Kinethic California: Dancing Funk and Disco Era Kinships documents the emergence of new forms of black social and vernacular dance invented by youth living in 1970s California, who helped build the foundations of contemporary hip hop/streetdance culture. Naomi Macalalad Bragin weaves interviews and ethnographies of first-generation (1960s-70s) dancers of strutting, boogaloo, robotting, popping, locking, waacking, and punking styles, as it advances a theory of dance as kinetic kinship formation through a focus on techniques and practices of the dancers themselves. She offers that the term given to these collective movement practices is kinethic to bring attention to motion at the core of black aesthetics that generate dances as forms of kinship beyond blood relation. Kinethics reorient dancers toward kinetic kinship in ways that give continuity to black dance lineages under persistent conditions of disappearance and loss. As dancers engage kinethics, they reinvent gestural vocabularies that describe worlds they imagine into knowing-being.

The stories in Kinethic California attend to the aesthetics of everyday movement, seen through the lens of young artists who, from childhood, listened to their family’s soul and funk records, observed the bent-leg strolls and rhythmic handshakes of people moving through their neighborhoods, and watched each other move at house parties, school gyms, and around-the-way social clubs. Their aesthetic sociality and geographic movement provided materials for collective study and creative play. Bragin attends to such multidirectional conversations between dancer, community, and tradition, by which California dance lineages emerge and take flight.

An oral history with the women of Parliament-Funkadelic, from forming the band to landing the mothership.

Parliament-Funkadelic is perhaps the greatest funk band ever assembled. Yet at the time of the group’s induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, none of the women who helped create the sound and performed in P-Funk were invited to the ceremony and their contributions have been largely overlooked.

Mothership Connected tells the story of Mallia Franklin, Lynn Mabry, Dawn Silva, Debbie Wright, and Shirley Hayden, all of whom were instrumental in making Parliament-Funkadelic, as well as the spin-off groups Parlet and the Brides of Funkenstein, into the legends they are today. Assembled by Seth Neblett, son of the “Queen of Funk” Mallia Franklin, and filled with the voices of funk icons like George Clinton, Sly Stone, Bootsy Collins, and the women themselves, this oral history makes clear why these “architects” at the “core” of P-Funk were both essential—and erased. From Franklin introducing Bootsy Collins to Clinton, to the Brides’ top-10 hit “Disco to Go,” to the drugs that helped destroy the group, this book reveals the hidden lives and uncomfortable truths of life in P-Funk. More than sex, drugs, and rock and roll, Mothership Connected is about Black women navigating a tumultuous era and industry to become musical pioneers. Now, after decades in the shadows, these genre-defining women are finally telling their story.