Like I said, I don’t want to derail the thread any further and my intent on the other thread wasn’t to start a heated debate, but since you brought that up, and as I mentioned above, I’m from Europe (France, specifically), and, yes, I said above most of my friends know about P-Funk, but that’s because they’re music buffs and because there was this huge P-Funk revival (in great part thanks to hip-hop and samples) among French hipsters in the 90s, so P-Funk became “cool” in some circles in my youth (and so did Bill in others because of his electronic, dub and world music output, but that indeed remained more niche because, obviously, you just can’t play too much Bill Laswell at a party, but it’s true for a lot of music in those genres).
But (sadly), none of the P-Funk acts ever had a hit in France. Most “ordinary” people here (of the X/Y generations, at least, I can’t speak for Gen Zs and Alphas, but I suspect it’s worse with them—I’m 5 years older than Danny, BTW, so it was a little uncalled for to be accused of being “less and less acknowledging and knowledgeable” because of “generational naivete”, but whatever…), most “ordinary” people here, I was saying, haven’t heard the names George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Parliament, Funkadelic, Maceo Parker, etc. I know, because I don’t just hang out with hipsters, and clearly there’s a line between what “laymen” know and what music buffs know. Those same ordinary French people that you’d randomly stop in the street, if you asked them, would most likely know of James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Prince, Stevie Wonder, Janet Jackson, Santana, Barry White, Lionel Ritchie, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, Kool & The Gang or Earth, Wind & Fire (and even bloody Shalamar!), but they wouldn’t know George and Bootsy from Bill (and, believe it or not, they wouldn’t know of Sly Stone either!). Now they’d all know Snoop’s What’s My Name? and other rap songs sampling/interpolating P-Funk, but they’d have no idea where that came from. P-Funk and Sly Stone never charted, thus never had any open cultural impact here. It’s a niche thing for “cool” people (and that’s also why I was privileged enough to attend 3 nights in a row of George Clinton at a small Paris venue, with an audience of only a few hundreds, in 1995).
The Western world isn’t as unified as it seems. No one in France has the slightest idea who Garth Brooks, Roberto Carlos, George Strait or Journey are, yet they’re listed on Wikipedia as some of the best-selling artists of all time. Barely anyone here knows of, say, Fleetwood Mac or Steely Dan either. Yet, I believe most people in the US knows those acts (save, maybe, Carlos, who’s Brazilian).
And it gets worse when you get out of the West. I was living and working in India when David Bowie and Prince died, and all my colleagues, when I mentioned it, were like: “Who?” (one even asked me, about Bowie, "Do you mean David Guetta?—Lawd, was that embarrassing!!). This would have been unthinkable in the US or Europe. Then I was l living and working in China the next school year, when Leonard Cohen and George Michael died, and the same thing happened: none of my Chinese students or colleagues knew who those people were.
So, yeah, despite my—I hope, I’m trying to learn—reasonably good understanding of African-American music History, my perceptions are very much biased by me being French. Which doesn’t undermine Danny’s argument: yes, the P-Funk collective’s impact on American music certainly was much more significant than Bill Laswell’s, and yes, if you surveyed every person on Earth, George’s name would be more known. Now is that all that matters? That’s another discussion to be had in another thread, so I’ll leave it at that 
I’ll reply to the other posts about Bill Laswell later, and I’ll try to keep the conversation (in this thread) about him from this point on
