THE GEORGE CLINTON INTERVIEW

If James Brown is the King of funk, and Prince the Prince, George Clinton is the Court Jester. And, like all court jesters, he gets away with telling more plain truth than his peers. Wrapped in persistently brilliant Afro-American vernacular, and wrapped by the hardest funk imaginable, Clinton might not sell as much as his crossover comrades, but what he does record pins your ears to the wall and sets your heart and feet pounding.

Highly prolific (he’s worked on 56 albums), and with a commune of likeminded musicians, Clinton remains as much the guiding light of funk in the common-denominated ’80s as he was in the progressive early ’70s and discofied mid-’70s.