ppadilha said:Wars of Armageddon: best use of fart sounds in a song?
Don't sleep on Grace Joneses's "J.A. Guys," though.
I was listening to Maggot Brain's title track a couple months ago, because I remembered listening to it a long time ago and thinking it was epic, then listening to it a couple of years ago and feeling let down, so I wanted to check back in on it and see what was what. Don't get me wrong, I'm a pretty big Parliament-Funkadelic fan, but I'd kinda stopped hearing this particular record as music, and had come to consider it more as a symbol, if you know what I mean. And so this was one of those periodic relistenings that you give to records like that: done not without affection, necessarily, but probably done out of respect as much as desire.
Anyway, I was struck by how faulty my memory had been: "Maggot Brain" is not an epic song at all. It's actually kinda tiny--rugged, halting, and cheap-sounding. I remembered it as this sustained cosmos-swallowing howl of collpase and rebirth, panoramic and profound, an idea no doubt shaped by what I knew to be the iconic and universally relatable story behind the song. But that doesn't really hold; the idea of Mother might be universal, but your mother, your version of her, is ultimately unknowable to anyone except you. And it's that human-sized mystery that I hear here, not the bullshit universality that "Maggot Brain" so often gets saddled with. It's deeply, deeply personal, an almost unbearably intimate display not of towering masterpiecery, but of the kind of raw small effort that only a kid will make.
No matter what they tell you or what they told me, this song is not some lone afronaut guitar hero singlehandedly mapping an entire universe of blues. This is one dreamy son's long, imperfect kiss into the void. And if it's never as good as I remember, it's always a lot more beautiful. Which I guess makes it even better.
