Politics & Funk

On December 26, 2003, Meatpuppets bassist Cris Kirkwood got into an argument with a woman over a parking spot outside of a Phoenix post office.  Kirkwood had been living in drug-induced seclusion in his Phoenix home for years–even refusing to leave his house after both his wife and best friend overdosed inside.  What he was doing at the post office on the day after Christmas is anyone’s guess.  Maybe he had an urgent letter to pick up?

What is clear is that when a security guard intervened in Kirkwood’s parking lot dispute, he wasn’t too pleased.  Feeling unable to properly articulate his side of the story with words, Kirkwood shoved the security guard, knocked his glasses off, snatched his baton and proceeded to pummel him with it.  The guard was taken by surprise, but after suffering numerous blows from his own baton, he drew his gun and fired a bullet into Kirkwood’s back.

Kirkwood spent a few months in the hospital. When he recovered, he was charged with assault with a deadly weapon, pleaded guilty and served two years in prison.  Upon his release, the Meatpuppets–who had disbanded almost a decade prior–reunited.

The Meatpuppets have always been a strange crew.  Their introduction into mainstream pop culture occurred in 1994, when Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain invited them to play along as he covered three of their songs–”Plateau,” “Oh, My” and “Lake of Fire”– on MTV unplugged.  In 1994, they released the album “Too High to Die” and had a minor commercial success with the track “Backwater.”

Despite their legendary consumption of cocaine, heroin, LSD and other drugs, the Meatpuppets managed to navigate the mid 90’s without ending up in body bags.  But, eventually Cris’s addiction to cocaine and heroin became so severe that he quit the band and withdrew into his own private psychosis.

Fast-forward a decade or so, and the Meatpuppets have reunited, released a new album (Rise to Your Knees) and are currently touring in support of it.  Last Tuesday–while Barack Obama was being sworn in as the 44th President–they played Wow Hall in Eugene, Oregon.

Many in the crowd seemed to have been frozen in time–possibly having not left their homes since the death of Kurt Cobain in 1994.  Flannel was ubiquitous, shoulder length hair was the norm, and a crude yet formidable mosh pit erupted near the front of the stage.

The meatpuppets–now in their mid 40’s–were bedraggled and strung-out looking and unleashed a rhapsodic punk-country-metal fusion that was simultaneously goofy, unpolished and ruthlessly badass.  They played with the whimsy of a band at ease with the fact that their peak was behind them and unconcerned that in the cannon of grunge/alternative music they’ll likely be most remembered as the band Kurt Cobain covered three songs from in his swan song performance.

They rocked “Oh My,” “Lake of Fire” and “Plateau” without pretense–electrifying the crowd with each one, and in between they jumped and hopped around to a number of  bluegrassey ditties that would unexpectedly crash into torrents of hard rock.

Both brothers–Cris and Kurt–still sported goofy mops of shaggy hair.  I kept my eye on Cris, trying to determine if he was indeed sober, but it was impossible to tell.  Regardless, he seemed at ease, often gyrating with his eyes closed and flinging his hirsute figure across the stages in manic bursts (see video).

At one point, a pudgy street woman (wearing flannel) ran her hand down my lower thigh.   Barely able to coordinate the movements of her mouth due to what appeared to be acute ecstasy intoxication, she proclaimed she could feel my aura penetrating her and asked for my sign. It was the only blemish in an otherwise rewarding night.

Tags: Cris Kirkwood, Eugene, Kurt Cobain, Lake of Fire, Meatpuppets, Nirvana, Oh My, Oregon, Plateau, Wow Hall

“Face to face
And back to back
You see and feel
My sex attack”

–Billy Idol

When he was 10, Billy Idol joined the Cub Scouts. He wasn’t Billy Idol then, he was William Michael Albert Broad and he was living a rather unremarkable existence in Goring, England. He went to school, played sports, climbed trees, went to the theater, attended church, did the dishes, hung out with his mates and engaged in the normal activities of a 10-year-old boy. For this reason, it wasn’t much of a surprise that when most of his peers joined the St. Mary’s Cub Scouts, Billy did, too.

But unlike his friends, Billy’s career as a Cub Scout was short-lived. And the reason he was asked to leave the chapter—a mere 3 months after he joined—forecasted a destiny that could not be properly groomed by tying square knots and building tepees. Sure, Billy had already displayed a bit of a wild streak, but when he was caught by his scoutmaster feeling up a girl five years his senior behind a hotdog stand in the midst of a soapbox derby, it became abundantly clear that he had talents far beyond whittling. He was pure sex, a budding cocksman of epic promise, and such a threat to the moral integrity of the Cub Scouts that his presence could no longer be tolerated.

