Archive for March 10th, 2004

A few years ago, I got into a discussion about James Brown with some of my relatives. One uncle was of the opinion that James doesn’t deserve all the credit he gets. “His band made him,” my uncle said. I didn’t debate the issue with him, since we were on totally different levels of knowledge and appreciation where James is concerned. That is to say, while my uncle may have actually been around to see James Brown perform in his heyday, I doubt that he has done the amount of reading and research that I have. So he may know James, but he don’t know James like I know James.

In Funk, the Music, the Rhythm, and the People of the One, Rickey Vincent states, “…the central locus of all funk was James Brown.” While I absolutely agree with that idea, I think it’s important to clear up some misconceptions. First, James Brown did not have a band. Allowing for small changes in personnel in recording sessions, he had three different bands. That’s what my uncle didn’t understand. The group that recorded “Cold Sweat” is very different from the group that recorded “Sex Machine,” which is again very different from the group that recorded “The Payback.” So what I think I want to do is look at the different what I think are the best songs of each era and break down the different manifestations of the funk that came about.

The eras as I describe them here are based on the following Polydor records reissues of James’ work:

Foundations of Funk: 1965-1969
Funk Power: 1970
Make It Funky: The Big Payback1971-1975

There are some other good anthologies out there, but this set is top-notch. Anybody who wants to get a good in-depth understanding of what James Brown’s work was about should invest in these. I like these principally because on every disc there is some previously unreleased work, which provides the sharpest contrast to the the hits we already know.

While I appreciate James Brown’s early work, including some of his most recognizable hits, Please, Please, Please, I Got You (I Feel Good), and Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag, those don’t necessarily constitute funk for me. I can’t help but like the personnel because there’s a Tooley in there playing the trumpet. (I don’t know if there’s any relation. I doubt it, but it’s nice to imagine sometimes.) In them are elements of funk, but it wasn’t until 1967 that James kicked in the door of the funk era with “Cold Sweat.”

The first thing to notice about Cold Sweat is the One. Rickey Vincent writes extensively about this in Funk, so I will not attempt to retread his points. What I will say is that the listener must pay attention to the fact that the accent is on the first beat of the first measure. The listener should also notice that all the instruments come off the One as well. That’s the engine that drives Cold Sweat. The importance of the change in emphasis from the 2-4 to the One cannot be overstated. Everything was different after that.

The song that perhaps illustrates the changeover best is “Funky Drummer.” At the beginning of FD, the drummer and band use a rhythm that was typical of early r&b/rock & roll (which are at times indistinguishable.) Both the snare and the punch of the horns is on the two and the four beats for the first 3:10 of the song. Then there is a middle part, during which the drummer doubles down on the one but no clear pattern is established. Then, at 4:06, we get the first appearance of the Funky Drummer beat, which has been sampled so many times. The pattern is, of course, most obvious in the drum solo. If we allow the onomatopoetic values of ‘Boom’ for the kick (bass) drum, ‘Bap’ for the snare, ’sssp’ for the high hat, and ‘Chicka’ for a quick one –two comprised of a tap of the high hat with a light hit of the snare, then the beat would go like this:

Boom boom BAP chicka chicka boom Bap sssp

This description is, of course, simplified, since I cannot verbally represent sounds layered sounds.

Now, back to Cold Sweat, which preceded Funky Drummer by three years. The early James was marked by a massive horn section. (Unfortunately, all my CDs with the liner notes are up in Philly so I can’t break down the personnel like I want to) But suffice it to say that he could effectively split them up into brass and woodwinds. In reality, it’s probably best to say that he had an orchestra without the strings. That’s how many people he had on stage. With all those people, control is a must and control is what he had. Everybody was locked in. Cold Sweat is not different from his other songs in that respect, but the tightness of the band on that track is unmatched.

