1/15/2024 0 Comments Lights out song 1980s![]() Giving the acid-drenched Madchester rave sound one of its first significant chart boosts by reaching the top 10 in the UK, Graham Massey and Martin Price’s "Pacific State" was the perfect cocktail of new age naturalism and club drugs. See also: Zapp: " More Bounce to the Ounce" After years as a favored sample for West Coast hip-hop producers (it appears in no less than 7 Ice Cube songs), nowadays you're most likely to hear "Atomic Dog" in commercial spots for kids' movies and pet chow. It's a gloriously unhinged performance, silly and strange, a kind of alchemical lightning-strike. George growls, barks, whinnies, and yawps his way through Shider and Spradley's futuristic bow-wow, offhandedly unloading one slobbery hook after another. That "Atomic Dog" came together at all is a minor miracle that it's every bit the equal of his '70s classics is something else entirely. By 1982, Clinton was a man out of time: beaten at his own game by that skinny motherfucker with a high voice, rocked by a nasty freebase habit, and deeply in debt to any number of ex-bandmates. Something about a dog.Īt the dawn of the '80s, funk got sleeker, sparser, more reliant on synths, less caught up in the cosmos. High as he was, George took one listen to that panting synth, and inspiration struck: A dog. He'd arrived with nothing prepared it's unclear whether he'd even heard the track before. ![]() Funkenstein, the Starchild himself, mad genius of Parliament-Funkadelic-arrived at the studio fresh from the club Garry Shider and David Spradley, longtime P-Funk associates who laid down most of what would become "Atomic Dog", remember flanking him while he recorded his vocal so he wouldn't start listing to the side. George Clinton had been partying the night he recorded "Atomic Dog" then again, he'd been partying quite a bit in those days. See also: Apollonia 6: "Sex Shooter" / Vanity 6: "Nasty Girl" It’s the rare recording that sounds star-making on its own, without the confirmation bias of history, and it’s the rare producer who knows exactly what to do with a star when he hears one. -Katherine St. Prince’s lyric might’ve come off mocking delivered by someone else, but with Sheila it’s just there, a vessel for her to fill with a star’s worth of potential energy-much of it via percussion solo, deployed live like a sudden tornado. While "The Glamorous Life" is undeniably a Prince song, from the worldly would-be celebutante who’s saved from independence by "the seventh wave" of making love to the horns that nudge-nudge all the lyrics, it’s a song that went to the right person. Actual version of history: Prince had-still has-an uncanny knack for spotting (and frequently dating, but still) talented female artists, and giving them world-class platforms. One version of history: Prince’s genius is such that it trickles down to everyone he works with, elevating the ordinary and the non-notable of the world.
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