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Funkadelic’s self-titled debut LP (1970) and the same year’s Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow proved that Clinton and company were adept at penning hook-laden soul nuggets, “wayback yonder funk,” gully blues-rock, sinister gospeldelia, and freak-flag-flying jams. By the time they entered Detroit’s United Sound Systems in late 1970 to record their third full-length, Maggot Brain, they’d honed their myriad styles to a raw-nerved peak. For a group rumored to record while zonked out of their minds, Funkadelic really held it together on Maggot Brain. They may not have been as tight as James Brown’s backing band the J.B.’s, but Clinton, Nelson, keyboardist Bernie Worrell, guitarists Eddie Hazel and Tawl Ross, and drummer Tiki Fulwood had cohered into a fearsome unit.

Perhaps the most distinctive thing about Maggot Brain is its incomparable bookends: The opener “Maggot Brain” and closer “Wars of Armageddon” are the most evocative expressions of birth and annihilation ever put on record. In the former, Funkadelic plunges into the dank throes of an existential quandary, as Clinton intones, “Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time/For y’all have knocked her up/I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe/I was not offended/For I knew I had to rise above it all/Or drown in my own shit.” Clinton really knew how to rivet attention and prep you for the journey of a lifetime.

Summarizing the LP in Brothas, Clinton wrote, “Maggot Brain was going places that Black groups hadn’t gone, into questions about whether America was still on the right path or whether the promise of the late ’60s had completely evaporated.” In these seven songs, you can hear Funkadelic attempting to make sense of the turmoil of the times, as they express the euphoria and anguish of being born and dying in the most extraordinary ways. - Pitchfork