George Clinton celebrating 50 years of P-Funk with live orchestra in January: Details

The Mothership will officially land at the Detroit Opera House on Saturday, Jan. 31, when funk god and godfather of modern hip hop George Clinton will helm a one-night-only performance celebrating 50 years of Parliament Funkadelic.

Accompanied – for the first time ever – by a live orchestra, Clinton will present gems from his songbook, backed by the Detroit Opera Orchestra as directed by Ray Chew. A lineup of special guests is also planned for the concert.

George Clinton and the Parliament Funkadelic perform at the Michigan Lottery Amphitheatre in Sterling Heights, Thursday, June 20, 2019.

Ticket presales began Sept. 9, at noon. Public ticket sales begin Sept. 12 at 10 a.m. VIP packages include exclusive meet-and-greets with George Clinton (extremely limited availability) and the Mothership Box Experience.

In 1976, Clinton and Parliament released “Mothership Connection,” a groundbreaking funk opus recorded at Detroit’s United Sound Studios. The album presented a sci-fi theme of funk musicians as galactic invaders, exploring the possibilities of Afrofuturism and Black identity in outer space. The album tour in 1976 featured a spaceship that descended from the ceiling to transport the audience to a “P-Funk” musical universe. (A replica of the spaceship is permanently housed in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.)

In Detroit, Clinton and his special guests will offer audiences a once-in-a-lifetime chance to hear Clinton’s songbook as never before: part concert, part spectacle, melding Clinton’s P-Funk raw energy with the grandeur of a full orchestra.

Clinton got his start in the late ’50s with his doo-wop group The Parliaments, named after the cigarette brand (they later lost Parliament naming rights and changed the band’s name to Funkadelic, and the band was also later known as Parliament-Funkadelic and as the P-Funk All-Stars). The Parliaments came to Detroit to audition for Motown – the musician collective run by the legendary Berry Gordy, whose artists included Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight, The Temptations, The Four Tops, and several other chart-topping acts. The Parliaments didn’t sign with Motown, but George Clinton did end up working as a songwriter for Motown and moved the band’s operation from the East Coast to Detroit.

Clinton’s music is a crucial part of an aesthetic that would become known as Afrofuturism, which imagines people of the African diaspora through the lens of technology, the future, and science fiction—such as Marvel and Ryan Coogler’s “Black Panther,” which imagines Wakanda as a thriving African nation, untouched by the continent’s history. Artists working in the genre include musicians Alice Coltrane, Erykah Badu, Kamasi Washington, Betty Davis, and Janelle Monáe, filmmaker Jordan Peele, and novelist Jesmyn Ward. Clinton is the second most sampled artist in the world, after James Brown. Artists who have sampled Clinton’s music include Dr. Dre in “Let Me Ride” on 1992’s “The Chronic,” Warren G (G-Funk to Parliament’s P-Funk), Ice Cube, Eazy-E, and Snoop Dogg.

“Funk is the DNA of hip hop,” Clinton told the Free Press before headlining the 2023 African World Festival. “Funk is just getting started! Afrofuturism, hip hop, that’s all the same. It’s all one nation under a groove. Funk is the DNA for music that you use your booty to dance to.

“Let ’em know we’re on our way home Tell them to bring two booties to shake, ’cause one ain’t enough!”