Yes, in October of 1965, William Albert Broad was given the boot by the St. Mary’s Cub Scouts. Months later, a teacher would write “Billy is idle,” on one of his school papers, in reference to Billy’s apparent disinterest in school. Ten years later, Billy would officially adopt the stage name Billy Idol during the formation of the Sex Pistols’ inspired punk band Generation X. Five years later, in 1984, he’d release his first solo album, Billy Idol, and armed with killer hair, a closet full of leather and an insatiable libido, he’d become a full-blown glam-rockstar and one of the earliest sex symbols of the burgeoning network MTV.

Since then, Billy’s almost died twice—first due to a motorcycle accident and then a mammoth overdose of GHB—but fate tends to smile on the hypersexual and Mr. Idol is still alive and thrusting today. In fact, he released Devil’s Playground, his first album in ten years, in 2005, and has been touring throughout 2008 in support of it.

It was three days ago—the morning after his Halloween show in Prague—that Billy’s agent, Leonard Washington, rang the central offices here at Politics and Funk.com. To be honest, the editorial staff was extremely hung over, and we only answered the phone as an alternative to breaking it into pieces to stop the ringing. But regardless of how haggard we may have felt at the moment, Leonard Washington sounded much worse.

He told us that he had been up throughout the night trying to prevent Billy from being…..Billy. According to Washington, age has done little to quell Idol’s appetite for drink and women, and he had crashed a Halloween party the night before, downing a handle of Maker’s Mark whiskey and fornicating with a corset-clad college student in an attic. At the peak of his intoxication—minutes before he did a back-flip into a keg stand—Idol had confided in Washington that he was a huge fan of Politics and Funk and that he considered it the supreme avenue for online political discourse. He then proclaimed that the media’s coverage of the 2008 election had sickened him and that he felt a burning desire to set the American public straight on a few things before they stroll to the polls like “bloody fucking sheep” on Election Day.

“So, what does this have to do with us?” Chief Editor Jamal Nesbit finally barked into the phone.

“Well, Billy wants to endorse, and he wants to do it on P and F,” Washington replied.

“No way, no guest writers and no endorsements, those are the core principles of P and F. Call The New York Times, they’re lusting for more Obama endorsements.”

“He’s not voting for Obama.”

“What, you’re telling me Idol digs the GOP? Fuck, what kind of world is this?”

“No, not McCain either.”

“Oh, so he wants to write in Ron Paul’s name?”

“Wrong again.”

“Well, then, who?”

“Idol isn’t a shill for the two-party system. He’s voting for Nader. He wants 600 words and if you don’t give it to him he’s vowed to de-flower the daughters of your entire staff.”

“Ha, he’ll be in his seventies by the time they’re of age, he won’t even be able to get it up.”

There was a pause on the line and a scream from somewhere distant. Washington sounded confused and frazzled, like the master of a vicious albino pit-bull whose thirst for the mailman could not be denied. Nesbit had transferred the call to speaker phone, and the brainchild of P and F sat in a crude semi-circle perplexed at the commotion. To be honest, we didn’t have a clue what was going on. But then, a low, staccato humming boomed through the phone.

“It’s a bass-line,” Nesbit said.

It was. Billy proceeded to serenade us with an a capella version of his 1984 hit, “White Wedding.” It was a robust performance and we were all pretty impressed, including the sole female member of the P and F team, copyeditor Laura Lane Welch, who flung herself on top of the speaker phone. Her eyes were glazed over and her body was convulsing in delight.

“What’s happening,” Nesbit asked.

“That my friend, is the female orgasm,” Head Editor Eli Percepied said.

He was right.

It is hard to strong-arm an independent webzine with no real journalistic motivation except the exercise of ego, but Billy Idol did just that. By sending Welch into fits of erotic bliss, he made it apparent that his threat of plundering our first-borns weren’t idle ones. We were faced with a grim choice, and to be honest, an easy one.

So without further adieu, we present to you the presidential endorsement of Billy Idol. And if the prose seems unedited, well, that’s because our copywriter couldn’t work on this piece without being sent into spates of sexual exhilaration, so we decided to just publish it raw. Besides, I think Billy prefers it that way.

Read Billy Idol’s endorsement.

Tags: Barack Obama, Billy Idol, John McCain, Leonard Washington, Politics and Funk, Ron Paul

I am not a writer.