Keeping Cold Sweat in mind, that era produced my favorite James Brown song, and the one that I think best typifies everything James and the boys had going on at that time, “Let A Man Come In and Do the Popcorn.” This is the one. Nobody really knows this song; except for the Foundations of Funk compilation, it’s not on any CD I’ve found. It wasn’t a big hit. Nevertheless, this is not just a James Brown song, it’s a meta-James Brown song; to understand this record is to understand the principles behind all James Brown records.

First, let’s deal with lyrics: the lyrics in this song don’t really make sense. This song was not written to express a thought, it was written as a conduit for a groove. Hence gems like, “Waterboy/the boy with the bucket/if you didn’t want the job/you shouldn’t oughta tuck it”

Musically, we have the evidence of the orchestral horn arrangement. On one hand we have one set of horns (woodwinds, I think) doing a slow descent, then the brass comes behind them and does a faster descent, then they all punch out circular round to close out the measure. This display is all about control. There are two tempos at work that get combined into one. The bass line stays consistent throughout, and there is no improvizational drum solo. James exhorts the drummer to “gimme a little bit mo’” at one point in the song, but there’s nothing like Funky Drummer going on. There is, however, one trombone solo.

The reason I think “Let A Man Come In…” is the best James Brown song is that it represents the tight focus of Cold Sweat, and it also displays James’ gospel roots. If someone is familiar with the asthetics of Black preaching, it’s all present here; all the way down to the shrieks of “Early! In the mornin’!” that would be heard in any Easter Sunday sermon. Also present are James’ band-instructing grunts, yowlps, and hollers. It’s wild because when you listen to the song, it seems as if the tempo changes, but it really doesn’t. It’s a mirage that appears because of the massive amount of energy that is infused into the song.

Maybe next time, I will break it down a little further. Right now, my brain is frying from trying to put these observations into words. It’s one thing to point out what’s going on to somebody who is listening to a song. It’s another thing altogether to try to explain aspects of a song while assuming that the reader has never heard the song, and probably never will. Having said that, I recommend that anybody who wants to hear some good James Brown records get the Foundations of Funk cd, if nothing else. Then you can hear Let A Man Come In. I will definitely break down the 2nd era next time.

This is why I can’t seriously do politics: most of the time, it seems that people are so entrenched in their opinions that they refuse to acknowledge that there are other legitimate options and thought processes. In both of these pieces, I’m just like, come on!

In reading over some of the headlines at Black Electorate, I was particularly struck by the article about the woman who seems to want some type of remuneration from Brown University because of some dealings they may have had in slavery. What’s the point in that, really? Brown is an Ivy League university. I could be wrong, but I find it hard to believe that many of the Black students there are being held back or otherwise systematically discriminated against. If you’re Black and communicate well, and have even a modicum of intellegence, a university is almost like a utopia. Sure, there may be an individual incident here and there, but I don’t think that those situations represent the total experience. Those are just some bumps in an otherwise smooth road.

Let’s say that the panel finds that the founders of Brown University did have some dealings in slavery and that they did profit substantially. Nothing in the article indicates that this is so, but just for the sake of argument, let’s say it happened like that. What happens now? Do they cut a check to all the Black students at Brown? If that’s the case, let me transfer right now! But seriously, one of the difficulties I have with reparations is the question of who gets them. Would they go to all Black alumni of Brown? Would they go to all Black students who were enrolled at the time of the decision? Would it wind up being a scholarship? And then there’s the problem of determining who is actually Black. What’s the definition? Who sets it? The NAACP?

Situations like this make me really believe in John McWhorter’s “Victimology” framework. He says that one of the main things holding Black people back is their embracing of victimhood. This situation with Brown seems to be just that. Let’s look at something that happened over 200 years ago and see how somebody took advantage of people who looked like us.

I’m not one of those people who believes that everything is okay now, and that racism doesn’t exist or anything like that. For that matter, neither does McWhorter. I do think, however, that plumbing history for examples of racism does nothing to make the lives of Black people better today. To be sure, such things should be noted, since they provide a context for what we know and believe about America, but at the end of the day, that stuff happened a long time ago. Whether the founders of Brown made money off slaves or not, I doubt that it has any impact on the Black students who are there now. In the same way, the fact that I probably could not have gone to the U. of Maryland 100 years ago has no bearing on what I do while I am there now.

