J. Christian Greer

The Mothership Connection: The Afro-Centric Psychedelicism of Parliament Funkadelic

Abstract

During the 1970s, George Clinton’s Parliament Funkadelic became one of the top selling musical acts in the world. Playing in front of tens of thousands, they traveled the globe putting on massive psychedelic assemblies, in which lysergic acid diethylamide (“LSD”) was distributed, consumed, and celebrated en masse. Following psychedelicist music collectives such as the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, Parliament Funkadelic approached their concerts not as simply musical events, but as liminal zones in which the combination of LSD and their heavy grooves merged audience and performer into a “groupmind,” or collective consciousness. Moreover, they attempted to augment this transpersonal mind-melding by utilizing over-the-top stage productions, which climaxed with the landing of a massive ornamental UFO, “the Mothership.” Together, the band and fans greeted the Mothership’s arrival by repeating the mantra, “every-thing-is-on-the-one” over and over again. Once landed, the Mothership expelled roughly a dozen alien emissaries who used futuristic technologies to elevate the audience into a higher spiritual dimension. Altogether, the landing of the Mothership was more than a theatrical gimmick, but a Funkadelic invitation for individual and collective transformation.
 

The neglect of the Funkadelic movement in the historiography of psychedelicism speaks
to a number of commonplace inaccuracies, which distort the way scholars understand
new religious movements centered on the use of mind-altering drugs. As a methodological intervention, this paper historicizes Parliament Funkadelic’s Mothership performance within the group’s Afro-futurist ideology. Special attention will be paid to how the popularization of the Funkadelic movement shifted the racial demographics of psychedelicism, and decolonized its cultural signifiers in the decades following the high point (so to speak) of psychedelic culture in the Sixties. The paper concludes by proposing a new foundation for the study of psychedelic religious movements.

Bio

Dr. J. Christian Greer is a scholar of Religious Studies specializing in the global history of psychedelic spirituality. While a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Divinity School, he led a series of research seminars that culminated in the creation of the Harvard Psychedelic Walking Tour, a free audio guide detailing how the Harvard community has shaped the modern history of psychedelic culture. His latest book, Kumano Kodo: Pilgrimage to Powerspots (OSGH Press) analyzes pilgrimage folklore that animates the rain-forest landscapes of Japan’s Kii peninsula, and his forthcoming book, Angelheaded Hipsters: Psychedelic Militancy in Nineteen Eighties North America (Oxford University Press), explores the expansion of psychedelic culture in the late Cold War era. He is currently a lecturer at Stanford University.