Inside the gatefold of vinyl copies of Maggot Brain is an excerpt from an article about the concept of fear, published in a magazine by the Process Church of the Final Judgment, a religious sect founded in England in the mid-’60s. Its thesis: “Fear is at the root of man’s destruction of himself.... Do we know the extent to which we are at war with one another—on every level from personal to world wide [sic]—because we are afraid?” That’s some heavy shit for a funk band to be dropping on folks, but Funkadelic mastermind George Clinton harbored an iconoclastic streak. While his fledgling ’60s band the Parliaments tried to adapt to Motown Records impresario Berry Gordy’s preference for matching suits, synchronized dances, and well-crafted vocal harmonies, they failed to make the cut. In his 2014 autobiography, Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kind of Hard on You?, Clinton observed that Gordy deemed the Parliaments as too similar to Motown artists the Temptations and the Contours, and their wildly varying heights struck the label boss as too odd. Ultimately, this rejection was for the best, as Clinton’s imagination was sprouting in ways too strange for Motown, as manifested in Funkadelic’s first three albums.
With the freedom afforded by Armen Boladian’s Westbound Records, Clinton proceeded to create a sonic and lyrical universe that placed equal importance on moving minds and bodies in unprecedented ways. If that meant immersing listeners in unconventional thoughts about fear or triggering meditations about world destruction, then the headstrong bandleader had enough faith in his audience to handle his bold blend of the pleasure principle with eschatological matters.
Though the Process Church dogma took up a quarter of the gatefold’s layout and imbued the record with a gravity, it wasn’t necessarily essential for analyzing and enjoying Maggot Brain’s merits. In fact, in a 2006 interview with Wax Poetics, Funkadelic bassist Billy Nelson said that he held no truck with the religion’s allegedly Satanic doctrines—nor, for that matter, with the grotesque cover art featuring a screaming Black woman buried in a mound of maggot-laden dirt, with the back cover revealing simply a skull. “That’s George [Clinton] sabotaging us again,” Nelson lamented. Defending the Process Church in Brothas, Clinton described its ethos as “a form of self-actualization.” He would delve further into its thinking on Maggot Brain’s 1972 follow-up, America Eats Its Young. But this was an ephemeral phase in Clinton’s artistic life, and secondary to the revolutionary sounds he and his bandmates were creating.