Thinking About James Brown

I just downloaded The One: The Life of James Brown by R.J. Smith onto my Kindle, and preparing to dive into this biography has got me thinking. Our world is so different from the one that The Famous Flames and the young James Brown inhabited. Segregation conferred a moral authority that gave defiant Black men like James Brown and the incomparable Malcolm X the power to shape culture in ways that seem almost unimaginable today.

Young people-white college kids, at least, whose ranks I eventually joined-were amused by the theatrics of Abbie Hoffman (though few actually read Steal This Book) and instinctively understood that the academic arguments of Tom Hayden and the rants of Paul Krassner revealed genuine fault lines in establishment thinking. But it was the anguish and rage that Malcolm, James Brown, Huey Newton, and other emergent Black leaders brought that, in many cases, spurred students to shut down campuses and change the course of a war.

What spiritual compass guides the Occupy movement? The right has brilliantly marginalized poor people. They simply do not exist in mainstream culture. There is no rallying point, no locus of righteous anger around which to sustain a countercultural movement. Sure, Blacks and Latinos disproportionately populate the underclass, but we have…Sanford and Son-excuse me, I got caught in the time machine for a moment-Tyler Perry’s House of Pain. How dare the left suggest that even a trace of bias exists in America today?

I’ve spent quite a bit of time working in prisons over the last several years. The course I developed uses music as a lamp to mine connections between cultures that, on the surface, might seem to have little in common. The recidivism rate in New Jersey is about 43%. That means many of the guys I work with will be coming back into the system, as I jokingly tell them, “to do graduate work.” Maybe—just maybe-if a student buys into the idea that without Mozart’s Don Giovanni there would be no Scarface, or comes to feel that Ado Annie, the second lead in Oklahoma!-a good girl with a naughty streak-is, in a way, Rihanna’s grandmother, one of them will feel comfortable seeking out broader horizons upon release, perhaps even landing a good job because they’ve connected with a hiring agent with whom they’ve been able to engage. Along the way, if he comes to understand that Stravinsky and Shakur-artists from radically different times and backgrounds-were dealing with the same set of human emotions, he might just change the world.

My studio is ringed with album covers from my youth. I look up at a King release: The Unbeatable James Brown and the Famous Flames. Wow. The cover proclaims that the record is brought to us in VIVID SOUND! I can hear the opening cut, “Try Me,” in my mind. The track starts with a splice of an MC introducing the band at a live event:

“Ladies and gentlemen, without no doubt… the-e-ese are the JBs!”

3/16/2012