Now, being an almost life-long fan of the revolutionary,
innovative and now iconic Parliament / Funkadelic,
being first turned on to them at a very early age in
the early 70's by my mother and older cousins and buying
the records and attending the "P-Funk Earth Tour" as a teenager
during the height of their success in the mid to late 70's,
I dived at the chance to buy this DVD documentary about one
of the baddest and most crucial musical alchemists
of the last 50 years!!---Bernie "Insurance Man" Worrell!!
Other than Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock, YES, ELO,
and maybe a small handful of less important artists,
nobody has done more for electronic instrumentation or
the keyboard in general than Mr. Worrell!
He almost single-handedly created the language of how synthesizers
are used in pop music today!--Funk, Rock, Pop, Alternative,
HIP-HOP...whatever!! In fact P-Funk was alternative long
before the phrase was even coined!--(Can Y'all Get 2 That??)
I just feel like this was a great opportunity that was half-azz
wasted because very little was really said about the man's
upbringing (no young photos, surviving family members, etc.)
were mined to shed light on where this prodigious talent was nurtured!
It was like...yeah, he had a mother, and she kept him sheltered
from ghetto life, and he could play Mozart and Bach, etc. at age 5
and composed his own concerto at age 8, but it didn't go too
much more in depth with it.
I like alot of the interviews with admiring musicians
from rock to funk to hip-hop who give it up to Bernie's genius,
but you would've thought that George Clinton and Bootsy Collins' interviews would have been
given carte blanche and gone unedited along with
a few more of the great surviving P-Funk musicians
like Gary Shider, Cordell "Boogie" Mosson, etc.
(who weren't even interviewed!) thrown in to boot!
This was his most prolific and groundbreaking period after all!!
And what about the scarce use of P-Funk video footage
and musical material that would've given people who've never
heard of Bernie a chance to hear his work
and go out and buy it!---Duh!!
Even his work with The Talking Heads in the 80's could have
been better handled and interviewed.
"Burnin' Down The House" was my jam back in '82/'83!!
I agree with another reviewer who said that the
documentary's director/producer assumes
that everybody already knows who
Bernie Worrell is, instead of doing this in true documentary
and revelatory form as one would do on say, the bio channel or
"Behind The Music"...
I was also distressed that Bernie is living a near transient
existence now--still going from gig to gig and hotel to hotel
at his age (63 or 64) because like so many of the great black artists
of the past, he lacked the business saavy of today's
less talented but more business-minded artists
and was grossly and shamefully bamboozled out of any
monetary rights to his legacy!
That is an outrage and a crime!!
He should be living like a king on his writer /publishing
royalties and treated like the innovative genius that he is!
Life is so unfair!
Mos Def, Prince Paul and one other musicians said that Bernie
should be getting checks from Moog, Korg, Yamaha, etc.
for all the business he brought to their industry!
I agree!!
I just felt that this documentary could've been so much more!
