Earth, Wind, and Fire would win in a fight with because--and this is entirely objective fact right here--they are one of the tiny, tiny handful of bearable acts regularly played in the drugstore where I subject myself to working. If you walked up to me in CVS towards the end of an eight hour shift and said that I could sell my soul for the chance to punch Phil Collins in the head, I would absolutely take it without a moment's hesitation. (Dude's a good drummer, in his very very half=assed defense, but holy god those songs are like soggy overproduced white bread).
Everybody knows Funkadelic were better than any of those pop-funk bands, though. EWF knew how to write killer pop songs, but when up against the P-Funk collective (an battalion of musicians with more amassed talent and sheer unique weirdness than the Wild Bunch, the Seven Samurai, the Dirty Dozen, and, uh...the Breakfast Club? combined), nobody could possibly stand a chance. Eddie Hazel would basically say, "Hey guys, here are the first few bars of 'Maggot Brain,'" and Bootsy Collins would say "I'm the goddamn bassist and my solo albums are still some of the coolest things ever recorded" and Bernie Worrell would inadvertently give birth to Dr. Dre's entire career and then George Clinton himself would step out of the Mothership and you'd turn weak at the knees and fall over. Seriously, though, people like to reference P-Funk and the whole Clintonverse as some kitschy/weird shorthand for how strange the 70s were--and their "mythology" is admittedly pretty gonzo, even incomprehensible--but damn, guys! A lot of this music is incredible, and still unique as hell even with all the imitators who have emerged since then.
Nothing against the Gap Band or EWF, both of whom (especially the latter) were great in their own right, but Parliament/Funkadelic (and Sly & the Family Stone, and James Brown) were into some visionary funk shit. Go check out One Nation Under a Groove and Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome, if you haven't.
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