Belita Woods Of Parliment Funkadelic Passes Away At 64

Today, about 3:00 p.m. Belita Karen Woods, former lead singer of Parliment Funkadelic Brainstorm, passed away from apparent heart failure.

I shall always love you, baby.



Belita Karen Woods.  October 23, 1948 to May 14, 2012

I will share information for her funeral as it develops.

Voting is beautiful, be beautiful ~ vote.©

George Clinton Asking Fans to Help Him Raise $50,000 for Recording Studio

George Clinton Asking Fans to Help Him Raise $50,000 for Recording Studio

George Clinton is asking his fans to help him raise $50,000 to preserve his recording studio in Florida. Clinton has had financial problems for years so he wouldn't be asking if he didn't need the help.

The Parliament Funkadelic frontman, 70, is using online fundraising website IndieGoGo to encourage devotees to contributeto the cause and aid the "restoration and preservation of original recordings, as well as urgent repairs and upgrades to the Parliament-Funkadelic family recording studio." So if you can donate, please do. You'll be preserving music history if you do.

Clinton is offering signed CDs, T-shirts and other memorabilia in exchange for donations, so donating will earn you more than good deed points.

Rewards increase depending on how much you donate. If you can donate $5,000, a pair of concert passes for all Parliament-Funkadelic shows for a year will be offered. If you can donate $10,000, you will get yourself a chance to collaborate with Clinton in the studio.

The online fund drive runs through April 16. It has raised $3,300 so far. So if you have the means, please donate.

Are you able to donate and to help George Clinton preserve his studio? More info at IndieGoGo

Rock n Roll Hall of Fame Member George Clinton Supports Music Education: New Song Release includes Mayor Corey Booker and Dr. Cornel West

Dr. Cornel West and Mayor Corey Booker

In support of "Music Education", George Clinton, the Mother’s Hip Education Foundation and the Barack Obama Green Charter High School, New Jersey’s first High School focused on Sustainability will be hosting a special "Music Education" listening party event. George Clinton has partnered with the Barack Obama Green Charter High School, to find creative ways to develop a sustainable music education program. Using principles of sustainability, where solutions are best implemented locally, Mr. Clinton is focusing on the town of Plainfield, New Jersey, where he grew up and formed his groundbreaking group Parliament and Funkadelic.

Barack Obama Green Charter High School

The Barack Obama Green Charter School

The mission of The Barack Obama Green Charter High School also known as Obama Green is to prepare students to become informed, engaged and independent critical thinkers and to inspire leaders for sustainable development with a focus on our environment. Students have already started to reach-out to make a difference.

Two Obama Green students were selected out of 30 high school students from around the country and participated in a government sponsored watershed project in Japan; other students participated in the Nature Conservancy’s’ Leaders in Environmental Action for the Future program. Students have tweeted cotton manufacturers in China to discuss production, working conditions and economics. Obama Green also boosts the only school to have a mobile living wall. This wall is composed of
plants, an aquaponic system and live fish creating a self-sustaining system. With support from George Clinton, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and PSE&G, Obama Green is breaking new ground in developing an urban model for sustainability education.

George Clinton

George Clinton is one of the foremost innovators of funk music, and was the mastermind behind the bands Parliament and Funkadelic. Clinton was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997 along with 15 other members of Parliament-Funkadelic.

Parliament and Funkadelic captured 40 hit R&B singles, including No. 1 hits "Flashlight," "One Nation Under a Groove," "Aqua Boogie," and "(Not Just) Knee Deep." Clinton’s collaborators included keyboardist Bernie Worrell, guitarist Eddie Hazel, bassist Bootsy Collins, saxophonist Maceo Parker, trombonist Fred Wesley.

Dr. George Clinton and
U.S. Representative John Conyers, Jr.

Clinton has become recognized as the godfather of modern urban music. Beats, loops, and samples of P-Funk have appeared on albums by OutKast, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Busta Rhymes, Missy Elliot, De La Soul, Fishbone, and many others. As Clinton has said, "funk is the DNA of hip-hop and rap." In 1996, Clinton released the solo album The Awesome Power of a Fully Operational Mothership, which reunited him with Bernie Worrell and Bootsy Collins.In 1997, Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Guitar Center’s Hollywood Rock Walk, and earned a Lifetime Achievement Award at the NAACP Image Awards. In 2002, Spin voted Parliament-Funkadelic No. 6 of the 50 Greatest Bands of All Time.

Over the past decade, Clinton has continued to play sold-out shows across the globe, while a countless number of his songs have been licensed for film and television. Currently, he is compiling new and old songs for an exclusive online-only release, fighting for artist rights through the P-Funk Initiative (a bill drafted with Congressman John Conyers Jr. to protect against copyright and royalty theft), and blogging about these issues on his website, FunkProbosci.com.



