Super Stupid

There's a recklessness at the center of "Super Stupid" that feels almost dangerous, a song that moves like someone who has decided consequences are someone else's problem. The guitar here — and it is the guitar that runs this song, Hazel's instrument given its fullest heavy-rock extension — is distorted past the point of conventional funk, pushing into territory that has more in common with hard rock and proto-metal than anything on the R&B charts. The rhythm section holds the center while everything else threatens to fly apart, and that tension between discipline and dissolution is where the song lives. Vocally the performance has a sneering energy, a portrait of self-destruction delivered without moralizing — you can hear affection for the character even as the song catalogs his failures. The production refuses to clean up the edges, the rawness itself communicating something about the subject. Funkadelic in this mode are doing something that shouldn't work on paper: combining the tightest rhythm section in American music with the loosest, most dissolution-prone guitar approach. It belongs to the tradition of rock songs that treat chaos as a form of honesty. Play it when you're in the mood for music that has given up on being respectable and decided to be real instead.