Reviewing for Rolling Stone in September 1971, Vince Aletti negatively described Maggot Brain as "a shattered, desolate landscape with few pleasures," competently performed but "limited." He was particularly critical of the record's second side, panning it as "dead-end stuff," and asked "who needs this shit?" Village Voice critic Robert Christgau was more enthusiastic, praising the title-track as "druggy, time-warped super-schlock" and claiming that the second track features "a rhythm so pronounced and eccentric it could make Berry Gordy twitch to death" he added that "the funk pervades the rest of the album, but not to the detriment of other peculiarities."
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Ī 2005 reissue included three bonus tracks, among them an alternate mix of "Maggot Brain" featuring the full-band performance.Ĭritical reception Professional ratings Review scores Subsequently only Clinton, Hazel, and keyboardist Bernie Worrell remained from the original Funkadelic lineup. Īfter the album was released, the band effectively disbanded: drummer Tiki Fulwood was fired due to drug use guitarist Tawl Ross reportedly got into an " acid eating contest, then snorting some raw speed, before completely flipping out" and has not performed since bassist Billy Nelson quit over a money dispute with Clinton. It peaked at number 108 on the US pop chart while missing the UK chart, and also reached the top 20 of the R&B charts. Westbound Records released Maggot Brain in July 1971. According to author Rickey Vincent, the organization's presumed association with mass-murderer Charles Manson, along with the album's foreboding themes and striking artwork, lent Funkadelic the image of a "death-worshipping black rock band." Release and aftermath The album's liner notes are a polemic on fear provided by the Process Church of the Final Judgement, an obscure Satanist religious cult. The cover artwork depicts a screaming black woman's head coming out of the earth it was photographed by Joel Brodsky and features model Barbara Cheeseborough. Other sources say the title is a reference to band leader George Clinton finding his brother's "decomposed dead body, skull cracked, in an apartment in Newark, New Jersey." Reportedly, "Maggot Brain" was the nickname of Hazel. The track "Super Stupid" was described by Pitchfork as a "tale of a dumbass junkie set to a tune Black Sabbath would have been proud of." The 9-minute closing track "Wars of Armageddon" has been described as a "freak-out" jam, and makes use of "paranoid, psychedelic sound effects and crowd sounds." Popular music scholar Yuval Taylor described it as "a burning hot prefiguring" of the music that Miles Davis would perform on his 1975 live album Agharta. "You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks" explores interracial love and features electronically distorted drums. The subsequent five tracks have been described as "sour harmony-group meditations heavy with bass, keyboard and class consciousness," with the band exploring a "psychedelic/funk fusion." "Can You Get to That" features Isaac Hayes's backing vocal group Hot Buttered Soul, and contains elements of folk blues and gospel music. That gave the whole thing an eerie feel, both in the playing and in the sound effects." Critics have described the solo as "lengthy, mind-melting" and "an emotional apocalypse of sound." Hazel utilized fuzz and wah effects, inspired by his idol Jimi Hendrix Clinton subsequently added delay and other effects in mixdown, saying "I Echoplexed it back on itself three or four times. Though several other musicians performed on the track, Clinton largely faded them out of the final mix so that the focus would be on Hazel's guitar. According to legend, the 10-minute title track was recorded in one take when Clinton, under the influence of LSD, told guitarist Eddie Hazel to play as if he had been told his mother was dead: Clinton instructed him "to picture that day, what he would feel, how he would make sense of his life, how he would take a measure of everything that was inside him and let it out through his guitar". The album opens with a spoken word monologue by band leader George Clinton, which refers to "the maggots in the mind of the universe".