Parliament-Funkadelic vs Earth, Wind & Fire

I especially would love to hear from you that lived through their primes. My vote goes to P-Funk. George Clinton stage presence alone got my vote. Not including the fact that Glenn Goins, Garry Shider, Ray Davis, Michael Hampton, Bernie Worrell, Parlet & Brides of Funkenstein were all on the same stage as once. Epic. I consider P-Funk Richard Pryor.

EWF is like my Bill Cosby....70's-80's Bill that is. These guys sound and message is very important to a lot of people. Especially brothers like me who need a positive outlook and path of life. I've started studying African History because of Maurice. If it was about the message, EWF would get my vote, but it's about the actual music to me, and P-Funk was just on another planet.

 

They are so different I can't choose. In the late 70s they were two of my favorites and I had many records from both. Great bands but very different EWF silky while PF edgy. My 02$

 

They were both world-class bands with top-drawer musicians.
P-Funk generally fits my personal pharmaceutical profile better.

 

Hard to compare, really. Kind of like pitting Frank Zappa and the Mothers against Steely Dan. FWIW, I love them both, but for different reasons.

 

I was in Jr High in their prime and got Flashlight and Bootsy Player of the Year in 7th grade.

EW&F is completely awesome, and I was very glad to have seen them with Maurice in the lineup, but I vote for PFunk and this is not even close.

Message as well as music. And throw in album art.

 

If I'm picking based on the best few songs of the band, then it's P-Funk, but for overall quality I went with EW&F. The question is, where the hell did bands like this go? Rock music is still pretty strong, but are there actual R&B, funk or rock bands made up of young black musicians anymore? Yeah, I know, I'm old.

 

There's some here and there but you have to dig for it. Which I'm not really into because they're not as funky as bands from 40+ years ago.

 

MAurice and George had a great rivalry back in the day, and EWF may have won in the overall marketplace, but I don't see them winning here and now.

 

Lots of those killer r'n'b bands from the 70's just seemed to sell out in the 80's, like Kool and the Gang, they went pop, I guess the money was useful. But something about the 70's seemed to suite funk.

I think there is and has been a large slice of funk in certain hip-hop groups though.

 

I can tell you which one was all over the radio, and that's EW&F. The only P-Funk song I recall hearing is "Give Up the Funk/Tear the Roof Off the Sucker." If I heard "Flashlight" or "One Nation Under a Groove" at the time of their release, they didn't make much of an impression on me.

 

Electro Funk and Quiet Storm seem to derail many of the great 70s funk bands as they tried to adapt and became pompy, cheesy, and bloated, instead of becoming leaner and meaner whilst relying on their chops and intensity; a predicament very similar to most 70s rock bands.

 

No vote from me. I love 'em both to death.

 

This is interesting stuff. If I was this age in '77 and heard "Flash Light" and "Serpentine Fire" back to back, I would've went crazy. You guys are lucky.

 

I take it you weren't in Philly. I couldn't cross the street without hearing 3 different PFunk tunes blaring out from oversized boom boxes. Bootsy, Parliament and Funkadelic were as inescapable as exhaust and asphalt fumes. If you wanted to hear something else you needed a system powered by a car battery that required a hand truck to move.

 

Amazing! It was like that back then?

 

Sure was in Germantown.

 

Another "can't vote." They're both powerhouses.

 

Boston, too.

 

There was a documentary(I forget the title) about 2 years ago on FUNK Music/Artists that played on Palladia(now MTV Live) and was way too short at 80 minutes(can't remember if that included commercials so could have been shorter). One part brought up how in the 1970s a lot of African-American families were middle class, as most had good paying factory jobs. Therefore, they could afford to buy their kids musical instruments(guitars, bass, keyboards, drums, saxaphones, trumpets, etc). After those factory jobs disappeared in the 1980s, so did the better paying jobs and kids were not getting access to those instruments anymore. I am not sure if music programs in grade school, middle school and high school were more available back in the 1970s, but would not surprise me. So, I think this sounded like a major factor on the death of FUNK Music, although Bootsy Collins was running a FUNK University in recent years(not sure if he still offers it), that had an awesome list of guest teachers.

I am not going to vote as love both groups, and I thought on my 1 year so far here as a member, reading that the SHF did not like having these types of topics posted trying to pit one artist against another. Maybe a better topic title would have been 'P-FUNK & Earth, Wind & Fire-Compare & Contrast'.

 

Earth, Wind & Fire, for me. I love Philip Bailey.

 

If God could sing that is what it would sound like

 

I voted for EWF, but I love Parliament and Funkadelic. Listened to Mothership Connection again just this weekend.

 

It's a bummer kinda. I can think of some for sure but they are not made up of exclusively young, black musicians. Even the big R&B/Soul names like Charles Bradley have largely white backing bands. The music is great, so I guess it is what it is.

I would reluctantly vote P-Funk if I were backed into a corner but EW&F was absolutely the touchstone for funk music with the "regular people" vs P-Funk for the heads. So either would be a big loss IMO.

 

For a little more granularity on the PFunk phenomenon, see this poll:

Favorite artistsartists in the Parliafunkadelicment Thang »