In fact, I hate writers, they are so bloody pompous.

When I meet them, I laugh at them and their wasted talents. The real poets end up on the cover of Rolling Stone in leather briefs and lipstick, not writing for some fucking rag that no one reads. So I apologize if my words are crude, but I feel compelled to share something with you regarding this election: you are on the verge of really fucking it up.

Who am I talking to? No, not you jingoist, morally-obsessed, inbred shit-heads who are voting for John McCain. Your shockingly primitive brains are of no interest to me. If I was the king, as I fucking should be, I’d banish you all to Alaska and build huge fences around the state so you couldn’t get out. You bloody hillbillies have the collective intelligence of a crushed PBR can.

No, I don’t care to sway any loyal GOP followers, as their hideousness is so vile it actually makes me feel un-sexy. Nor, do I seek to pull votes away from the solipsistic fervor of mainstream liberalism. If you identify in totality with the agenda Democratic party, then you should be forced to spend the rest of your life in a sports bar full of New England Patriots fans. This will expose you to the horror of myopic loyalty, you pansy, liberal fucks!

No, these words aren’t intended for loyalists of either of the two major parties, as they are both beyond hope. This letter is addressed to one specific demographic, and that is the so called progressive wing of the Democratic party.

Yeah, that’s right, I’m talking to you so put down the fucking bong and listen.

You’re so fucking heady with your Obama “Change” shirt on, but do you have a goddamn clue what you’re voting for? You’ve got peace stickers all over your Che poster (I’m sure he’d approve), a fucking picture of Thoreau on your wall, and Zinn’s Peoples History of the United States on your dresser (btw, he’s voting for Nader), yet you’re about to cast a vote for a neo-liberal with a thirst for hegemony, Wall Street bailouts, government wiretaps and corporate campaign contributions, whose one consistency is choosing political expediency over political fortitude.

Barack Obama is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Sure, he’s sexy, but so am I and do you really want me in control of the presidency?

Remember when he said he was going to take public financing during the general election? Well, he reneged, and in doing so struck a huge blow to the burgeoning clean elections movement.

Remember his opposition to the Iraq War? Yeah, well, that was a nice talking point, but unfortunately he voted to fund the war in the Senate instead of showing some courage and standing up to the bloody neocons.

What about his opposition to the Patriot Act? Oh yeah, he voted to authorize that, too?

But, wait, wasn’t he opposed to the FISA bill? Didn’t he promise to filibuster it? Yup, he did, before he caved and voted to provide immunity to the telecommunications industry for spying on Americans

Ok, you say, but at least he’s anti-war, right.

Fuck no, you ignorant Yankee. Obama’s a hawk, just look at the foreign policy advisors he’s surrounding himself with. He takes advice from Madeleine Albright, architect of the economic sanctions that led to the death of 500,000 Iraqi children under the reign of Bill Clinton. When they asked that fat toad if she thought it was worth it to kill 500,000 kids to exert America’s imperial dominance, do you know what she said?

“I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.”

Five hundred thousand kids dead due to a lack of food and medicine and somehow this shrew validates it all so casually. And where Bush started, Obama is ready to take up the reigns. Sure, he’ll pull us out of Iraq, but only so he can expand the war in Afghanistan. Just weeks ago, he committed to send over 15,000 more troops once he’s president, proclaiming that “the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 are still at large and plotting.”

So you better find Barack a Stetson, because it appears America’s about to have another cowboy occupying the presidency.

“So, what do you expect me to do?” you ask. “I mean, I know Obama isn’t perfect, but he’s the at least better than McCain, isn’t, he?”

You’re goddamn right he is, but that doesn’t mean you should vote for him.

There are 50 states in this nation of used-car dealers and only nine of them are in play in this election. If you don’t live in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida, Colorado, New Mexico, North Carolina, Missouri, or Indiana, you’re free to vote your conscience and you should.

So cast your vote for Ralph Nader.

This pimp has spent the last 50 years protecting everyday Americans from the corporations that prey upon us. He started his career by taking on the auto industry and is also responsible for the passage of The Clean Air, The Clean Water Act, the EPA, The Freedom of Information Act and a slew of other consumer-related reforms. He wants to cut the bloated Pentagon budget, truly abandon the American war doctrine, provide single-payer healthcare, mandate public financing of elections and demolish the corrupt two-party system.

