The Perfect Chord looks back at albums you may have missed when they dropped, or miss now that they've faded from memory. This week's glimpse into the crates:
O.G. Funk – Out Of the Dark
Producer Bill Laswell’s Black Arc series, for all their scattered, frantically studio-created schizophrenia, nonetheless carried an undeniable energy throughout each album. Indeed, while the various supergroups clearly sounded as if Laswell had telephoned each member, scheduled a week’s worth of studio time, and told them to go to town, most of the musicians came from the P-Funk collective (a roster massive enough to rival the Avengers), whose output from the late 1950s until the late 80s had been recorded in the exact same fashion. Each recording subsequently drips with comfort and familiarity, as if the listener was hearing a group of buddies getting together after a few years apart (which, in most cases, was precisely what happened).
Out Of The Dark appeared in June of 1994 from the collective dubbed O.G. Funk. The nominal O.G.s in question—Jerome “Bigfoot” Brailey, Billy “Bass” Nelson, Bernie Worrell, and Gary “Mudbone” Cooper, all of whom formed the core of the group—had played together since the late-1960s (and, in the case of Brailey and Nelson, even longer). Even the group’s peripheral players had old-school pedigree: lead vocalists Prince Whipper Whip and Melle Mel were legendary hip hop pioneers (Whipper Whip with Grandwizard Theordore and the Fantastic Five, Melle Mel with the variously-Grandmastered Furious Five), and guitarists Spacey-T Singleton and Nicky Skopelitis were accomplished studio veterans. With Laswell behind the boards, the group was significantly less-edgy than other Black Arc acts (Slavemaster, for instance), almost guaranteed to put out something golden.
Immediately, Out Of The Dark plays up the group’s original funk connections; “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah” unsubtly culls the groove from Funkadelic’s “You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks” and turns it into a heavy beat poem, with Melle Mel and Whipper Whip trading verses over Worrell’s unmistakable B-3 organ. Laswell’s signature, low-end heavy mix makes the rhythm section into a collection of small explosions, largely from Brailey, whose drums are clearly in front, yet not enough to be overpowering. The two vocalists’ lyrics turn surprisingly political (with Melle Mel clearly name-dropping Rodney King, and both he and Whip overtly condemning police brutality), before almost completely abandoning any soapboxing. Indeed, “Funk Is In The House” is an outright party jam anchored by Whip (who handles most of the lead vocals for the rest of the album) and Spacey-T, whose ferocious chords propel the song forward.
Deftly avoiding predictability, the album takes a slower turn for the next three tracks: “Funkadelic Groupie,” a relatively crude groupie-avoidance fable, segues into the eight-plus-minute instrumental “Music For My Brother,” on which Singleton clearly pays tribute to the then-recently-deceased Eddie Hazel with a series of passionate fretwork. “I’ve Been Alone” follows, a surprisingly tender ballad with a Melle Mel reappearance, some impressively-sung vocals by Whip. and a prominent Mudbone Cooper backing vocal over the chorus. Equally surprising is that “I’ve Been Alone” isn’t the only ballad on the album; “Don’t Take Your Love From Me” faintly echoes Funkadelic’s “I’ll Stay,” only with a bit of mid-90s melodrama, and actually makes it work to impressive effect, and album closer “Angie” finds Whip waxing philosophical about a lover who, most unexpectedly, has been deployed for Desert Storm. Worrell proves to be the equalizing factor on most of the songs; his keyboard and organ parts add ethereal atmospherics to every song, putting the listener in a sort of Maggot Brain-era mindset that makes the overall idea make sense.
That said, it’s the harder, grittier funk-rock tracks that make Out Of The Dark a balanced success. The album’s title track appears second-to-last on the album, a wholly original cut with Whip finding an appropriate balance between melodic singing (which he again handles admirably) and high-energy party rapping. Cooper and Bernard Fowler pop up again in the background on the song’s chorus, expertly mixed by Laswell. “I Wanna Know,” a re-interpretation of Funkadelic’s “I Wanna Know If It’s Good To You,” features the band at its tightest, with Nelson and Brailey sitting in the pocket and Whip laying down a couple verses before letting the guitars carry the latter half. While not as incendiary as “Yeah Yeah Yeah,” the song galvanizes the listener for the album’s two closing tracks.
Despite the fact that the O.G. Funk line-up never actually recorded any more music under the name, all its members continued to perform, occasionally even with each other. Shortly after Out Of The Dark’s release, Nelson rejoined George Clinton as a member of the P-Funk All-Stars, playing bass and guitar to this day. Brailey had settled into a career as a session musician before the 1990s began, and continued as a drummer-for-hire even as his band Mutiny (which he’d formed in the mid-1970s) released occasional albums. Bernie Worrell, Bernard Fowler and the rest of the Funkadelic veterans continued to appear on future Laswell releases; Spacey-T continued his session career before joining Fishbone in the late-1990s and is currently an instructor for SoundArt, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit providing music education to young aspiring performers. Prince Whipper Whip has largely retired from music, occasionally appearing on albums by Z-Trip and Brother Ali (among many others); Melle Mel continues to record and perform, both as a musician and as a hypeman for the Urban Wrestling Federation, a New York-based professional wrestling company. While O.G. Funk remains a brief stop in their illustrious careers, it’s still a fascinating artifact—fortunately one whose songs occasionally appear in sets by each of its contributors, ensuring its place in a vast canon.
A. Darryl Moton is a freelance writer/curmudgeon refusing to answer stupid questions about his hair in Ankeny, Iowa.
