they just jam together, fuck around in the studio, and piece things together from that (im pretty sure most of keith richards songs came out from riffing in the studio)

but you can still piece it together into an end result approximating a 'song'

george and them didnt want to do that

they were BORED of the old motown factory way of writing (even though he loved those songs)

they didnt want to write pop songs

they wanted to stretch out

ie songwriting was not that important, it was more about being the best band, showing off chops, being loose, i dont think he wanted to be a great songwriter in the classic sense.

theres nothing wrong with that, i love a lot of their albums that sprawl out all over the place, i like my 20 minute live recording of flashlight, but i also love when they wrote compact songs, like coming round the mountain, fantasy is reality, cosmic slop too.

this isnt confined to funk btw. lots of 70s rock bands had killer riffs but werent necessarily into writing 'great songs'.

i guess this boils down to semantics, the diff between 'great records' and 'great songs' (which imo = great songwriting which for me = a certain structure).