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If you're awake and on this planet, you've no doubt heard: James Brown is dead at 73 of a heart attack following pneumonia
at a hospital in Atlanta.
In classic show-stopping style, he died the morning of December 25. He was the top news story on Christmas Day.
What can we possibly say about the Godfather of Soul, Mr. Dynamite, Soul Brother Number One, the Hardest Working Man in Show
Business? Not a lot, I think; it would be like trying to make pithy eyewitness commentary upon witnessing a supernova. If
you were there, you know. If you weren't, go get your hands on Star Time, the most complete James Brown CD package
that I know of (although an archive-packed and likely expensive boxed set is sure to follow his death), and watch every JB
video you can find on YouTube and elsewhere, and you'll begin to get the idea.
When it comes to a musical force of such cosmic magnitude, I guess only a few things need to be noted for the record (both
those puns are accidental):
James Brown invented funk. Really, he did. He took R&B and rock & roll and volcanically compressed them into the super-syncopated
mama-jamma of a backbeat we now take for granted in any dance music possessed of a monster groove. Plus the sassy synchro-stabbing
horns, the orgasmatronic dance steps, the dagger-pointed verse licks (with lines so deadly they had to be punctuated with
"Hunh!"), the stage drama (you haven't lived til you've seen him do The Cape), and all the rest. Any taxonomy of high-powered
dance-pop since the 1960s leads straight back to James Brown.
James Brown influenced everybody: Prince. The Rolling Stones. The Beatles (think the screams in "Revolution" or "Hey Jude"
would have happened in a James Brown-less world?). The Temptations. Stevie Wonder. Jimi Hendrix. Van Morrison. Michael Jackson.
Aerosmith. George Clinton. Bootsie Collins (who played bass on Brown's "Sex Machine" and went on to co-found P-Funk). Miles
Davis. Lou Reed. Madonna. Van Halen. Living Colour. Britney Spears. AC/DC. Tina Turner. Justin Timberlake. Back-street bar
or mega-arena, it doesn't matter; any pop act trying to kick some musical bootie onstage these days is paying tribute in some
way to the Godfather.
James Brown laid down a major slab of the foundation for rap and hip-hop. Listen to The Scream (we're talking way before Howard
Dean), that perfectly-pulsed scatlike sweaty-sandpaper JB wail, and his peppering of split-second-timed "ungh!"s and "hah!"s,
and his unbearably danceable talk-sung band patter, and you've got the precursor to every rapper and slammer and styler from
The Last Poets to Saul Williams to Eminem.
I saw James Brown in concert three times: once in the early 80s, once in about 2002, and about six months ago in June of 2006.
The first two were near-religious experiences of funkified get-down mania. The power of the man and his bands drove people
about out of their skulls. The final time I saw him, last June, he looked, sounded and acted very, very old. And why not?
Fifty years of nuclear-powered one-nighters is more than we are entitled to ask of one man.
He will lie in state onstage Thursday at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, where he got his start, and Saturday at a public funeral
in his hometown of Augusta, Georgia, where he will be buried.
As always at a James Brown event, the lines are going to be long.
© Bruce A. Jacobs (Posted 12/27/06)
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