No matter how frequently brings the latest incarnation of Parliament/Funkadelic to town, which he did Friday night with a show opened by DJ Rootz, it seems there will always be a swirling crowd of sequin- and faux-fur-clad freaks anxious to greet the man whom many music lovers still consider to the Godfather of Funk.
While Clinton, now 69, is hardly the pied piper of if his glory days, P-Funk still mounts an audio and visual spectacle that requires zero special effects to keep the audience energized and engaged. Fans young and not-so-young simply fall in line with the party already happening on stage thanks to a constantly rotating parade of singers, dancers and players who together unfold meandering, bombastic arrangements in which it can be hard to tell when they leave one classic, say “Flashlight,” and float into another, like “Gotta Get Over the Hump.”
Itap all too easy to pick apart this formula, so letap not. Instead letap take P-Funk’s music for what it is: classic danceable jams that have influenced innumerable younger entertainers and in fact continue to incorporate contemporary music trends. Fans come out to see P-Funk these days because they know what they’ll get -– an old-school funk fest — and because they don’t want to miss out on the chance to groove with one of music’s hard-living legends.
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Elana Ashanti Jefferson is an editor at The Denver Post and a longtime music fan.
Ryan Cutler is a Denver photographer and new contributor to Reverb.
