''Maggot Brain'' is the third studio album by the American

funk rock Funk rock is a fusion genre that mixes elements of funk and rock. James Brown and others declared that Little Richard and his mid-1950s road band, The Upsetters, were the first to put the funk in the rock and roll beat, with a biographer stat ...

band

Funkadelic Funkadelic was an American funk rock band formed in Plainfield, New Jersey in 1968 and active until 1982. The band and its sister act Parliament, both led by George Clinton, pioneered the funk music culture of the 1970s.John, Bush. Funkade ...

, released by

Westbound Records Westbound Records was a Detroit-based record label founded by Armen Boladian in 1968. It had a distribution deal with Janus Records from 1970 to 1975, but then it switched distribution to 20th Century Records during 1975 and 1976, but again switch ...

in July 1971. It was produced by band leader George Clinton and recorded at

United Sound Systems United Sound Systems is a recording studio and locally designated historic district in Detroit, Michigan, United States. Many popular music artists over the last seventy years have recorded at the facility, including blues musicians like John ...

Detroit Detroit ( , ; , ) is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is also the largest U.S. city on the United States–Canada border, and the seat of government of Wayne County. The City of Detroit had a population of 639,111 at t ...

during late 1970 and early 1971. It was the final album recorded by the original Funkadelic lineup; after its release, original members

Tawl Ross Lucius "Tawl" Ross (born October 5, 1948, in Wagram, North Carolina) is an American musician. He was the rhythm guitarist for Funkadelic from 1968 to 1971, and played on their first three albums. He left the band in 1971 soon after a debilitating ...

(guitar), Billy Nelson (bass), and

Tiki Fulwood Ramon "Tiki" Fulwood (May 23, 1944 – October 29, 1979) was an American musician. He was the drummer for the funk bands Parliament and Funkadelic, as well as a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, inducted in 1997 with fifteen other membe ...

(drums) left the band for various reasons. The album charted in the R&B Top 20. Today, it is perhaps best known for its 10-minute title track, performed by guitarist

Eddie Hazel Edward Earl Hazel (April 10, 1950 – December 23, 1992) was an American guitarist and singer in early funk music who played lead guitar with Parliament-Funkadelic. Hazel was a posthumous inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, inducted in 19 ...

. ''

Pitchfork A pitchfork (also a hay fork) is an agricultural tool with a long handle and two to five tines used to lift and pitch or throw loose material, such as hay, straw, manure, or leaves. The term is also applied colloquially, but inaccurately, to ...

'' named it the 17th best album of the 1970s. In 2020, ''

Rolling Stone ''Rolling Stone'' is an American monthly magazine that focuses on music, politics, and popular culture. It was founded in San Francisco, California, in 1967 by Jann Wenner, and the music critic Ralph J. Gleason. It was first known for its ...

'' ranked ''Maggot Brain'' the 136th greatest album of all time in its updated list.

Music and lyrics

The album opens with a spoken word monologue by band leader George Clinton, which refers to "the maggots in the mind of the universe". According to legend, the 10-minute title track was recorded in one take when Clinton, under the influence of

LSD Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), also known colloquially as acid, is a potent psychedelic drug. Effects typically include intensified thoughts, emotions, and sensory perception. At sufficiently high dosages LSD manifests primarily mental, vi ...

, told guitarist

to play as if he had been told his mother was dead: Clinton instructed him "to picture that day, what he would feel, how he would make sense of his life, how he would take a measure of everything that was inside him and let it out through his guitar". Though several other musicians performed on the track, Clinton largely faded them out of the final mix so that the focus would be on Hazel's guitar. Hazel utilized fuzz and wah effects, inspired by his idol Jimi Hendrix; Clinton subsequently added delay and other effects in mixdown, saying "I

Echoplex The Echoplex is a tape delay effect, first made in 1959. Designed by Mike Battle, the Echoplex set a standard for the effect in the 1960s—it is still regarded as "the standard by which everything else is measured." It was used by some of the ...

ed it back on itself three or four times. That gave the whole thing an eerie feel, both in the playing and in the sound effects." Critics have described the solo as "lengthy, mind-melting" and "an emotional apocalypse of sound." The subsequent five tracks have been described as "sour harmony-group meditations heavy with bass, keyboard and class consciousness," with the band exploring a "psychedelic/funk fusion." "Can You Get to That" features Isaac Hayes's backing vocal group Hot Buttered Soul, and contains elements of

folk blues Country blues (also folk blues, rural blues, backwoods blues, or downhome blues) is one of the earliest forms of blues music. The mainly solo vocal with acoustic fingerstyle guitar accompaniment developed in the rural Southern United States in ...

