I think that contrary to popular belief, that there were only a FEW funk groups. All the rest were either poor imitations, JB's style soul bands, or simply "flirting" with funk. Thre were cats funkin' but only a few who were dedicated solely to funk, and I think that ended up hurting funk in the long run. People distotrted George's vision and saw funk as silly music with fucked up costumes, And soon P-Funk became a parody of itself. I think funk was the next logical step in soul but got trapped by commercialism aka Disco. But I think Disco is a much maligned music. Most of it was okay, but then you had the Euro Disco(Georgio Moroder, Silver Convention, etc) which I think ruined it.