Editing P-Funk mythology (section)

==Background==
{{main article|Parliament-Funkadelic}}
George Clinton's space-age mythology began to emerge with the release of Funkadelic's self-titled [[Funkadelic (album)|debut album]] in 1970. Later that same year, Parliament released their debut album ''[[Osmium (album)|Osmium]]''. Clinton's cosmology was largely absent from the latter release, and it took longer to blossom in Parliament's output. Generally speaking, Parliament was a dance-oriented band, while Funkadelic was more serious and psychedelic.<ref name="Hacker">Hacker, Scot. "[https://web.archive.org/web/19970726122422/http://www.birdhouse.org/words/scot/pfunk.html Can You Get to That? The Cosmology of P-Funk]." ''Platforms: A Microwaved Cultural Chronicle of the 70s'', edited by [[Pagan Kennedy]]. [[St Martin's Press]], 1994.</ref>

The two bands shared personnel, and Clinton blurred the lines between them both by referring to his touring band as "A Parliafunkadelicment Thang". The shorthand for this conglomerate became "P-Funk", and it grew to include offshoots like [[P-Funk All Stars]], [[Bootsy's Rubber Band]], [[Parlet]], [[The Brides of Funkenstein]], [[The Horny Horns]], and solo albums by [[Game, Dames and Guitar Thangs|Eddie Hazel]] and [[All the Woo in the World|Bernie Worrell]].<ref>Salant, Shelley. "[http://www.metrotimes.com/detroit/george-clinton-lays-it-all-down/Content?oid=2441830 George Clinton lays it all down: Uncle Jam still wants you]", ''[[Metro Times|Detroit Metro Times]]''. May 4, 2016.</ref><ref name="Tate">[[Greg Tate|Tate, Greg]]. "Doin' It In Your Earhole", ''Tear the Roof Off, 1974-1980''. New York, N.Y: Casablanca, 1993. Liner notes.</ref> By the mid 70s, P-Funk was a massively successful group of acts. A ranking of the top live acts of 1977 included three bands from the conglomerate in the top fifteen slots.<ref name="Wright"/>

After the bands' earlier releases, Clinton began to feel that something more conceptual was in order, and he expressed deep admiration for [[The Who]]'s ''[[Tommy (The Who album)|Tommy]]'' and [[The Beatles]]' ''[[Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band]]'' as "the classiest two pieces of music I had ever seen where everything related to each other. So I wanted to do one of those kinds of things." Clinton settled on the extraterrestrial concept because of its originality, saying, "Put niggas in places that you don't usually see 'em. And ''nobody'' had seen 'em on no spaceships! Once you seen 'em sittin' on spaceships like it was [[Cadillac]] then it was funny, cool."<ref>[[John Corbett (writer)|Corbett, John]]. [https://books.google.com/books?id=KQ2WFvz6GXUC&dq=john%20corbett%20Extended%20Play&pg=PA150 Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein]. [[Duke University Press]], 1994. 150.</ref>

The primary author of the P-Funk mythology aside from George Clinton was [[Pedro Bell]], who illustrated the liners for many of P-Funk's releases. Bell's [[felt-tip pen|felt-tip]] illustrations included prolonged essays that expanded the mythos of Clinton's lyrics with a complementary syntax that "forged a new realm of black language".<ref>Vincent, Rickey. [https://books.google.com/books?id=Tb-FBAAAQBAJ&dq=Funk%3A%20The%20Music%2C%20the%20People%2C%20and%20the%20Rhythm%20of%20The%20One&pg=PA255 Funk: The Music, The People, and The Rhythm of The One]. St. Martin's Griffin, 2014. 255.</ref> Though Bell coined terms like "Rumpasaurus" and made extensive contributions to the P-Funk mythology, his work has been largely overlooked.<ref>Shakur, Abdel. "[http://misstraknowitall.blogspot.com/2009/06/natural-way-to-dro-part-i.html The Natural Way To Dro (Part I)]", MISSTRA KNOWITALL. June 30, 2009.</ref>

Clinton has pointed to the show ''[[The Outer Limits (1963 TV series)|The Outer Limits]]'' as an influence in his elaborate narrative, but more importantly, he and Bootsy Collins allegedly encountered a UFO together while driving to Detroit. Clinton recalls light bouncing from one side of the street to the other, and remarking to Collins, "The Mothership was angry with us for giving up the funk without permission." The bouncing light eventually focused on their car, and Clinton asked Collins to "step on it".<ref name="Needs"/>

The P-Funk mythology was just one tool in the conglomerate's arsenal. By the mid-1970s, Clinton was rebranding funk as many things at once, "an aesthetic, a marketing ploy, a black cultural nationalist battle-plan and a way of being if not a spiritual discipline." He was drawing on everything from "hipster lingo of the beboppers, early black radio deejays and the apocalyptic anti-slavemassa edicts of the [[Nation of Islam]]" as well as the [[Youth International Party|Yippies]] and the [[Black Panther Party|Black Panthers]]. Clinton was positioning P-Funk as a "radical response to the American police state" and "the antithesis of everything that was sterile, one-dimensional, monochromatic, arhythmic and otherwise against freedom of bodily expression in the known universe."<ref name="Tate"/> In its simplest iteration, Clinton posited that "funk" was equivalent with the "truth".<ref>Friedman, Ted. "[http://music.eserver.org/text/Friedman-Making.it.Funky.html Making It Funky: The Signifyin(G) Politics Of George Clinton's Parliafunkadelicment Thang] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120227015509/http://music.eserver.org/text/Friedman-Making.it.Funky.html |date=2012-02-27 }}". 1993.</ref>