and gospel music. "You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks" explores interracial love and features electronically distorted drums. The track "Super Stupid" was described by ''

'' as a "tale of a dumbass junkie set to a tune

Black Sabbath Black Sabbath were an English rock music, rock band formed in Birmingham in 1968 by guitarist Tony Iommi, drummer Bill Ward (musician), Bill Ward, bassist Geezer Butler and vocalist Ozzy Osbourne. They are often cited as pioneers of heavy met ...

would have been proud of." The 9-minute closing track "Wars of Armageddon" has been described as a "freak-out" jam, and makes use of "paranoid, psychedelic sound effects and crowd sounds." Popular music scholar Yuval Taylor described it as "a burning hot prefiguring" of the music that

Miles Davis Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926September 28, 1991) was an American trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. He is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th-century music. Davis adopted a variety of musi ...

would perform on his 1975 live album '' Agharta''.

Title and packaging

Reportedly, "Maggot Brain" was the nickname of Hazel. Other sources say the title is a reference to band leader George Clinton finding his brother's "decomposed dead body, skull cracked, in an apartment in

Newark, New Jersey Newark ( , ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of New Jersey and the seat of Essex County and the second largest city within the New York metropolitan area. The cover artwork depicts a screaming black woman's head coming out of the earth; it was photographed by

Joel Brodsky Joel Lee Brodsky (October 7, 1939 – March 1, 2007) was an American photographer, best known for his photography of musicians, particularly his iconic "Young Lion" photographs of Jim Morrison. In his lifetime, he is credited with photographing o ...

and features model Barbara Cheeseborough. The album's liner notes are a polemic on

fear Fear is an intensely unpleasant emotion in response to perceiving or recognizing a danger or threat. Fear causes physiological changes that may produce behavioral reactions such as mounting an aggressive response or fleeing the threat. Fear ...

provided by the Process Church of the Final Judgement, an obscure Satanist religious cult. According to author Rickey Vincent, the organization's presumed association with mass-murderer Charles Manson, along with the album's foreboding themes and striking artwork, lent Funkadelic the image of a "death-worshipping black rock band."

Release and aftermath

released ''Maggot Brain'' in July 1971. It peaked at number 108 on the US pop chart while missing the UK chart, and also reached the top 20 of the

R&B charts The Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart ranks the most popular R&B and hip hop songs in the United States and is published weekly by '' Billboard''. Rankings are based on a measure of radio airplay, sales data, and streaming activity. The chart had 100 ...

. After the album was released, the band effectively disbanded: drummer

was fired due to drug use; guitarist

reportedly got into an " acid eating contest, then snorting some raw

speed In everyday use and in kinematics, the speed (commonly referred to as ''v'') of an object is the magnitude Magnitude may refer to: Mathematics *Euclidean vector, a quantity defined by both its magnitude and its direction *Magnitude (ma ...

, before completely flipping out" and has not performed since; bassist Billy Nelson quit over a money dispute with Clinton. Subsequently only Clinton, Hazel, and keyboardist

Bernie Worrell George Bernard Worrell, Jr. (April 19, 1944 – June 24, 2016) was an American keyboardist and record producer best known as a founding member of Parliament-Funkadelic and for his work with Talking Heads. He is a member of the Rock and Rol ...

remained from the original Funkadelic lineup. A 2005 reissue included three bonus tracks, among them an alternate mix of "Maggot Brain" featuring the full-band performance.

Critical reception

Reviewing for ''

'' in September 1971,

Vince Aletti Vince Aletti (born 1945) is a curator, writer, and photography critic. Career Music industry Aletti was a contributing writer for ''Rolling Stone'' from 1970 to 1989. He was the first person to write about disco in an article published by the m ...

negatively described ''Maggot Brain'' as "a shattered, desolate landscape with few pleasures," competently performed but "limited." He was particularly critical of the record's second side, panning it as "dead-end stuff," and asked "who needs this shit?" ''

Village Voice ''The Village Voice'' is an American news and culture paper, known for being the country's first alternative newsweekly. Founded in 1955 by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, John Wilcock, and Norman Mailer, the ''Voice'' began as a platform for the cr ...

'' critic Robert Christgau was more enthusiastic, praising the title-track as "druggy, time-warped super-schlock" and claiming that the second track features "a rhythm so pronounced and eccentric it could make

Berry Gordy Berry Gordy III (born November 28, 1929), known professionally as Berry Gordy Jr., is a retired American record executive, record producer, songwriter, film producer and television producer. He is best known as the founder of the Motown record l ...

twitch to death"; he added that "the funk pervades the rest of the album, but not to the detriment of other peculiarities." Writing years later for ''

PopMatters ''PopMatters'' is an international online magazine of cultural criticism that covers aspects of popular culture. ''PopMatters'' publishes reviews, interviews, and essays on cultural products and expressions in areas such as music, television, fi ...

