from the LP Osmium, Invictus Records, 1970The narrative of a single mother doing what she has to do in order to support her brood of children is one that crops up a few times in the pantheon of P-Funk-ness, but this is arguably the first such instance of said circumstances; in this version, mom’s a widow with fourteen kids (“…their father died in the war…”) who sells moonshine to make ends meet---which I suppose isn’t as bad as what she winds up doing later in “Cosmic Slop”. People who are used to the space-funk zaniness inherent to Parliament’s later records will be surprised by the gritty, stripped-down feel on this, their debut LP; that said, they have never been a band to turn out generic funk, and this tale of perseverance is told to us with heavily processed vocals, including a chorus of backup singing that’s Leslie-d to all hell and winds up sounding like a legion of aquatic robots. This album dropped before Funkadelic’s self-titled debut, thus serving as an official opening credo from the original shamans of interstellar funkmanship, only at this early stage they still have one foot planted firmly on the ground, and deep in the mud.