Rock n Roll Hall of Fame Member George Clinton Supports Music Education:  New Song Release includes Mayor Corey Booker and Dr. Cornel West

When: Monday February 20th, 2012
           5:00pm – 8:00pm

Where: Barack Obama Green Charter High School
209 Berckman Street, Plainfield, NJ 07062
www.obamagreencharterhigh.org

Who: George Clinton, Parliament Funkadelic

What: George Clinton Promotes Music Education with New Jersey’s First High School                       Focused on Sustainability

Contact: Steven King, Co-Founder and Director of Sustainability and
Programs, Barack Obama Green Charter High School,
mrstevenking@gmail.com, (917) 573-8816.

George Clinton gets to the bottom of funk with Berklee students

George Clinton

He started in doo-wop, then went psychedelic. Throughout the 1970s, his bands Parliament and Funkadelic carved out bold, crazy new spaces in rock and funk, deploying a cast of loopy, absurdist characters fresh off the Mothership - the UFO that for many years throned above their concerts.Samples of their music saturate hip-hop, and you don’t have to master the whole catalog to have danced a few times to classics like “Aqua Boogie,’’ “One Nation Under A Groove,’’ or the perennial “Flashlight.’’

What’s more, George Clinton is still at it, delivering at age 70 on a busy tour schedule with his P-Funk All-Stars, funking it up for audiences that invariably blend all generations and backgrounds.So you would think that with this 50-plus-year track record of innovation and influence, someone would have thought to award Clinton an honorary doctorate by now.

But apparently not. By the funk grandee’s own recollection, no university has seen fit to confer such an honor upon him. None, that is, until the Berklee College of Music, which receives him for a four-day visit that culminates Thursday with a concert featuring Clinton with members of the P-Funk horn section and Berklee’s own P-Funk Ensemble.

“I really don’t know how it came together, but I’m really glad they did it,’’ Clinton says in a phone interview. It’s not his first visit to Berklee, however. He made a quick stop at the school in 2006, walking into the student ensemble’s rehearsal to gasps of surprise, and jamming with them for a little while.

This week’s visit is a more lavish and organized affair, with rehearsals, class visits, and workshops for Berklee students planned along with the public concert, where Berklee president Roger Brown will bestow the honorary degree. And the concert will feature songs from different phases of Clinton’s career in new arrangements that the ensemble’s faculty leader, bassist Lenny Stallworth, has sent Clinton in advance.

The master is already impressed.

“I was surprised to find out that they thought so much of our music,’’ Clinton says. “I learned that you can actually orchestrate it, write the music down, and note it. They had all the rhythms noted, and even some of the hip-hop stuff that we did, they were able to note it.’’

If Clinton professes surprise, it may be because the P-Funk sound is famously sprawling, with the performers’ free-wheeling attitude seeming to extend into the music itself. But don’t get fooled, says Stallworth. There’s plenty of method to the madness.

“His music is more like organized chaos,’’ Stallworth says. “It looks like it’s not organized, but it’s very organized.’’

George Clinton announces campaign to reclaim copyrights at CBC 41st Annual Legislative Conference

George Clinton announces campaign to reclaim copyrights at CBC 41st Annual Legislative Conference

George Clinton encourages U.S. to follow E.U. example to protect artist copyrights and American jobs Press Release 9-14-2011

George Clinton encourages U.S. to follow E.U. example to protect artist copyrights and American jobs Press ...

What The Funk?! 

George Clinton and The Parliament Funkadelic

by Adam O'Connor | August 30, 2011

Never has a genre of music been so synonymous with a particular artist than it has been with George Clinton and his travelling circus of funk. A gravely misunderstood man, he's much more currently involved with music than most people would think. Perhaps it's been the negative media that has dogged him through certain turbulent times in his life, or maybe it's simply that he just marches to the beat of a different drum overall. All it takes is looking past the (now removed) colored locks and patchwork faux-hippie funk ensembles to see that the man is not only a musical legend in his own right, having spawned multitudes of offshoot musical endeavors, but he's also been smack-dab in the middle of more than his share of copyright lawsuits than he'd care to recount. Who'd have thought that law and funk mixed so commonly? The Prime Minister of Funk does, and he's not giving up the fight anytime soon. Not even at the age of 70.

The first thing I had to do before speaking with Dr. Funkenstein was familiarize myself with all things funk. For starters, there is a lingo that it behooves you to understand when speaking with an individual of Clinton's funkmanship. It's not entirely different from punk, in that sense. A person might say, for instance, that something that is against the mainstream is "so punk rock." As in, "dude, the way you just called that mall security guard a 'rent-a-cop' to his face was so punk." And so it is with funk. Secondly, I had to make sure I was entirely sure I understood where Clinton was in terms of his legal woes. And by that, I mean who was he suing and who is he supporting that is being sued in the Battle Royale of copyright infringement and artistic freedoms that he's been dealing with for years. And yet I still felt entirely unprepared.

Forget whatever it is you think you've heard about George Clinton. The man is not, in fact, batshit crazy. Perhaps a little eccentric, but overall, he is a man who is passionate about music. And his musical legacy is the one thing that stands out most when the topic of George Clinton or Parliament or Funkadelic or any other funk-based musical project is brought up. He was able to merge his own brand of musical mischief with what was a burgeoning movement of music that encapsulated blues, rock, jazz, soul, disco and a slowly evolving strain of Motown. "Funk itself has been around forever," says Clinton. "Motown was probably the funkiest label ever, but there were no bass lines in it."

