America Eats Its Young

According to Dave Rosen of Ink Blot, America Eats Its Young was radical in that it "devours" African-American music whole "and regurgitates it back as a virtual catalog of styles and sounds. Containing no hit singles and precious few catchy tunes, America Eats Its Young is primarily an experimental record that doubles as a lesson in the history of black music."[4] Dave Swanson of Ultimate Classic Rock said that Funkadelic stripped away the "sounds of rock, funk, soul and psychedelia" that had defined their previous albums, instead delivering a "hard funk offering"[2] Biographer Kris Needs described the album as Clinton's "grand statement" on the Vietnam War and "other elements that were afflicting his country", and further added that it featured Clinton's "most ambitiously epic production yet to befit the socially-conscious themes bristling among the love ditties and reworks."[5]

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[6]
Blender	[7]
Christgau's Record Guide	C+[8]
Encyclopedia of Popular Music	[9]
Funk (Rickey Vincent)	[10]
The Great Rock Discography	6/10[11]
Mojo	[12]
Pitchfork	8.1/10[1]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide	[13]
Select	[3]

Vernon Gibbs of Soul Sounds wrote in 1973 that most fans of Funkadelic were "universal in their condemnation of certain parts of America Eats Its Young," while conceding it himself to have a "dearth of top notch material" for a double album, and said that the consensus highlights "could not offset the badly thought out stuff".[14] Robert Christgau wrote in Christgau's Record Guide (1981) that the album was marred by its double length, "programmatic lyrics" and usage of strings as well as Funkadelic's continued use of sleeve notes by the Process Church of the Final Judgment, further singling out "Biological Speculation" and "Loose Booty" as the album's only good songs.[8]

Among retrospective reviews, Andrew Perry of Select panned the album as an unappealing, "cluttered jazz-rock fusion" that was alone in the Parliament-Funkadelic discography and which "seldom [earned] the accolade of true funkadelia." He also felt Clinton was largely uninvolved with the album, which instead profiles "vague polemic" that provides "neither the entertainment nor the hedonistic alternative of the moon-age anti-manifesto that was Clinton's trademark".[3] Christgau revisited the album for Blender, where he reiterated his dislike of the liner notes and described it as "Funkadelic's worst album", whose domination by Bernie Worrell scorched "the widespread and plausible muso theory that his keyboards were what made P-Funk P-Funk. Strewing chaos and screwing his friends, George Clinton was what made P-Funk P-Funk."[7] He later called it Clinton's "most Zappaesque" album.[15]

More positive was Ned Raggett of AllMusic, who described America Eats Its Young as a double album that was "worth every minute of it" and a departure from the "endless slabs of double-album dreck that came around the same time" as Funkadelic brought "life, soul and much more to the party".[6] The Rolling Stone Album Guide says that although America Eats Its Young is not Funkadelic's best album, it "introduces key elements that will lead Clinton to Parliament", such as vocal harmonies and Worrell's playful, catchphrase-heavy humour, and favoured the "party tunes" over the album's "political anger".[13] Dominique Leone of Pitchfork called it a "disparate, schizophrenic record" where Clinton's attempts to make it more crossover-friendly were thwarted by its length, adding "there's simply too much material, and too many conflicting directions to really make this seem anything other than a Frankenstein production." He nonetheless compared it to the Beatles' White Album (1968) due to it "containing too much great stuff to dismiss, but by almost anyone's standards, containing more than it needs."[1] Mojo named it an "expansive work by a huge funk collective".[12]

• Keyboards & Melodica: Bernie Worrell
• Percussion: Zachary Frazier, Tiki Fulwood, Ty Lampkin, Kash Waddy
• Guitar: Harold Beane, Catfish Collins, Ed Hazel, Garry Shider
• Bass guitar: Bootsy Collins, Prakash John, Boogie Mosson
• Trumpet: Bruce Cassidy, Arnie Chycoski, Ronnie Greenway, Chicken Gunnels, Al Stanwyck
• Alto saxophone: Randy Wallace
• Tenor saxophone: Robert McCullough
• Steel guitar: Ollie Strong
• Juice harp: James Wesley Jackson
• Violin: Victoria Polley, Albert Pratz, Bill Richards, Joe Sera
• Viola: Walter Babiuk, Stanley Solomon
• Cello: Ronald Laurie, Peter Schenkman
• Vocals: Harold Beane, Diane Brooks, Bootsy Collins, Catfish Collins, George Clinton, Ray Davis, Ronnie Greenway, Clayton Gunnels, Fuzzy Haskins, Ed Hazel, Prakash John, Steve Kennedy, Garry Shider, Calvin Simon, Grady Thomas, Frank Waddy, Randy Wallace, Bernie Worrell

Album - Billboard (United States)[16]

Singles - Billboard (United States)

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