Born in 1933, Brown learned his hard-headed ways in a 1950s music business that was a rough twine of Mafia hegemony and outta-sight profits. He believed in the redemptive power of hard work as others believed in the blood of the lamb. A true believer in the do-it-yourself ethos of the American Dream, he didn’t see why race should be a barrier to getting the good things in life. Hard work was how he shaped his destiny in a sectarian world, his eventual success the product of near tyrannical drive and will. He could be hard work personally, too. He rarely took no for an answer, whether it was a question of getting an encore, sleeping with him, or signing away your royalties. In his music as in his wiles, Brown was no suave pinkie-ring seducer. He had none of the snake-charmer sweetness of a later generation of soul men. If the key to musical seduction is hiding all artifice behind a carefully disheveled front of natural élan, Brown took another road, emphasizing all the stuff other artists tucked away. Listening to Brown’s classic hits—“Cold Sweat,” “Out of Sight,” “Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine”—you could be eavesdropping on some 11th-hour rehearsal, the air jumpy with back chat, barked instructions, and flip, musicianly code. You can all but hear the effort that goes into summoning up the bumpy and volatile groove.
Brown’s music seems fully dependent on its front man, entirely led by his sandpaper rasp—but if you want to dig its secret flow, you have to listen down past Brown himself into a song’s boiler-room frequencies, where the bass and drums make things shake. If you’ve always been baffled by just what it is a bass player does, play “Sex Machine” and try tuning your ear to the sinuously pivotal bass line William “Bootsy” Collins lays down; bass and guitar supply the song’s true harmony, with Brown’s vocalizing so much scattershot percussion. This music is hard work, in the best sense: you can feel the sweat, see the crooked smiles on the musicians’ faces. It seems to bypass all rationale and go straight to the sacroiliac, its emphasis never quite where you expect it to be. Brown had his own code for this hypnotic way of playing off the beat: he called it The One. (...)
Brown could fake a lot of things, but he couldn’t fake vulnerability or regret or confusion. He didn’t do weakness or softness. He was James Brown! He was the One, and he always got what he wanted. Unlike other troubled soul-men like Marvin Gaye and Al Green, Brown had no Church in his soul. Sure, he put over some songs like an old-time preacher, but that was projective shtick, just like he borrowed bits of flash from drag queens and tap dancers in the street. He didn’t need God because he worshipped at his own rugged altar. His ego was impregnable. His music doesn’t have the carnal/devotional tension that marks the work of the greatest soul singers, many of whom were made personally unhappy by its grip but found a way to project the spiritual malaise into songs of unearthly bliss and strangeness. What’s missing from Brown’s music is any hint or breath of otherness, sweetness, light. His is a roar of certainty, done deals, and finality.
by Ian Penman, City Journal | Read more:
Photo: Gilles Petard/Getty Images