Unfortunately, this true American hero has been excluded from the debates by the Republicans and Democrats, who have conspiratorially mandated that a candidate have a showing of 15% in the polls to participate—but you have the potential to right this wrong.

If Mr. Nader gets 5% of the national vote on Tuesday (he’s currently polling close to it), he will be granted public financing if he chooses to run in 2012. This means over 80 million dollars in funding and a chance to crack the corporate duopoly that’s been dominating politics for the last century.

Think about it. Do you really identify with Barack Obama’s policies? Do you really think that change comes from a candidate whose list of top donors is full of the Wall Street investment firms that precipitated the economic meltdown?

Declare your independence this Tuesday and a cast a vote for Ralph Nader.

Do it for yourself, do it for America, or do it for Billy fucking Idol, because outside of the pure sexual power of glam rock stardom, a vote is one of the most terrible things to waste.

Billy Idol is a British pop star. His views are his own and don’t necessarily represent those of Politics and Funk. He was granted this space after he threatened to plunder our first-born daughters.

Tags: Barack Obama, Billy Idol, FISA, Goldman Sachs, Madeleine Albright, Patriot Act, Ralph Nader

In 1999, when I was sixteen years old, I waited in line for forty-five minutes to see Kid Rock play at the UNO Lakefront Area in New Orleans, LA. I had been listening to his album Devil Without a Cause on a daily basis, and felt a particular attachment to the track, “Bullgod,” which was his first single to gain significant radio play. Once my friends and I finally proceeded into the arena, we took seats on the far right next to the two towering speakers. As fate had it, we plopped down adjacent to a group of raucous twenty-one-year-old girls.

“Ask them to buy us daiquiris,” one of my buddies urged.
“What kind should we get?” I responded.
“Get 120 Octane, it’s what my brother always drinks, he says it’s the strongest.”

It was, and by the time Kid Rock came striding out in a leopard skin frock and a top hat, I was drunk.

I don’t remember much of that show, outside of the four gold cages that were suspended from the ceiling and filled with scantily clad dancers. In fact, I’m not even sure if they played “Bullgod,” although I assume they must have. However, I do know that when I woke up the next day—besides being hung-over for geometry—I couldn’t hear anything except for an intolerable ringing in my eardrums.

My deafness didn’t subside for an entire week, during which numerous doctors told me that I might suffer from hearing impairment for life. Ever since that miserable moment, I have strictly adhered to the belief that almost nothing in life is worth waiting in line for.

However, On Tuesday, January 30th, I found myself bobbing up and down for warmth at eight-thirty in the morning along with over 15,000 others, a single speck, in a line that shouted, smiled, and snaked its way across five blocks of the Denver University campus in the hopes of getting a glimpse of presidential candidate Barack Obama. Mr. Obama was just a week off of one of the most impressive conquests of his campaign, a brutal trouncing of Senator Hillary Clinton in South Carolina, in which he defeated the former First Lady by a vote margin of more than two to one. With exactly one week left until the Super Tuesday primaries, he was picking up steam; nevertheless, he was still trailing Mrs. Clinton by eleven points in national presidential polls.

However in Denver on Tuesday, there didn’t seem to be a dour looking face in all the lot, despite the fact that it was 22 degrees and we hadn’t progressed an inch in over an hour. The soccer Mom’s in front of me were well bundled and pre-occupied with chat about the PTA, and behind me sauntered a group of college students ranting about midterms and bemoaning the fact that they hadn’t brought a “J for the line.”

After waiting for an hour and half, I got a call from a friend of mine who was an Obama precinct captain, and through her influence I was allowed to bypass the horde and make it inside. I later learned that if it weren’t for her favor, I would have been consigned to a seat in the lacrosse bleachers, where Mr. Obama spoke briefly to the overflow crowd.

Instead, I waltzed inside, where the energy level was high.

Obama had just recently received the endorsement of Senator Ted Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy, and it was Caroline who introduced him to a monsoon of applause. The support of the daughter and the brother of America’s most iconic president was a boost for the Obama campaign, accentuating Obama’s appeal as an agent of change.

During his speech, Obama hit upon on the usual spectrum of Democratic issues, from providing universal healthcare to withdrawing from Iraq. But while doing so, he chose not to make many ideological distinctions between himself and Mrs. Clinton.

Instead, Senator Obama drew contrast between his character and that of the former First Lady.

Obama furthered paralleled himself to John. F. Kennedy by relaying an exchange that occurred between Kennedy and Harry Truman, when Truman advised Kennedy to put off running for the presidency.

