We're Not Who You Think We Are
Album: Star Time!
Year: 1970
James Brown, The Godfather of Soul!!
This, of course, was Brown’s best branding effort of all. Even better than “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business. After all, if they ever did come up with the work-ethic rating system, you could be displaced from the top of the hardest-working charts, but once you’ve become Soul’s Godfather, it’s a lifetime thing.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #725: James Brown – “Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved”
Album: Star Time!
Year: 1970
One of the most cleverly titled songs in Brown’s entire canon, “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine,” deploys the parenthesis in the title with the same deadly accuracy his brand-new guitarist plays the lick that powers the song.
That new guitarist, one Phelps “Catfish” Collins, was instrumental in Brown moving his music away from the horns and towards a smaller, but no less funky sound.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #724: James Brown – “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine”
Album: Star Time!
Year: 1969
It doesn’t matter whether James Brown came up with or allowed himself to be called “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business.” In fact, it doesn’t matter whether or not he was: I mean, how do you actually rate that? Is there some kind of show business work scale? Or Top Ten List?
And note that he wasn’t just the hardest-working man in Soul or the hardest-working man in Music. Nope: James Motherfucking Brown was the hardest working man in all of Show Business! He worked harder than Lucille Ball and Jimmy Stewart and Jerry Lee Lewis. He worked harder than Willie Mays and Walter Cronkite and Norman Mailer.
Album: I Can’t Stand Myself When You Touch Me
Year: 1967
James Brown was absolutely on fire in 1967.
And on no song did that fire burn hotter than the absolutely scorching “Get It Together,” which takes the super funky groove of songs like “Cold Sweat” and then ups the tempo to a ridiculous degree.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #722: James Brown – “Get it Together”
Album: Cold Sweat
Year: 1967
Everything is percussion. That, of course, is the formal innovation of James Brown’s mid-1960s funk: to treat every single instrument in the room as a percussion instrument.
And with its stop-start horns, bass, and drums, and of course the chickenscratch guitars of Jimmy Nolen and Country Kellum, “Cold Sweat” might be the epitome of that innovation.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #721: James Brown – “Cold Sweat”
Album: James Brown Sings Raw Soul
Year: 1966
“Don’t Be A Dropout,” has often been credited as James Brown’s first socially conscious song, but he didn’t even write it. A guy named Burt Jones wrote, which is probably why it’s a weird hybrid of Brown’s driving funk and a flat-out pop song.
And, as always, with a song that’s so preachy, I wonder if it persuaded any kids — black or white — to actually stay in school. Like, they were teetering on the verge of dropping out, but then “Don’t Be a Dropout” came on the radio, and they were all like, “nah, man, I’m going to stay in school.”
Though I should point out that it wasn’t just James Brown: Otis Redding also recorded a pretty great song on the same subject, so maybe it was useful.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #720: James Brown – “Don’t Be A Dropout”
Album: James Brown Sings Raw Soul
Year: 1966
While a lot of James Brown’s funkier tunes stopped and started seemingly upon their own free will, “Money Won’t Change You” was the exact opposite: once it found its groove, it hung on for dear life.
So it was all double-time drums, liquid organ and horn blerts over and over and over and over again world without end amen. While I could see where this kind of repetition could drive folks nuts, to me, it’s no so far off from what The Velvet Underground would be doing — albeit a lot less funkier — at around the same time.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #719: James Brown – “Money Won’t Change You”
Album: Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag
Year: 1965
Among the many many other things it’s always been, “Papa’s Got a Brand-New Bag” might have the most prescient song title that has ever existed.
Sure, there might have been other funk songs — Brown himself made a case for 1964’s “Out of Sight” — but at the very very least, “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” was the first funk song that proclaimed itself as a funk song.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #718: James Brown – “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”
Album: Please, Please, Please
Year: 1956
I didn’t really discover James Brown until 1991. Well, that’s not exactly true: you don’t exactly discover James Brown. As one of the most important musicians of the past 100 years — and really, only Bob Dylan and Miles Davis might be more important — he’s always been there.
Which might be why it took so long: songs like “Please, Please, Please,” “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” and “I Feel Good” were such an integral part of the popular music firmament that it was hard to wrap my head around them as discrete entities in and of themselves. (And in fact, “I Feel Good” has been ruined by the seemingly endless usage of it in film trailers, TV shows and the like.)
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #717: James Brown – “Please, Please, Please”
You can talk about genres, artists, albums, or even songs, but sometimes what keeps us coming back to music is the discovery of the transcendent musical moment. For me, “the moment” is the part of the song that fully and utterly engages me; the reason that I keep coming back to it.
I’m not necessarily talking about hooks here, because the purpose of a hook is the draw you into a song. I’m really talking more about traps: the part of a song that that keeps you there.
The is the third in a series. The first one had 25, the second one has 24, this one has 23.
Every single moment I’ve listed below kills me single every time I hear it.
Oh, and this isn’t in any kind of order, despite the numbering.