A review by sethdmichaels
Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir by Ben Greenman, George Clinton

5.0

Highly highly recommend this book, which really shows how brilliant George Clinton's mind is and how influential he has been. A history of American music from doo-wop to the present, including the way that black musical pioneers were robbed of the lucrative rewards of their creativity. Clinton is really fascinating - he's done every job you can imagine in the music industry, and his ethos and the savvy way he built his scene are so classically American - he's a self-invented, well-staged character, unafraid to be ridiculous or too big, he's incredibly generous about sharing credit and making it about the community, and he pulls together funk and soul and rock and cartoons and sci-fi and musical theater and weird religious cults to create his own vast thing, which in turn has been mined by everyone that followed (there's a pages-long "sampleography" of hip-hop songs built around P-Funk riffs at the end of the book). Even if you only sort of know about Parliament/Funkadelic/etc, it's a great read.