So, Clinton and his funky followers (he travels and performs with anywhere between six and eight members nowadays, although his 1997 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame consisted of him and a whopping 15 of his cohorts) set forth to create something that contained more of a psychedelic and doo-wop vibe than what was previously being unleashed upon the masses. It wasn't a far departure from the hybrid musical genres that were being experimented with at the time, but they sure brought an advanced style and atmosphere to the table.

In all fairness, funk truly didn't actually start with Clinton, but that's not to say that he wasn't one of the prime vehicles behind the music's movement. "James Brown. Muddy Waters. Little Richard. Jerry Lee Lewis was one of the funkiest rock n' rollers ever," says Clinton. But the emergence of a supremely trendy and well-liked pop music phenomenon was threatening what the legends of funk, soul and R&B had been working towards. "We had to overdo the funk to overtake where pop was," he says. And overdo it they did. If you've ever even seen pictures of this wonderment of a performing troupe, you've no doubt noted the elaborate costumes, colors, props and overall eccentricities.

So what, at the earthly age of 70, keeps him going? "Funk is its own reward, the gasoline for the mothership," he says. "The fumes from the funk keep me going. When I work, I'm not tired. When I'm not working, I get tired." Sometimes a slight translation is needed from the man, but again, he's not so entirely out-there that these ramblings don't make sense (prior to what I guess I was expecting). "I keep playing for the music, because it has become so important to the world."

One of the more interesting things currently happening in Clinton's life, and there have no doubt been plenty over the course of his seven decades here in the Milkyway Galaxy, is the legal battle he has been injecting into over the sampling and stealing and borrowing and bickering of both his music and the music of others. But more important to him is how things are affected by the copyright laws and those who enforce them. He's even got his own blog (funkprobosci.com), which he himself updates out of his home, devoted to the protection of music and artists and the fight against those who unfairly benefit from the improper handling of music "ownership" (i.e., goliath record labels such as Universal). In fact, he not only crusades on cyberspace and appears in court and with politicians when needed, he's out there pounding the pavement for his cause. "To be fighting the fight, fighting for the music is totally funky," says Clinton. "We go up to our local copyright office, they know us all so well."

The problem began when the music catalog company Bridgeport Music seized control of the rights to several of Clinton's songs in the '70s and has held onto them for the sole purpose of suing whatever artists have used or sampled even a single note (literally, they have sued over the use of a single chord). This goes against the very thing that Clinton stands for: making music for the music's sake, so that people can enjoy it. (At the conclusion of this interview, he literally made me promise and repeat back to him that I would "keep the funk." I still don't even know what that means, but I did it anyway.)

"Messing with the copyright laws, that's fucking with history," he says. Many of the artists who this process has harmed the most are those who fall into the hip-hop genre, who have been known to sample Clinton's work the most of any style of music (you've likely heard parts of "Atomic Dog," in particular, in several rap and hip-hop songs), which does not please Clinton. "We get along with all the hip-hoppers. The fight isn't with them," he says, "the fight is with the big record companies."

"I love the fight because we're making noise, so we can make a difference," says Clinton. "We put it right out there in the open. Everybody's getting into it. I'm having fun." But other than legal battles, what's next for funk, you might be wondering? The man's career has got to be winding down (although you wouldn't think so when speaking with him, the man sounds so determined to keep up the funk). "We could go to other planets, we could do a whole new tour of Broadway plays," he says. And somehow, from the very beginning and despite all the serious and passionate legal discussion, I had a feeling the conversation was going to return to space exploration. | RDW

Violence and FUNK Do Not Mix

TALLAHASSEE — August 1, 2011. In response to the tragedy which occurred Saturday night, near a concert in Cleveland OH, which Rock and Roll Hall of Fame legend George Clinton and his Parliament-Funkadelic headlined, The Mother’s Hip Connection Education Foundation founded by Mr. Clinton is offering a reward of $5,000 through the Cleveland Police Department for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of the individual(s) responsible for the shooting which wounded 4 and left 1 dead. “It saddens me that this act of violence came so close to the thousands who came to the concert, which P-Funk was showcased, as it goes 360 degrees against the core teachings of FUNK,” Clinton shared, “… FUNK is FUN with a K on it and the K is for kindness. Violence and FUNK do not mix and we make this donation to assist with the efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice.” This donation towards the reward is a token, but we want anyone who allows P-Funk in their lives to feel safe.

Mother's Hip Connection Education Foundation is the social consciousness of Mr. George Clinton and was organized in Tallahassee, Florida on March 2, 1998. Our mission is "Improving the educational environment while promoting life long learning through music". The specific purpose for which the non-profit was organized: To promote education, provide scholarships, initiate fundraising while providing financial in kind resources in collaboration with similar programs, corporations and institutions to achieve our common goals.