The best way to view his work is on original vinyl album covers where you can be sure that previous owners spent a lot of time looking at every detail, reading every joke, realizing that they could forge a new identity where being black was taken as a given and a positive aspect of life. George Clinton’s P-Funk collective was an entire mythology and Pedro Bell essentially created the visual brand for the project, incorporating his beloved underground comics, radical politics, ironic humor and science fiction. And WITHOUT SHAME–decare their eventual victims as the bangling argie-bargies responsible for the ecological pimpster game that they cheerfully continue…AWAKE NOT, and Earth remains as this solar system’s space strumpet…sour milk from the breast of MOTHER NATURE!” –From the liner notes for Cosmic Slop– These cachetic mumruffians of madness continue to hasten total biological Armageddon for the ‘benefit’ of consumerism. “Premature ecological doom through the reactionary efforts of POLLUTING ENTERPRISES of capitalistic pimpism foreshadow Earth’s demise.
By 1973 George Clinton had paid young Bell a visit in Chicago and soon he was part of the group’s stable of talent, creating drawings and cartoons based on the band’s records and his own inspiration. Other sources included Abbie Hoffman’s counterculture text Steal This Book with its R Crumb illustrations and the often surreal covers of avant rocker Frank Zappa.Īfter hearing an early Funkadelic track on local radio, Bell began to create artwork based on their sound and sent it to their Westbound Records label in Detroit. Growing up in Chicago, Bell had the opportunity to see Sun Ra in 1958, an experience he dubbed “pretty deep for my creative.” The underground comics of the 1960s proved to be very inspirational to Bell as well, and he has always cited the work of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth with its custom car culture and odd characters as a strong inspiration. In fact, Bell is a key connection between the space mythology of Sun Ra and the development of the Afrofuturistic perspective that has continued to develop and gain momentum over the past decade.
It was nightmarish and funny and beautiful, a perfect fit for the music.” George CLinton When he sent us his interpretation I was blown away. I talked through ‘Cosmic Slop’ with Pedro on the telephone, and his mind translated it into a strange vision told in half-visual and half-verbal language. Like Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Bernie Worrell and other members of the Funkadelic entourage, Bell lived the Funkadelic lifestyle, which included dressing in psychedelic clothing and smoking marijuana. A flip through the covers that Pedro Bell created for Funkadelic and George Clinton albums.īell also penned liner notes to many of the albums, expanding on George Clinton’s ideas and concepts and contributing many of his own ideas to the band’s Afrofuturistic mythology.
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