James Brown: Moves Yes, Music No
On the tube the other night I stumbled across an E Channel-style countdown of the greatest dancers in the history of American pop music. It wasn’t surprising that most of the stars who topped this chart were African-American; it was a little eyebrow-raising that the list included so few women. Most startling to me was that numero uno was James Brown. I had expected Michael Jackson, whose moon-walk in my growing-up memories is the equivalent of the Neil Armstrong’s actual bounce across Earth’s cheesy satellite.
This countdown’s film clips, however, proved unassailably the superiority of Brown’s rhythmic interpretations: the little twitch that built to a bigger gibber that exploded into hip-shaking joy. Of Brown’s capability as a musician, by contrast, history is proving to be less kind. The novelist Jonathan Lethem, in this weekend’s Guardian, writes: “As the men who play on stage with him will hasten to explain to you, James Brown is, sadly, not a musician. His devoted and long-suffering players, all of whom revere their boss as a creator and star beyond all comparison, have confessed how they always sniggered into their sleeves during his agonizing and agonized organ solos.” Click here for more of Lethem’s pop-music ruminations.
