George Clinton’s real UFO encounters: “If you ain’t got no booty, what do you shake?”
People weren’t meant to be this informed all the time. It’s quite literally not natural for us to know this much information and have such a big-picture view of the world. For most of us, we have to focus on what we ourselves can change for the sake of our own mental health. Having too much of a big-picture view of the world will only stress us out. That said, we could go the George Clinton way, take the big picture to such a degree that we all become one, and see just how ludicrous it is to care about our petty differences.
Clinton sums this up best in an interview with Rolling Stone. When asked about white artists performing Black music, he is fairly supportive of the idea: “You’re supposed to learn from each other, blend from each other, and it moves around like that.” So far, so down to earth. Suddenly, that figurative statement becomes literal in the funniest way possible.
Adding, “We gonna be dealing with aliens. You think Black and white gonna be a problem? Wait till you start running into motherfuckers with three of four dicks!”
A good point well made, George. You see, Clinton didn’t just use the whole sci-fi/afrofuturism vibe of Parliament/Funkadelic as an image. He’s all in on the idea of life beyond the stars because, if you ask him about it, he’s met them in person.
He goes on to talk about an alien encounter he had with bass icon Bootsy Collins. Right from the off, he answers the question that all of us would have and says, “We weren’t high.” He says the two of them were driving together after a morning fishing trip, and at around midday, “A light hit the car, and a substance like mercury out of the thermometer rolled up the side of the car.”
In a further interview with the YouTube channel Nowness, he expanded on what happened next: “We just drove up to my house… my daughter came outside and said to us, ‘Y’all look like you’ve seen a ghost.’” Then it gets really weird. Years later, he recalled that, shortly after they got back, his daughter “was talking about going to bed. We’d (gone fishing) around 9:30 or 10 in the morning. Why would she be going to bed? Time was amiss; we’d never even contemplated the time being missing.”
In the same conversation, he goes on to talk about how rather than these visitors being invaders or colonisers, he likes to believe they’re our ancestors. That they’re a shared part of our DNA that can help bring us together. Which is the core of all this. For all his talk about out-there concepts we’d normally find in sci-fi films, to him, this is about us realising all that we have in common.
It makes no sense to discuss the concept of ‘white music’ and ‘Black music’ when it should be all about how much we, as humans, can connect with each other. It’s a charming thought, one put best later in the same interview. When asked what he’d like to say to these aliens if given the chance, he says he’d like to ask, “How do y’all dance? If you ain’t got no booty, what do you shake?”
Real talk, it’s a question we could do a whole lot of good by asking each other first.
