George Clinton is one of a rare type of people who is capable of presenting several vibrant images of himself at once. He switches from funkster to Martian to icon with chameleon-like ability and the speed of a jaguar.

He is surprisingly open at first, but this is a ploy to distract from his true essence. He is more content speaking about funk, drugs, outer space and Tupac Shakur than he is about why he dwells on these things, his influence on modern music and what makes him tick. But Clinton’s psychological state does not detract from his mission.

“My mission is to keep the funk alive,” Clinton said. “It’s all about the mothership. It is our mission that the mothership must continue into the next millennium. I encourage everyone to get on the mothership and continue funking forever.”

Classic albums like “Mothership Connection” (’75), “One Nation Under A Groove” (’76), “Computer Games” (’82), “Some Of My Best Jokes Are Friends” (’85) and “Hey, Man … Smell My Finger” (’93) have earned him the respect of an entire generation of musicians.

It has become a common occurrence to pick up a rap CD and find one of Clinton’s songs sampled on it.

The allure of such classic funk songs as “Bop Gun,” “Funkentelechy (Where’d You Get That Funk From),” “The Mothership Connection,” “Give Up The Funk (Tear The Roof Off),” “Aquaboogie,” “Atomic Dog” and “State of the Nation” has been transfused in musicians ranging from Thomas Dolby to Ice Cube.

“Thomas Dolby is truly funky,” Clinton said. He cites Dolby as one of the most interesting people he has ever worked with. “He’s capable of doing a lot of different types of music at once. I’d like to do that. It would make the funk funkier.”

Clinton, who was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year, is pleased to see other artists using his work as a stepping stone for their own.

He believes he is spawning a generation of “funk clones” that will help him perpetuate funk into the next millennium, if not eternity. It is this concept that drives him into working with rap artists like Tupac Shakur (on “All Eyez On Me”).

“He was fun, lots of fun,” Clinton said about Shakur. “He was nothing like his image seemed to be. He plays the part of a gangster rapper real good. But he’s nothing like that in person.

“The one thing that I always remember when I think of him,” Clinton added, “is that he was a dancer first. But he graduated into a rapper and became quite successful. He always learned fast.”

Clinton’s backing group, which consists of 25 to 40 people at a time, according to Clinton, often changes quicker than the certified “Godfather of Funk.” During the last 25 years, the band has been called Parliament, Funkadelic, Parliament /Funkadelic, Bootsy’s Rubber Band, The Brides of Funkenstein, Parlet and the P-Funk All Stars.

“You have to reinvent yourself every five years or so,” Clinton said. “Otherwise, the funk just doesn’t work right. I never feel pressured by anyone to change. I’d do it anyway. I always plan to do it before obsolescence comes about. That’s why we always change the band names.”

The band’s personnel are also prone to changes. Clinton says there is a “revolving door” in the band that often influences how many people are on stage funking with him at any given moment.

“My people know that it doesn’t mean anything if they’ve been in the group a long time,” Clinton said. “It’s like a revolving door around here. If someone leaves, they are immediately replaceable.”

Those who choose to return, and there are quite a few of them, have to earn their way back into the lineup or wait until someone else decides to leave. Clinton runs his ensemble this way to show everyone who is in charge that they are all expendable, with the possible exception of long-time Clinton collaborator William “Bootsy” Collins.

Clinton may keep his band strictly structured, but he doesn’t have any desire to influence the structure of society. He refrains from inserting political messages in his music and chooses to focus on the funk instead.

“Hell no, politics are never more important than the groove,” Clinton stated. “We don’t preach politics. We present the information sometimes, but we don’t preach about it. The politics can make a good groove, though. We play with politics in our music, throwing information here and there and everywhere.

“Our music is about survival,” he added. “Whatever you need to be in order to survive. We tell our audience to do all you can do about something and try to survive.”

But Clinton is outspoken when it comes to drugs. When asked what he thought about drugs, he replied “I just think about them. I think about them a lot.” His statement quickly became obvious because every question after that worked its way back to drugs in some manner or another.

“I think all drugs should be legalized, not just marijuana,” he said. “Less people would do it because it wouldn’t be hip anymore. But I think drugs make creativity possible. I think they open our minds to different experiences and ideas.

“But it depends on what kinds of drugs and how you get them,” he added. “When it became a buy this, buy that thing, with all the extra bullshit in it to make it stretch further, that’s when creativity was sacrificed.”

Clinton claims that “acid led to awareness.” He points to ’60s musicians who used the drug to influence their music, which later went on to affect foreign policy.

He believes these musicians also fueled the current desire for drugs because “it was inevitable that people understood what was said about drugs and that they would embrace them.”

Has Clinton done drugs himself?

“Yes,” he replied, “they are good to me, too.”

Perhaps this explains Clinton’s insistence that aliens walk among humankind, doing drugs to expand their minds while being protected from detection by the government. Or maybe drugs are the real reason why he thinks he was chosen from another place and another time to spread funk throughout the galaxy.

“I’ll believe anything,” Clinton said. “I think anything is possible. I believe that music is a drug. Like drugs, it opens your mind to changes and sets the conditions in order to see the changes.”

Whether you choose to open your mind to the changes drugs induce, Clinton hopes you will come out and change your mind about funk music.

“We’re talking about 25 to 40 funkateers on stage,” he said, “and a lot of audience members giving up the funk, funking their booties off, some with booties in their hands, for three or four hours.

“At the end of the millennium,” he added, “we will be going back to the Dog Star. We’ll take a break in the continuum and then continue into space. We came from space, so we will eventually go back for more funking, more funking and even more funking.

“It will be the same thing,” he continued, “so maybe it will feel like a little deja-vu experience for some of my people. But I promise that it will be funky.”

George Clinton will be showing all the dope dogs where he got that funk from when he stops at Stephens Auditorium tonight at 8 p.m.

Tickets are still available at $21.50, so aquaboogie your way to the nearest Ticketmaster outlet.