parliament-Funkadelic, I had it. That’s what I was listening to. James Brown was immensely important to me. The funk got brought into hip-hop, into house, funk, soul, and all those things are majorly important because it’s an expression of the soul.

I heard that George Clinton said of the sample [of P-Funk All Stars’ ‘Hydraulic Pump’], “That shit’s dope!” Later on I made a cover version of ‘Dr Funkenstein’ called

“I heard that [outhouse legend], soon as I could remember anything,” says George, now seventy-seven and on his final Parliament-Funkadelic tour. “About the midwives, how they delivered babies. That story is one of my first childhood memories. She was going to the bathroom and had me.”

Overton Loyd, the illustrator who designed a pop-up Atlantis for Parliament’s Motor Booty Affair,once described Clinton as a cross between Malcolm X, Rod Serling, and Walt Disney. In a career noted for its anti-Nixon movements (with the contributions of hundreds of musicians), the outhouse legend could be easily flown headlong into Clinton’s P-fantasia, joining a revolution disguised in potty humor: the images of spanked war babies, guitar players in bedsheet diapers (loomed by Cannon?), George’s jumbo rubber chicken feet that Bootsy Collins spotted poking out of a toilet stall in D.C., the “Maggot Brain” prologue about drowning in your own shit/business. It all gets brought down to earth, to a concrete slab at the edge of the woods in a small cotton mill town, where the nearest segregated hospital was miles away but the closest midwife was family. Funk was a condition, a transformative property of existence born from a landscape of human capital.

George’s mother, Julious, once sang her child “You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks,” a 1922 Thomas Talley poem that Funkadelic would turn into an Echoplex for equality in 1971. The refrain could’ve been a back-and-forth between eras. As if it were George’s mother urging “Can you get to that?” to hip-hop’s future generations, looped into the already now. No time to sit around admiring a sample for its timeless consequence.

“I’m dreaming of a new idiom,” says George’s younger cousin Manualynn Stowe Faison, on the phone from Myrtle Beach. “We need to harness that deep down P-Funk energy. Don’t tell him I told you, but George has that Alice in Wonderlandmind. Doesn’t take much to get it pumpin’.”

“Mommy, What’s a Funkadelic?” was not on Soul Train,but rather good acid. Recorded in Detroit in 1970, this nine-minute response begins with licking chops on reverb. Through distortion and shimmer, George reflects on leaving “a little town in North Carolina” while headed for the Black Soap Palace, the New Jersey barbershop where the Parliaments formed. Virginia gets bypassed, along with the Philip Morris Plant that manufactured the Parliaments’ namesake, as well as George’s gigs throwing papers and caddying for Ben Hogan. By the fade, Kannapolis has long evaporated into flange and steam, raising suspicions that the song never left Detroit to begin with.

Dale Earnhardt Boulevard runs near the old Freak Palace space in Kannapolis, across 85 South into Concord, by a clock repair shop/ record store where I bought the Funkadelic 45 “Music for My Mother.” Concord is the former home of WPEG, the station that once kindly broadcast “Atomic Dog” twenty-five miles south to the atomic dogwoods of Charlotte. I grew up in Charlotte and first met George at an in-store at Shazada Records, when I was thirteen. I remember kaleidoscopic braids, long nails, and a ten-minute blind-dog rap called “Dog Talk.” (“If I mistake you for a tree to pee, I hope you understand.”)

Talking to the Charlotte Postin 1979, George promised to submerge the Coliseum with Parliament’s Motor Booty Affair Tour. He called the show “20,000 Mugs Under the P,” having been inspired by a fishing trip in the Bermuda Triangle. See you in Planktonia. George, who claims he can hear fish, once shot a catfish with a bow and arrow from the shore, advancing the state of leisure sport in tie-dyed pants and Cazals.

The farm in Michigan where this actually happened is also where George’s little brother James “Jimmy G” Keaton authored the bassline to “Hydraulic Pump” in 1982. That moon-cycle lapping at the shore, post-wake, was actually handclaps, congregated inside a drum machine and processed through reefer. Either way, “Hydraulic Pump” can turn a party into a bodily function. “I wanted it to be syncopated with the lights on a flying saucer,” says Jimmy G, on the phone from Greensboro. “That’s genetics.”

Prince once said that after seeing Parliament he went into the studio the same night and did “Erotic City.” We only managed to hit up a Krispy Kreme in Raleigh.

Thanks to satellite GPS, the former Clinton address is now visible from outer space. I visit on a wet-aired August afternoon and find a guy changing out the locks on the front porch. I ask if I can poke around out back, flashing my copy of “Music for My Mother.” As if that would certify everything. An officer at the Cabarrus County Jail, Scott Cagler first heard “Hydraulic Pump” while posted at a Clear Air Force Station Base in central Alaska. Apparently, MWR (Morale, Welfare and Recreation) kept the missile defense library stocked with P-Funk records. “The Space Command Squadron had a tapedeck in the library—so that’s what I was doing.”

I look up Lowe Avenue, past the corner on E C Street where a pump once supplied George Washington Carver High with drinking water. The Palace barbershop is still operational, but the Palace Theatre, where Manualynn Stowe Faison would go to monster movies and “hug up,” is now a funeral home.

The last time Manualynn saw her cousin George, he was gliding across the stage in an office chair in Myrtle Beach. Air-pumped on pneumatic shocks, in a white suit and size-thirteen Gaturs. “George Clinton’s cut his locks,” she laughs. “I didn’t recognize him, and my husband had to point him out. I said, ‘Which one is George?’ He said, ‘Sanford and Son.’ Who would’ve known he would go from locks to Fred G. Sanford? That’s a trip in itself. The second half of the show, he got in his roller derby chair, pumped it up ’til he couldn’t pump no more.” Reflecting on her extended funk genes, she adds, “George’s gettin’ old but don’t let nothing stop him. He just roll right on. I said to myself, ‘Well, that’s where I get it from.’ That makes you feel strong, gives you courage to carry on. It’s a good feeling to have it confirmed in the P-Funk. We need the funk.”