'', Taylor called the album "one of the loudest, darkest, most intense records ever made," and stated that the group "captured the odor of the age, the stench of death and corruption, the weary exhalation of America at its lowest." Dominque Leone of ''

'' called the album "an explosive record, bursting at the seams with exactly the kind of larger than life sound a band called Funkadelic should have made." Dave Segal, from the same publication, revered it as "a monument of

psychedelic funk Psychedelic funk (also called P-funk or funkadelia, and sometimes conflated with psychedelic soul) is a music genre that combines funk music with elements of psychedelic rock. It was pioneered in the late 1960s and early 1970s by American acts li ...

" and "a defining document of Black rock music in the early '70s". Additionally, he called its two bookending tracks "the most evocative expressions of birth and annihilation ever put on record" and suggested that the "soulful funk-rock" tracks in between represent the "hott stfive-song streak in the Clinton canon". ''The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Rock History'' (2006) claimed that ''Maggot Brain'' and Funkadelic's previous two albums "created a whole new kind of psychedelic rock with a dance groove". Music historian

Bob Gulla Bob Gulla is an American music historian and musicologist, music encyclopedia author, and biographer and writer. He has authored books such as ''Icons of R&B and Soul: An Encyclopedia of the Artists Who Revolutionized Rhythm'', ''Guitar Gods: The 25 ...

hailed it as an "iconoclastic funk-rock" record, featuring the best guitar playing of Hazel's career. Author Matthew Grant describes the album as marking where "the band really hit their stride. In a subsequent review for ''

Blender A blender (sometimes called a mixer or liquidiser in British English) is a kitchen and laboratory appliance used to mix, crush, purée or emulsify food and other substances. A stationary blender consists of a blender container with a rotating me ...

'', Christgau described the 10-minute title track as "indelible" and said the album culminated in "Funkadelic's most incendiary freak-out ever" on the last track, while also applauding the 2005 CD reissue's bonus tracks. '' Stereogum'' named it the second best album by the

Parliament-Funkadelic Parliament-Funkadelic (abbreviated as P-Funk) is an American music collective of rotating musicians headed by George Clinton, primarily consisting of the funk bands Parliament and Funkadelic, both active since the 1960s. Their distinctive ...

collective, and called it "one of the most cathartic R&B albums ever made." John Bush of

AllMusic AllMusic (previously known as All Music Guide and AMG) is an American online music database. It catalogs more than three million album entries and 30 million tracks, as well as information on musicians and bands. Initiated in 1991, the databa ...

stated that the group "hit its stride with he acid-rock extravaganza." ''Happy Mag'' named the album among the 5 best P-Funk releases, describing it as "an absolute freakout of psychedelic funk sounds," but also "perhaps Clinton’s most lyrically sparse album." '' Fender'' called the album "an eruption of psychedelic agit-funk that blended the increasingly bleak American story—urban decay, prime time body counts from an ongoing slog through

Vietnam Vietnam or Viet Nam ( vi, Việt Nam, ), officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,., group="n" is a country in Southeast Asia, at the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, with an area of and population of 96 million, making i ...

, and front page assassinations—with the sounds of Hendrix, Motown, James Brown,

Cream Cream is a dairy product composed of the higher-fat layer skimmed from the top of milk before homogenization. In un-homogenized milk, the fat, which is less dense, eventually rises to the top. In the industrial production of cream, this process ...

Sly Stone Sylvester Stewart (born March 15, 1943), better known by his stage name Sly Stone, is an American musician, songwriter, and record producer who is most famous for his role as frontman for Sly and the Family Stone, playing a critical role in the ...

Blue Cheer Blue Cheer was an American rock band that initially performed and recorded in the late 1960s and early 1970s and was sporadically active until 2009. Based in San Francisco, Blue Cheer played in a psychedelic blues rock or acid rock style, and ...

and

Vanilla Fudge Vanilla Fudge is an American rock band known predominantly for their slow extended heavy rock arrangements of contemporary hit songs, such as their hit cover of The Supremes' " You Keep Me Hangin' On". The band's original line–up—vocalist ...

." ''

The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...