“Harry Truman, urged patience, “ Obama said. “And John Kennedy replied: ‘The world is changing. The old ways will not do. It is time for a new generation of leadership.’”

In a nutshell, this has become Obama’s message and campaign strategy deftly tied into one. He knows he is an inspirational figure with a charismatic, public persona that Mrs. Clinton cannot match, so he flaunts his similarities to political icons of the past whenever possible.

In contrast, Mrs. Clinton’s strategy of questioning Mr. Obama’s experience seems to have lost its sway, especially since Mr. Obama has responded by embracing his lack of Washington credentials and proclaiming them as a virtue.

“Washington wants to boil me, wants to stew the hope out of me,” he often jokes, portraying himself as a crusader aimed at altering a government that has continually failed the American people, a government of greed and “cronyism” to which Mrs. Clinton belongs

Obama also suggests that a Clinton presidency will be a regression to the politics of the past.

“I know it is tempting—after another presidency by a man named George Bush—to simply turn back the clock, and to build a bridge back to the 20th century,” he said in Denver.

It is a classic battle of old guard versus new guard politics, and Obama appears to have finally grown comfortable with his role as populist crusader—and it seems the nation may be growing more comfortable with the idea of him becoming president as well.

Although he still trails Clinton nationally, Obama has made huge strides in many of the key primary states in the last week. According to a Zogby poll released on Sunday, February 3rd, he has opened up a twenty-point lead in Georgia, is neck and neck with Hillary in New Jersey and Missouri, and picked up fifteen percentage points in the last two weeks to take the lead from Mrs. Clinton in California, the biggest prize of all the Super Tuesday states.

It appears that the Clinton dam is on the verge of breaking, but with only one day remaining before the dawn of Super Tuesday, does the Illinois senator have enough time to crash through?

If Mr. Obama takes enough delegates to keep things close after this Tuesday, he may send the Clinton machine spinning into disarray. In fact, the longer the nomination stays unsettled, the more saturated and intrigued America will become with the improbable storyline of a half-black, half-white, junior Senator with a weird name toppling the matron of one of America’s most dominant political sects.

At Denver University on Tuesday, it took Barack Obama fifteen minutes to make it to the podium—the crowd screaming and chanting as he signed autographs and slapped hands. But once he began to orate, there were moments in between the chanting and the applause when all of those in attendance seemed to be gripped in jut-jawed astonishment. It was as if they felt that they were watching something, or someone, who might be on the verge of turning a corner on the American political system, and radically altering the “brand” of politics we can expect for years go come.

Throughout his candidacy, Mr. Obama has evoked comparisons with Dr. Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, and JFK. Personally, after watching him in the flesh, he reminds me of someone else.

Tags: Barack Obama, Denver, Hillary Clinton, Kid Rock

“How many ways to get what you want
I use the best
I use the rest
I use the N.M.E
I use Anarchy”

-The Sex Pistols, “Anarchy in the U.K”

Clad in a feathery tunic resembling a jail smock, Johnny Rotten joined The Sex Pistols on the stage of The Tonight Show last Tuesday and dutifully screamed his lungs out during “Anarchy in the U.K.” Afterwards, he exchanged a genial handshake with Leno, and his guest, Presidential candidate Ron Paul. The idea that Paul, who spent the early stages of the campaign fending off vehement attacks from Republicans and the conservative media for his anti-war views, has recently taken on the role of cult hero and potential spoiler is wild on its own. But, the fact that the 72-year-old physician and free-market champion ended a prime time interview by smacking palms with the self-proclaimed king of vitriol anarchy is enough to make any seasoned political junkie quiver. Ron Paul and The Sex Pistols? Why not, stranger things have happened and will, in a political primary season that becomes more bizarre by the moment.

In Tuesday’s Presidential debate at Drexel College in Philadelphia, the Democratic brethren seemed willing to try anything up to lawless anarchy in the hopes of taming the virtually unstoppable ascent of frontrunner Hillary Clinton. Who could blame them? Mrs. Clinton’s campaign appears to grow more awe-inspiring by the moment, and has shown itself to be invincible to attack. The weak spots in the Clinton armor have been clear-cut from the beginning, but how to exploit them is a mystery to the host of Presidential hopefuls trailing the former First Lady in the polls.

