They do slow splits and they are superhuman in their flexibility. The camera matches them, meets them, and slows down their groove into They turn, stoop andĬrouch toward the camera, as if engaged in capoeira with it, as if ready to They close their eyes to follow internal geographies. Their backs to the camera, disoriented, lost in their own experience of beat Shoulders, hips and long thighs in call and response. Train line in the middle of Times Square. Rhythm guitar driving them ever outward, they create a Soul Into the streets like a wave they are still steady in tight leathers and
They congregate in front of a fountain, climb over park benches and The city, for once disinterested in them, becomes their Released by the squeal of guitar, they take over the park and the (2011) “Here’s a Chance to Dance our Way Out of our Constrictions: P-Funk’s Black Masculinity and the Performance of Imaginative Freedom”, Keywords: performance, masculinity, non-normative heterosexuality, funk This power to harness emotionally strong and sometimes inchoate feeling had a powerful effect on its audience-prompting some to find unity and empathy with other black men. Most significantly, P-Funk’s music explores black experience, particularly bodily, sexual and sensual experience at points of ambiguity, vulnerability, pain, desire, and laughter, using tools of music that speak to their listeners individually and internally, as well as collectively. P-Funk’s solidly funking music, hallucinatory and often politicized music, experimental cover art and wildly threatrical stage shows create a new a queer space for black heterosexual men.
I explore issues of embodiment, sexual fluidity, and community in P-Funk’s iconography, lyrics and sound and then consider ways that black male fans have gained a sense of imaginative freedom from their music. ‘Here’s a Chance to Dance our Way Out of our Constrictions’: P-Funk’s Black Masculinity and the Performance of Imaginative Freedom” considers the ways that George Clinton’s two funk projects, Parliament and Funkadelic, create new spaces for nonnormative heterosexuality and creative production.