'' critic

Geoffrey Himes Geoffrey Himes is an American music critic who has written weekly for ''the Washington Post'' since 1977. He also wrote for '' No Depression'' as a contributing editor in its first print era in the late 1990s to the early 2000s and has written for ...

names it an exemplary release of the

progressive soul Progressive soul (often shortened to prog-soul; also called black prog, black rock, and progressive R&B) is a type of African-American music that uses a progressive approach, particularly in the context of the soul and funk genres. It developed ...

development from 1968 to 1973. In 2003, ''Rolling Stone'' ranked ''Maggot Brain'' #486 on the magazine's list of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, with the magazine raising its rank in 2012 to #479, calling it "the heaviest rock album the P-Funk ever created".Wenner, Jann S., ed. (2012). Rolling Stone – Special Collectors Issue – The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. USA: Wenner Media Specials. In the 2020 reboot of the list, the album's rank shot up to #136. The record was also listed in the music reference book ''

1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die ''1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die'' is a musical reference book first published in 2005 by Universe Publishing. Part of the ''1001 Before You Die'' series, it compiles writings and information on albums chosen by a panel of music critics ...

''. The singer Bilal names it among his 25 favorite albums, citing its "loose" creative direction as an influence on his own music.

Track listing

* Sides one and two were combined as tracks 1–7 on CD reissues.

Personnel

Credits are adapted from the album's liner notes.

Funkadelic

* George Clinton –

vocals Singing is the act of creating musical sounds with the voice. A person who sings is called a singer, artist or vocalist (in jazz and/or popular music). Singers perform music (arias, recitatives, songs, etc.) that can be sung with or withou ...

, (lead vocals on tracks 1, 6, 7) * Raymond Davis – vocals (lead vocals on track 2) *

Fuzzy Haskins Clarence Eugene "Fuzzy" Haskins (born June 8, 1941) is a former singer with 1950s and 1960s doo-wop group, The Parliaments. He is a founding member of the groundbreaking and influential 1970s funk bands Parliament and Funkadelic, also known as ...

Calvin Simon Calvin Eugene Simon (May 22, 1942 – January 6, 2022) was an American singer who was a member of the bands Parliament and Funkadelic. He is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, inducted in 1997 along with fifteen other members of Parliam ...

Grady Thomas Grady Thomas (born January 5, 1941, in Newark, New Jersey, United States) is a former member of the bands Parliament and Funkadelic. He is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, inducted in 1997 with fifteen other members of Parliament-Funk ...

Garry Shider Garry Marshall Shider (July 24, 1953 – June 16, 2010) was an American musician and guitarist. He was musical director of the P-Funk All-Stars for much of their history. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997, with fifteen ...

, Hot Buttered Soul (

Pat Lewis Pat Lewis is an American soul singer and backing vocalist since the 1960s. Biography Patsy Lewis was born October 23, 1947 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, United States, and moved to Detroit, Michigan in 1951. In the early 1960s, Pat, her sister Dia ...

, Diane Lewis and Rose Williams) – vocals *

–

guitar The guitar is a fretted musical instrument that typically has six strings. It is usually held flat against the player's body and played by strumming or plucking the strings with the dominant hand, while simultaneously pressing selected strin ...

, vocals (lead vocals on track 5) *

– guitar, vocals (co-lead vocals on track 6, 7) *

– keyboards, vocals (lead vocals on track 3) * Billy Nelson –

bass guitar The bass guitar, electric bass or simply bass (), is the lowest-pitched member of the string family. It is a plucked string instrument similar in appearance and construction to an electric or an acoustic guitar, but with a longer neck and ...

, vocals (lead vocals on track 4) *

– drums

Production

* Produced by George Clinton *Executive producer –

Armen Boladian Bridgeport Music is a music publishing company founded in Michigan by Armen Boladian in 1969. It controls the copyrights to recordings by George Clinton and Funkadelic. Bridgeport Music has filed lawsuits for copyright infringement via sampling a ...

*Bernie Mendelson in charge of The Eegangas *Cover

photography Photography is the art, application, and practice of creating durable images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is employe ...

*Inside cover photography by Ron Scribner *Artwork design – The Graffiteria/Paula Bisacca *Art direction – David Krieger *Album supervision – Bob Scerbo *Album co-ordination – Dorothy Schwartz *Model on album cover- Barbara Cheeseborough

Charts

''Billboard'' (North America) - album * 1971 Pop Albums No. 108 * 1971 Black Albums No. 14 * 1990 Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums No. 92

References

External links

*
the Motherpage
{{Authority control Funk rock albums by American artists Psychedelic funk albums Psychedelic rock albums by American artists Westbound Records albums 1971 albums Funkadelic albums