"Maggot Brain" is a eulogy played on one guitar. Funkadelic recorded it in 1971 as a ten-minute instrumental built around Eddie Hazel's guitar solo, a performance that George Clinton reportedly instructed by telling Hazel to play as if he had just learned his mother was dead. The song contains no lyrics of its own, only a spoken introduction about the earth being eaten by maggots. The guitar carries everything. Grief, rage, acceptance, collapse, and a slow rise back toward something like peace, all inside a single take with no edits.