Document Type
Article
Abstract
Through an examination of Parliament-Funkadelic’s lyrics and music, this paper explores shit, dirt, and the funk, investigating their relationship to George Clinton and his band’s desire to darken the Humanistic project of Enlightenment, their desire to soil language, and thereby question conventional, bourgeois values. The author argues that Funkadelic participate in what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the “peculiar logic” of the carnivalesque, detourning status quo notions of culture and society, creating complex contortions through the blurring of the good and the bad, the cerebral and the carnal, the sublime and the mundane. In essence, Funkadelic are a musical carnival that exists to dismantle the normal and the everyday, that provides a new lens through which to look at contemporary culture and engage with its many contradictions.
Repository Citation
Thomas, Joseph T.. ""A Joint Rolled in Toilet Paper": Funkadelic’s Funky Soul." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 6, no. 2, 2006, pp. 1–19. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol6/iss2/5
Included in
African American Studies Commons, American Popular Culture Commons, Music Commons, Rhetoric and Composition Commons