Computer Games by George Clinton

Computer Games, out on Capitol in November 1982, is the first record George Clinton put his own name on, but anybody who dropped the needle knew the crew. Clinton had shut down both Parliament and Funkadelic the year before, after a stretch of money woes and personal wreckage, and most of the same players followed him into these sessions. Call it the P-Funk gang flying under a new flag.

The title tells you where his head was. Dance music was going electronic in a hurry, and instead of sneering at the machines, Clinton plugged them in and twisted them into his own rubber-legged, cartoon-cosmic shape. "Loopzilla" climbed into the R&B top 20, and "Atomic Dog" went all the way to the top of the R&B chart while stalling at 101 on the pop side. It bought him a short second wind before legal tangles and a cold shoulder from the labels caught up with P-Funk in the mid-'80s. Slant Magazine later ranked it 97th among the decade's best albums.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.