In short, I think that the problems we face in the Black community cannot be solved by looking back at what happened in the past. That old saying about people not knowing their past is true (whichever saying you know, that’s the one I meant.) but it’s also true that you can’t drive forward if you keep your eyes on the rearview mirror. The racist practices of the past are bad, but they have maybe 3% stopping power. Racist practices of today are bad but they have, maybe, 22% stopping power. That other 75%, that’s totally in our control. What Nicholas, John, and the rest of the Browns that founded the University, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and even George Wallace and Bull Connor did is not keeping kids today from reading and learning mathematics to the appropriate level for their grade. There’s a place for discussing the effects of racism, but this is not it.

On the other side of the aisle, I read an archived article about Black History Month by Mychal Massie. Overall, I agree with his premise. However, smack dab in the middle of the piece, he writes, “During Black History Month, black children have Paul Robeson, Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. DuBois – all of whom were purveyors of bitterness – force fed to them.” I have two problems here: first, I don’t think most Black students could identify two of the three. I’m assuming that they would probably be able to pick out Marcus Garvey because of his military-style regalia, but that may be a huge assumption on my part. Second, and more disturbing to me is the way he singlehandedly dismisses them because he disagrees with their politics.

If there’s anything that bothers me about the discourse of political thought it’s the fact that we act like only people who agree with us are worth knowing or learning about. Now, in Massie’s defense, he does mention three people whose names I am unfamilar with, James A. Harris, William Lester Jr., William B. Purvis, and Capt. Robert Lawrence Jr., so there is some research for me to do. The contributions of those four men notwithstanding, that a Black intellectual of any stripe can just casually dismiss W.E.B. DuBois or Paul Robeson is unconscionable. This is particularly true when discussing them as people Black students should, or in Massie’s case should not, learn about. Marcus Garvey is an important figure too, but he doesn’t resonate with me like DuBois or Robeson.

Students need to learn about DuBois because they need to understand that Black folks most certainly do have a heritage as intellectuals. And I’m not talking about Black(?) folks way, way back in Africa somewhere, I’m talking about in these United States. Now, I’m not necessarily comfortable with DuBois’ embrace of socialism, but I think that it represents a teaching opportunity. The teacher could engage the students on whether they think his ideological responses to the racism that he saw in his day (might the fact that he had to go to Germany to get his PhD because no school in the States would accept a Black PhD candidate have had something to do with his “bitterness”?) were warranted and whether such thoughts are appropriate now.

As for Paul Robeson, I am just aghast that anybody could just casually dismiss him. If I had known who he was when I was younger, Paul Robeson would have been my role model. He did everything. Paul Robeson was the 3rd Black student at Rutgers, having earned an academic scholarship. While there, he earned 15 varsity letters and was a 2-time All American in football. In addition to numerous academic awards, he graduated valedictorian. That’s just college. That’s before he graduated law school or started performing. What more could someone want to point to in one person? He is the perfect example for students that one need not give up in one area to do well in another. Again, while I understand that Massie’s objection to Robeson being taught during BHM has to do with Robeson’s political positions later in his life, I think that such thinking can short-circuit the learning process. It is every thinking person’s right to interrogate Robeson’s political actions. Whether one decides that his actions were valid or not is immaterial. All students would do well to learn about and learn from Paul Robeson.

As an aside about Robeson, while we all venerate Muhammad Ali for standing up for what he believed even though it cost him his title, we only celebrate him today because he won his title back. Most people don’t know about Paul Robeson because he never got back on top and as such, does not fit the story arc into which we typically cast our historic figures. At least now we’re starting to recognize his greatness. He’s on a postage stamp…looking like Sidney Poitier.