Five notes, and Sir Nose gives up
The bass does not walk. It leers, a chromatic slide that feels like a flashlight beam finding you in a corridor you hoped was empty. Everything else, handclaps, a chant, a keyboard that giggles, arranges itself around that beam. Flash Light is a chase scene in the P-Funk comic: Sir Nose, the enemy of dance, finally cornered. You do not need the comic to feel cornered. The Minimoog is enough.
The song closes Funkentelechy Vs. the Placebo Syndrome, released in November 1977, and the single followed in January 1978 on Casablanca, produced by George Clinton, written by Clinton, Bernie Worrell and Bootsy Collins. The bass line people still assign to Bootsy is Worrell’s. Collins, the story goes, did not want the part. Worrell played it on Minimoogs, several of them linked, and played the other keyboards too. He later called those five notes a solo, the most important part of the song, and dismissed busier playing as saying nothing. The track became Parliament’s first number one on the R&B chart and a pop hit behind it, Casablanca’s first R&B number one as well. United Sound in Detroit is where this circus usually pitched its tent. The mythology is silly on paper. The low end is not silly at all.
Live, the chant is a weapon. Flash light, flash light, and a room that has never read the sleeve still knows to point at something. Worrell, when he was there, made the Moog swagger without hurrying. The song’s afterlife in hip-hop is mostly this bass, sampled because it already sounds like a loop that learned manners and then ignored them. Five notes. A nation of producers has been trying to write a sixth ever since.
The bass line on Flashlight, that’s five notes. That’s a solo. It’s the most important part of the song.
(Bernie Worrell, Creative Loafing)
Clinton’s plot, the Placebo Syndrome, the flashlight as the tool that finds the funk in the dark, is a children’s story told at adult volume. It gave the musicians a reason to be ridiculous and precise at once. Worrell’s classical training is the secret under the joke. A chromatic line with that much swagger is not an accident of a knob. It is harmony used as a plot twist. Bootsy’s absence from the bass, once you know it, makes the record stranger and better. The bassist most associated with the empire sat this one out, and the keyboardist wrote the empire’s most stolen sentence.
What remains is the beam. Flash Light still sounds like someone turning a corner and deciding you will dance or you will be exposed. Sir Nose was a puppet for people who will not move. The Moog did not argue with them. It made their stillness impossible. That is a better sermon than the comic, and the comic was already pretty good.
