FUNKADELIC - UNCLE JAM WANTS YOU @ 45

 

Celebrating its 45th anniversary today is Funkadelic's "war on disco" concept album, Uncle Jam Wants You, which was released on September 21st, 1979. Band leader George Clinton is pictured on the front cover, African warlord style, in a rattan chair flanked by a giant "Flashlight" and "Bop Gun" (nods to the P-Funk songs of the respective same names). Flashing the "on the one" hand sign, combined with the album's subtitle, "Rescue Dance Music from the Blahs", it is a clear declaration of intent. "On the One" is more than just a credo of how to play funk music (accent on the first beat), it's a call to unite and harness the power of togetherness, and a fundamental acknowledgement of the spiritual "oneness" of the universe. It is the first Funkadelic album since America Eats Its Young in 1972 not to sport a cover illustrated by Funkadelic artist Pedro Bell, though Bell did provide artwork for the album’s back cover and interior.

The album's centrepiece, Not Just (Knee Deep), is a 15 minute monolithic groove that is so insistent and insidious, it feels like your brain is being surreptitiously rewired by some sort of "funkateer" subliminal manipulation, reprogramming your responses to get your groove on. The longer it goes on, the more helpless the listener feels in its grasp. That's worth the price of admission all on its own, but there are other treats as well, albeit perhaps not quite as inescapable. Freak of the Week offers up more solid P-funk groove, as does Uncle Jam, but the remainder of the album falls out into mostly filler. It's forgivable though, considering the other two thirds of the album is all winner.

Uncle Jam Wants You (a reference to the "Uncle Sam wants you!" US Army recruitment posters) may be a more militant sequel to the band's previous album, One Nation Under a Groove. As previously stated, it's all about countering the banality of mass marketed disco music, which had slathered the latter half of the decade in mirror-ball mediocrity and dreary dance dreck. On that front, it does what it says on the tin.

Uncle Jam Wants You was the second Funkadelic album to be certified gold.