kodwo-eshun-more-brilliant-than-the-sun-adventures-in-sonic-fiction

08[150)08[151)that Cool demands. As a homeopathic agent, 'Funk not only moves, itcan remove' the sensations of feeling walled-in, closed-up, cased inarmour. It squirms like a tapeworm, heaving and contracting along yourintestines. It's a bassnake that undulates the inert abdomen and pelvisin S waves, snakemotions that sidewind along the thighs.As Sly bassman Larry Graham explains, '" I'm gonna add some bottomso that the dancing just don't end," and then my fuzztone came in . See,my fuzztone is a little box you step on. It's a distortion box y'know.'Instead of an inert lump of bass, Graham's fuzz bass distorts the lowend so it powers into the lead sound, careering up from under inhumpbackbeats, melodies from the bottom which bumpstart the arseuntil it begins evolving into the ass and then the booty. With Sly and theFamily Stone, the bass deepens through distortion and starts roamingaround as low end rhythmelody.whatcha gonna do without your ass?Sun RoScramble the Human Security SystemThis reversal of sound, in which the bass takes over from the guitar sothe low end plays the high end, immediately alters the sensorialhierarchy demanded by The Pop Song. The ass, the brain and the spine allchange places. The ass emerges from its status as sensory untouchable tobecome the motor-booty, the psychomotor driving you to dance. TheClintonian brain puns compulsively, issues an alarming logorrhoea.Bootsy's bass activates the distributed brain of the body. The assstops being the behind, and moves upfront to become booty.Funk, reorganizing the shape of The Song in space, unnerves thebodyshape presumed by Pop. It exaggerates all your extremities.Extraterrestrial funk alters its aliens at their outer extremes of ass,nose and trunk. Parliament is full of desperate warnings against disco'ssuperior cloning capacities, processes which leave you funkless, snatchyour booty. On '79' S Gloryhallastoopid, the Clintonian reversal reachesrunaway point. The booty comes alive, makes its escape from the rest ofthe body, is surgically amputated in an assendectomy, replaced byprosthetics while the nose extends into a monstrous trunk.Perpetual Bass MutationBootsy uses the Mutron Bi-phaser so the bass rrRRevs, a motorbikepowering the track. Fictionalizing this sound into a low end lifeform,Mutant Bass becomes the Spaceface double bass of Flashlight, theunderwater bass of Aquaboogie. With Bootsy the bass becomes a one-manrubber band, a tone-effect generator. As well as being the anchor whichweights the mixadelic arrangement, it now extrudes spinal textur-r-r-iffs,a low-end glutamate that reverses the gravity of the Parliament universe.Why Spaceface? Because it turns gravity upside down. Now that thelow end arrives from above, the bottom is now above your head. There'sno ground in Bootsy's amplified physics. Instead his bass swaps functionswith Worrell's Moog synth, both acting as low end mutation engines.Landing on the MoogOn the 10.38 Flashlight 12 mix, former child prodigy and New EnglandConservatory-trained Bernard Worrell becomes the latest Afronaut toland on the Moog. Synthesizing the bass from the Moog turns the lowend into gloops and squidges from giant Claes Oldenberg toothpaste.Worrell's mutant Moog is radioactive plasma, perpetually pulsating fromglobules to strobing mayday signal, from the emergency signal ofcomputer malfunction to the crackle of crinkled plastic to thesheetmetal clap which replaces drums with a wavering yet regularimpact.Synthetic bass suckulates, the new Funkencyclo-p-dia term for asound which both sucks and p'ustulates. Moog becomes a slitheringcephalopod tugging at your hips, dragging your neck into its bonelessmaw, sinking holes in your ears and sucking out the balance mechanism- thereby sliding solid ground from under you.Flashlight is the dreamvision of synthetic rhythm, light synched tosound until it entrains the brain into the blinding realization that 'Weare the Light. ' The chorus is a loop of operatic Yiddish, perpetuallyunwinding and uncoiling like a tapeworm made from choral chants.Flashlight's voices are double-backwards tapes, phonemes sangbackwards then reversed, so the attack of each syllable flips over into aTwin Peaks-style grumble that lasts aeons then springs back allatonce ina gabbling gremlin tone and a shivering 'Oooooh!' from Clinton. Bassslithers in traction which sucks you down then expels you into the pathof Clinton crooning 'Now I lay me down' in a dazed drawl. There's anawkward pause after the stunned elongation of 'down', before 'to sleep'