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George Clinton

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

George Clinton was born on 22 July 1941 in Kannapolis, North Carolina, and grew up in Plainfield, New Jersey. As a teenager he worked in a barbershop, and there he formed The Parliaments, a doo-wop group modelled on Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers. In the 1960s he also worked for a time as a songwriter for Motown. In 1967 The Parliaments had their first big hit with (I Wanna) Testify.

Music and breakthrough

In the 1970s Clinton found his own way with two bands at once: Parliament and Funkadelic. They blended influences from Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone, Frank Zappa and James Brown, and experimented with new sounds and technology. With more than forty R&B hits the collective dominated Black music in America for a time. From 1971 to 1973 part of the band lived in Toronto, where America Eats Its Young was made, the first album with the bassist Bootsy Collins. In 1982 Clinton began his solo career with Computer Games, which included Atomic Dog.

Influence

Clinton's funk was wilder and stranger than that of his predecessors. He combined heavy grooves with psychedelia, striking costumes, absurd humour and stories about spaceships and the future, a form of Afrofuturism. Together with James Brown and Sly Stone he is regarded as one of the great innovators of funk. When his popularity sank in the 1980s, he came back via hip hop: many rappers cited him as an influence and sampled his music, and the G-funk of the 1990s built on his work. In 1997 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Parliament-Funkadelic.

Listening

Listening tip. Listen to Atomic Dog (1982). Notice the slow, dragging funk rhythm, the synthesizer bass and the strange, half-barked cries, and hear why so many hip hop producers later sampled this track.

Discography

Studio albums

In School of Rock

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Mentioned in other articles

See also

Categories: ArtistsFunkG-funkDetroit techno