10 Trippy Albums You MUST Hear Before You Die
4. Funkadelic - Maggot Brain (1971)
When an album opens with pioneer of funk George Clinton stating “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”, you know you’re in for a bizarre listening experience. Representing the more emotionally mature side of the psychedelic coin, the album’s title track, which is little more than an extended guitar solo by Eddie Hazel, manages to accumulate a lifetime’s worth of emotion into ten minutes, with its desperately sad, passionate guitar wails. It is said that Clinton, under the influence of LSD, told Hazel to imagine his mother had died, and to translate that sense of pain into song.
The rest of the album transcends into some straight up psychedelic funk, with songs like “Back in Our Minds” and “You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks”, before ending with the frenzied “Wars of Armageddon”, which starts with babies crying and finishes with bombs dropping. Written at the beginning of the end of the hippie era, in a time of heightened political unrest, the album provides a rollercoaster ride through the human mind; it is at once rebellious, seductive, dirty, depressing, funny and funky as ever.