CRITERIA FOR CANON

The list is meant to be an authorized canon on P-Funk. What that means can be different things for different people. Essentially, all of the “core” P-Funk albums, along with all of the essential side projects and spin-off albums, were a certainty. Notably, almost all of the band member’s solo albums are included, as are key side projects of said band members, as long as the release in question had some key connection to the P-Funk stylistically or in terms of personnel. Some albums that feature members of the band past and present were omitted; the reasons for this are as follows.

First, some albums were nearly impossible to find information on other than the fact that they existed at one point. Even the music itself was a mystery in a couple of these circumstances. In addition, when delving into discussions on the releases in question in interviews, the primary sources often wrote them off as “informally released.” This has occurred in this process on half a dozen occasions and has compounded the investigative process and hampered the criteria for inclusion in the list. Perhaps with more time in the future, newer editions of this volume can contain some of these albums. Keep in mind, however, that this was the case with only about half a dozen very obscure albums.

Second, some band members’ side projects have so many branches that are so far away from the P-Funk tree at large that they belong to another group’s satellite or even another band’s genre or sound. Indeed, the wormhole has been explored deeply in this regard, but at some point, a cutoff had to be made as to what could be and could not be considered officially in canon. Indeed, if every relatable album to P-Funk in every conceivable way was included, this book would be another couple of volumes, lending itself to the notion that there are truly only a couple degrees of separation at the most between all pop music throughout modern history and P-Funk.

Third, there are thousands of songs that have sampled and interpolated P-Funk. As vast as that list is on its own, meritable of a book in its own right, the use of sampling P-Funk developed inside the hip-hop satellite. It is certainly containing the same DNA, but it is also maintaining something distinctly separate, again meritable of its own volume. Lists have been assembled in the past of songs sampling P-Funk, but much like the P-Funk canon itself prior to this volume, nothing really formative has been wholly compiled in that regard. Several important hip-hop songs interpolated P-Funk, some to the point where it seriously became part of the canon; many of those songs were included in this list.

Fourth, in regard to the multitude of remixes out there, most of them have been left out, unless the personnel on said remixes was so vastly different from the original that it needed its own listing in the book or if the remix was more famous than the original and deemed its inclusion important.

Fifth, live bootlegs have been left off for obvious reasons. If every single bootleg of every single show by every related P-Funk band was to be listed, this book would be 10 volumes or more. However, all the major live releases have been included and are at the end of book, immediately following the list of all the studio releases. Unlike the list of studio releases, which is listed chronologically by the act’s debut release, the live list at the end of the book is listed alphabetically.

Finally, there have been a few releases that were left out because they were made on a “shoestring budget” and were never potentially released with any marketing. Some of these are very minor releases, put out by friends of members of P-Funk and/or people who might have recorded with someone in P-Funk. Many of these not-included releases are available only on a burned CD-R with either handwritten liner notes or no liner notes at all. These “bootleg studio releases” are so common that another wormhole situation can easily happen, so they were wisely left off of the list.

The importance of the complete canon in one single volume was very important in order to showcase P-Funk’s seemingly never-ending vastness. Fitting everything into one large volume lends the canon a fitting posterior for its epic history. In doing so, much like all canon, criteria had to be created to help draw on conclusions of canonization. But as already iterated, P-Funk is seemingly never ending. It grows and changes with each successive release, further proving its ever-regenerating quality, constantly in flux. This is only a part of the majesty that is the P-Funk canon.