The ineptness has been led by Illinois Senator Barack Obama. Despite his foresight in condemning the Iraq War, his reputation as an honest and non-partisan leader, and his glorified public persona as a hip, charismatic intellectual—who purportedly spends his nights listening to Miles Davis on a scratchy record player while reading a dog-eared copy of Emerson’s “Self Reliance”—Obama has been unable to gain ground. In recent national polls, he still trails Hillary by between 25 and 30 points. Even more damning, he is losing the African-American voting block to Hillary by 10%, a demographic that is absolutely crucial to his success.

Ironically, it is his image as a reform candidate that has crippled him the most. Obama’s “Politics of Hope” have handcuffed him in his efforts to draw a real distinction between himself and Clinton. In fact, any attempt by Obama at harshly criticizing Clinton draws an immediate and predictable tongue lashing from her handlers, who love nothing more than accusing Mr. Obama of engaging in ‘attack politics.’ For this reason, Obama has been forced to resort to gently stressing his policy differences with Hillary instead of deriding her character, which is where she is the most vulnerable.

But one can only be gun-shy in politics for so long before ending up on the wrong end of the bullet, and on Tuesday it appeared that the other Democratic hopefuls had endured just about enough of Mrs. Clinton cakewalking her way towards the nomination. In addition, debate co-moderator and Meet the Press host Tim Russert was publicly known to have an unquenchable lust for tripping up the Hillary Clinton machine. In the last debate, he had viciously sandbagged her with one of the last questions of the night.

Continue reading “The Four Headed Monster Strikes at Hillary… Johnny Rotten Makes a Convincing Case for Anarchy….Mike Gravel is Forced to Debate His Reflection as it Wails in the Mirror”

Tags: Barack Obama, Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd, Hillary Clinton, Johnny Rotten, Mike Gravel, Ron Paul

Politics & Funk is a celebration of the postmodern political spirit, or the lack thereof. Today, America is embattled in a vicious partisan war that will decide the direction it will evolve over the next decade. Fresh off eight years of GOP rule, the Democratic party has grown legs and is making a spirited run at the White House. Meanwhile, despite widespread unpopularity, Republican strategists seem eerily confident that they will conquest in 2008 and cement the doctrine of conservatism in the American ethos.

The byproduct of such a conflict is a political landscape chock-full of fire-breathing, chest-pounding, pill-popping hacks, whose relentless desire to accumulate power and disseminate propaganda has the potential to send our nation spiraling into the apocalypse. If left unchecked, they will ravage America’s spirit with a barrage of self righteous proclamations so grotesque that even the dead and buried will blush.

Who, if anyone, can provide an antidote to this onslaught of paranoid gruel?

This answer, quite obviously, is not encapsulated in a mortal man, but does exist in the spirit of those whose efforts while alive left us a legacy of hip-jiving, thigh smacking, ass slapping, unadulterated funk.

Funk, in the spirit of Walt Whitman, whose funk- filled prosody heralded Lincoln, immortalized pure Americana, and shot forth a thousand funky disciples to “shout their barbaric yawps from the rooftops of the world.”

Funk, in the essence of Henry David Thoreau, who went to the woods to cultivate his own funkiness, returned to find society plagued by a terrible lack of funk, and famously proclaimed that he’d rather inhabit “a (funky) pumpkin alone than be crowded on a velvet cushion,” sans funk.

Funk, in the legacy of Hendrix, who lived for funk, fought for funk, wailed for funk, dropped acid for funk, and eventually drugged himself to death with the fleeting hope that his funk would be an inspiration to the world.

Funk, in the memory of Jesus Christ, who spread the tenets of funk, before being crucified for his unnatural inclination to funk, and then rose in prophecy of funk, only to proclaim his funkiness once and again.

Funk in remembrance of Rick James, whose funk was utterly seductive, whose funk was conquered only by James Brown, who was the funkiest funk prophet of all time, outside of Kerouac, who never knew funk but only bled it.

It is dawn in Denver now, and I’ve got C-SPAN blasting second only to the speaker in the corner. The volume is perfect. I can barely make out the squawking of the pundits below the raw rumble of my bass. The mountains are covered in smog, but there is clarity somewhere on the horizon. There is salvation, and it lies within the spirit of this song.

Politics & Funk is committed to framing the American political process in a manner which is not conducive to nausea. Through the provision of political editorials packed with percussion and style, we seek to punctuate the informative with the melodic, the formulaic with the rhythmically supreme. Hopefully, the result will engage and enlighten, so kick back, gyrate, swivel, and breathe in the heady fumes.

Tags: Henry David Thoreau, Jack Kerouac, Jesus Christ, Jimi Hendrix, Rick James, Walt Whitman