GEORGE CLINTON - COMPUTER GAMES @ 40

 

Marking its 40th anniversary today is the debut solo album from Funkadelic/Parliament founder, George Clinton, with Computer Games being released on November 5th, 1982. After dominating the R&B scene throughout the previous decade with the monster P-Funk collective in all its variations and manifestations, Things were starting to get dicey for Clinton in the 1980s. Computer Games was a brief commercial rally for Clinton before he’d be beset by grinding legal battles, personal struggles and lack of label support through the remainder of the decade. The album was conceived of as a response to the burgeoning electronic music scene which was rapidly infiltrating the funk/R&B/soul/disco dance music scenes. Rather than reject the insurgence, Clinton chose to embrace it and integrate it into his own methods of production. Though the album was listed as a solo work, the personnel for the project was largely the same musicians he’d been working with on the most recent Parliament and Fundadelic albums.

The centerpiece of the album is the epic Atomic Dog. Released as a single, it was created almost by accident by virtue of an inadvertently backwards drum machine recording in something of a drug addled miasma when Clinton stumbled into the studio one day in the middle of a blizzard. He could barely stand, but mumbled some incoherent instructions and then improvised his vocals, leaving the folks in the studio with the task of making some sense of it all. Miraculously, not only did they make sense of it, they turned it into pure dance floor gold. More than that, the song has become a template for countless grooves in the ensuing decades, which repeatedly sampled to the track’s riff to build upon as a foundation. It has become part of the DNA of hip-hop on the deepest possible level.