FAREWELL JAMES BROWN

I'll admit it: I'm not a huge James Brown fan. I mean, I think I've only got like one JB album, and that's just something that I ripped into MP3 format from somebody else's CD. I suppose it's because I didn't really learn how great he was until I was well into my twenties, at which point I was buying almost exclusively jazz albums--I've meant for years to bolster my music collection with bunches of Soul's Godfather, but I've never gotten round to it.

He was great, however, my own indifference as a music collector notwithstanding. It's pretty hard to listen to him without recognizing not only his influence on other musicians, but that he was a genius in his own right. Further, his band was always as tight as a jazz combo, or Frank Zappa, or Steely Dan, in an era when hippie sloppiness was too damned common. They call him "the Godfather of Soul" but without Brown we wouldn't have funk, no Bootsy Collins or George Clinton. Hell, hip-hop, for that matter, would be much less interesting if there had never been a James Brown. And one should never forget what a fantastic dancer he was, either.

But like I said, I've only come to understand all this within the last decade or so. However, that doesn't mean I didn't have JB touching my life before I really knew what he was about. Like this totally bizarre performance of "Living in America" from the film Rocky IV. Or his role as the grooving and singing Reverend Cleophus James in The Blues Brothers. Great stuff that, I'm sure, affected my own personal aesthetic development in multiple ways.

While I'm at it, here's another Youtube JB clip, a black and white television performance of "Sex Machine" segueing into "Soul Power." It's well worth watching, if only so you can see how totally tight and funky his band was back then. You know, he would dock his musicians' pay if they screwed up during performance; obviously, it did the trick.

One thing troubles me, though. Throughout all the rightly deserved media praise JB's getting after his death a few days ago, very few talking heads and reporters seem to be mentioning his song "Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud," which is probably the hippest civil rights anthem ever put on record, which makes him unarguably a Real Artist. Anyway, here's a video of a live performance of the song, where JB gets a mostly white audience of youthful hipsters onstage with him to recite repeatedly the phrase "I'm black and I'm proud." You gotta love that.



Farewell James Brown.

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