I don't get Funkadelic at all. I saw them live in 1997 and it was tedious, like watching The Grateful Dead or some shit. Their influence has always seemed to me to be noxious too.
i remember my teenage disappointment and confusion on listening to the dead, expecting some sort of amazing trippy experience - music that would some how transport me on a psychedelic journey either with or without drugs, only to find endless flaky folky claptrap
this on the other hand is just that - head music, like ur music, music that exists as an elemental basic component, that has to be this way like a law of physics, a precise naturally occurring space that needed to be filled, a definition
i dug this so deeply i still remember exactly when it would hit a scratch and get stuck on that groove 11:39
so sparse, it sounds mixed, almost like techno, filtered elements dropping in and out echoing on top of that definitive beat, the call and reply, the chorus
later funkadelic went towards being an ensemble type big band, sprawled with loads of releases, hard to pin down tunes amongst the general sound and attitude, clinton & the whiole thing became increasingly a cartoon, and i think highly variable quality of the live performances?