Entry · catalog no. 1164
the Mothership
/ /ðə ˈmʌðərˌʃɪp/ /thuh MUH-thur-ship
proper noun · Plainfield, New Jersey; Detroit; New Orleans, Los Angeles and Oakland on the Earth Tour; Washington, DC, where the replica now sits · 1970s
✓ Verified
1.
The flying-saucer stage prop that landed at the close of Parliament-Funkadelic concerts from 1976 onward, and by extension the whole mythology attached to it: Star Child, Dr. Funkenstein, the Afronauts, and a Black future located off this planet. Designed with Broadway Jules Fisher and Peter Larkin and financed by Casablanca Records, it descended through smoke and lights while the band worked a call-and-response arrangement of the spiritual Swing Down, Sweet Chariot, and George Clinton stepped out of it in character. It was engineered as spectacle and staged as church — a deliberate collision of science fiction and the Black sanctified tradition.
“When they brought the Mothership down at the end, grown folks were hollering like it was Sunday service.”
2.
By extension, an origin point or seat of authority that later work descends from — used in Black music writing for P-Funk itself, the source that Dre, Snoop, OutKast and much of West Coast and Southern rap trace back to.
“Every one of those synth lines is coming straight off the Mothership.”
Origin & Attribution
Black American, mid-1970s, out of the Parliament-Funkadelic circle that ran from Clinton Plainfield, New Jersey barbershop through Detroit studios. The concept arrived on record first — Mothership Connection, released 15 December 1975 — and became a physical object for the P-Funk Earth Tour, which opened 26 October 1976 at the Municipal Auditorium in New Orleans. Clinton has been plain that the ambition was competitive: he had watched the Who, Bowie and the Stones mount arena spectacles and wanted a bigger one for funk. Three corrections. First, the ship in the Smithsonian is not the 1976 original. It is a near-exact replica built in the mid-1990s for the Mothership Reconnection Tour; the original was dumped in a Maryland junkyard in 1982 when the management company was buried in debt, and no trace of it was ever found. Second, the landing was not the opening number. Clinton says it was scripted that way on the first night in New Orleans and it killed the rest of the show, so they moved it to the end and it stayed there. Third, this was not costume-jewelry glam borrowed from white rock. Glenn Goins sang the ship down over a spiritual, in call-and-response, and the people who were in those rooms describe it as a church experience, not a special effect.
1975
Mothership Connection is released 15 December, the first Parliament album to go gold and later platinum
1976
The P-Funk Earth Tour opens 26 October in New Orleans and the Mothership lands onstage for the first time
2011
Clinton donates the 1990s replica to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, where it now anchors the Musical Crossroads gallery
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
Plainfield, New Jersey; Detroit; New Orleans, Los Angeles and Oakland on the Earth Tour; Washington, DC, where the replica now sits · 1970s
Spoken by
George Clinton and the P-Funk collective; funk and hip-hop musicians and audiences; Afrofuturist artists and writers
$THEMOTThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Enduring51 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
70/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1975
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
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Citations & Sources
■
The Mothership, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, object 2011.83.1.1-.9
museum · catalog record
■
Keith Harriston, "Forty years later, George Clinton Mothership is still landing," The Undefeated/Andscape, 2 October 2017
feature · interview
■
"Parliament-Funkadelic Donates Mothership to Smithsonian," Rolling Stone, 2011
news · reported
■
Parliament, Mothership Connection, Casablanca Records, 15 December 1975
album
■
+ Cite a sourceParliament, Live: P-Funk Earth Tour, Casablanca Records, 5 May 1977
album · recorded live
See also