Consumer Guide Album

George Clinton: The Best of George Clinton [Capitol, 1986]
The best-of has always been a dubious consumer service: even when it's a genuine bargain, it allows bizzers to make money off the same music twice, and don't think they don't love every dollar of it. In this case one of the bizzers is the artiste, who already stuck two of these cuts onto that strange half-live, half-compilation "mini-album" earlier this year. There's not much arguing with the individual selections. Since it reshuffles the entire first side of You Shouldn't-Nuf Bit Fish, the most playable Clinton of the '80s if not all time, it's stronger cut for cut than that one, and it's a better dance record than Atomic Dog. But it's totally lacking in epistemological integrity, and if you think that's a ridiculous thing to say about a funk album, you've got placebo syndrome--George knows what I'm talking about, and without a dictionary. B+