James Brown’s obituary in The Guardian has to go down as one of the truly inadequate moments in journalism at that otherwise great paper. It’s worth a read, if only to understand how difficult it is to get people to do anything other than drink on Christmas Day. If he’d died a day later or before, I can only think it would have been much better.
The last two decades were not perhaps so kind to JB, and so the “obit” reflects the genuine tragedy of a man whose colossal contributions became invisible to many. It’s a terrible, inadequate way to memorialize a giant, but it does reflect a reality. Every compilation of obscure 70’s funk acts that gets turntable time is, in a way, a chip away at the titanic achievement of Butane James and the Famous Flames. That stuff may have a groove, but it only serves to confuse the all-bases-covered superhuman inventiveness of James Brown with lesser beings. Today’s ears have lost the quintessential James Brown, for whom perfection seemed to be a starting point.
A bit like feminism or the civil rights movements being inconsequential to people who enjoy the benefits they bestowed, what JB did so completely changed music that it is very difficult, even for those of us who witnessed the change to understand how profoundly separate the pre- and post-JB worlds are. Today, there are people old enough to write for The Guardian, whose entire lives have been in the transformed world that James Brown created.The first time I saw him, on television, doing “Think” (IIRC) was one of those jaw-dropping moments that literally alter your conciousness. Seeing the Slide for the first time, seeing him spin, then drop to the floor, and rise up as if on an express elevator, then snap perfectly into the groove – and what a groove! – eclipsed everything I knew about music. It even made me alter my understanding of what the human body was … no-one had ever moved like that, it seemed. In retrospect, his dancing was a door that opened in my brain, and every visually stunning, totally unexpected move from seeing Thriller, to the slow-mo of six million dollar man, to Carrie Moss in the Matrix’s 360, to Chop-Socky Ninjas in full flight – you name it – went through the door that JB opened. It was just a way that he changed your expectation of what a body would or could do.
The difference was, he was doing it live.
I saw him live for the first time at a time – around 1979, when punk and new wave had swept the taste for funky grooves away – and in a place – Vancouver, BC, not known for it’s thriving black culture – that in a way this was incredibly fortunate. The focus was off JB, who had seemed first over-the-top when he adopted his “Godfather of Soul – G.F.O.S.” personality. Then, when George Clinton’s wackier antics came into view, judged by the standards of over-the-top, Brown seemed eclipsed. But cooler friends living in NYC were in the middle of a Parliament/George Clinton/Prince funk revival, and their awareness of JB was growing: even though he was old, they said JB still was worth checking out.
Understatement, to say the least. The club was about the size of a living room, with a tiny revolving stage. It was called the Cave, and the interior was a mass of decrepit papier mache stalagmites and stalactites. Into this poured JB’s unbelievable band. And after the requisite build up, out came THE GODFATHER. Despite the tiny audience – of maybe eighty people, I think I was the only one there younger than thirty – and the squalid surroundings, JB launched into a show as though he were on stage at Madison Square Garden. It was electrifying. The Slide was there, and the effect live was just as mind-bending as it had been on telly. But the main thing was the music. I had never really understood, I think, what the word ‘tight’ really meant. Sex Machine suddenly meant something, and it was humbling. Here was this old guy – well, in retrospect, he was probably 46—moving, dancing, and singing like I had never, and would never. And christ, it was fun.
The problem that Brown faced was the reverse of most performers: as he got older, his music became more, not less relevant. There was a time in the Eighties when his music just seemed to be the only true, relevant music, and that included the records he’d made in 1963, and the records he was making with Afrika Bambaata. Even people like KRS1, Run-DMC and Public Enemy were so clearly, beautifully indebted to him – and not just for the samples – that JB seemed like the source of everything they did, too. Instead of nice, docile old guys wanting to see their past hero play diminished versions of what once was, James Brown had millions of us, waiting for him to do what he had done at the Apollo, twentyfive years before, but more so – and he was already thirty then.
I saw JB a few times after that. People were often disappointed. Having created the most influential sounds, rhythms and moves for forty years, he now had to live in the shadow of not only his own past glory, but the new generations that took on what he had made, often without awareness or attribution. Eventually, the new, younger players could do it better, but they had to wait until JB himself was well over 60 to do so. But what they couldn’t do, not in a million years, is invent it all. And no-one else ever – EVER – screamed like that.
Having seen him when he still had it, it was easy to see what each one of the moves, the act with the cape, all that really was. James Brown said it – it was a Brand New Bag. His music will always be with us—the Greatest.
