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George Clinton: Some Of My Best Jokes Are Friends (Capitol)

Charles Shaar Murray, New Musical Express, 1985

IF THERE'S nothing more pathetic than an ageing crazy person, then why is George Clinton still able to make music as passionate, hard and funny as Some Of My Best Friends Are Jokes? For nearly 20 years Clinton has steered his multifarious front organisations – Funkadelic, Parliament, Bootsy's Rubber Band, The Brides Of Funkenstein, Parlet and all the others in his Mothership – on a voyage of exploration in search of the Holy Grail of pure, uncut funk. At times, his interlocking network of conceptual gags has sent him too far into warp space for his work to be even halfway comprehensible to all but his most obsessive devotees; at others, he's simply spread himself too thin to comfort. But when he connects...

Total word count of piece: 455


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