My review of "The CD of JB", a James Brown compilation, and a meditation on his influence in my life and on popular music in general.

The "Godfather of Soul" just died, and so today's writing experiment involves writing whatever floats to the surface for the length of The CD of JB (a 1985 compilation), tightening that, and then posting any interesting sections to this page. So this will be rough, naive, and perhaps somewhat factually inaccurate, but I'm posting it anyhow, because otherwise I'll never get back to this project, and so here we are.

The liner notes inform me that "Spanning several generations of musical styles and record buyers, James Brown's prodigious output inevitably and continually provokes debate between different generations of his fans." Well, time will take care of that little problem, if it hasn't already. Regardless, this compilation oozes assertive confidence. It amazes me how much James Brown did with so little. I am preparing to record some of my own songs for the first time in twenty years, and I am learning a lot from studying his spare use of instrumentation and vocals. In that sense, it's not so far removed from Colossal Youth, the Young Marble Giants' quiet yet enduring 1979 contribution to the post-punk canon -- and one of my all-time favorite recordings of popular music. Unlike most of their post-punk compatriots, and more like their Welsh compatriots Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck, the Marbles were strongly influenced by black rhythm and blues music. (Am I the only listener who has ever noticed how one of the guitar riffs in "Wurlitzer Jukebox" evokes the intro to "Soul Man"?)

(Oh, and while I'm listening to that, am I the only person who thinks the new version 11 update to Windows Media Player [which I'm now nicknaming "WIMP"] pretty much sucks? Just curious.)

One of the things I like about this James Brown disc is that it isn't perfectly balanced -- the vocals are mixed way up. Some of the tracks sound like party jams. On the first track ("Super Bad"), the trumpet gets a chance to improvise over a solid foundation of repetitive bass, guitar, and handclaps. I don't think there are even any drums on this track. Amazing.

Get on down.

Looky here ... looka that ... ovah there ... gotta have a fun good time....

I got soul ... and I'm super bad.

I remember hearing the Talking Heads' last album, Naked (1989), and thinking how the first cuts that jumped out at me were the two that had a James Brown-style brass section and David Byrne's JB-homage vocals. Byrne didn't replicate James Brown's squeals, though, which sound like he's imitating, variously, a trumpet or a sax.

Jump back ... I wanna kiss myself.

The music often features short, staccato bursts of brass punctuated with chromatic riffs that are astonishing for their smoothness and brevity -- long before synths, back when Tina was still with Ike, these guys were a lean mean rhythm machine.

There were times when I would listen to this CD as I laid out the zine I published for 17 issues in the '90s, a sex zine called Black Sheets, described by a local free paper at the time as "a fun, light-hearted romp through the realms of alternative sexuality; the magazine is pansexual with a strong queer sensibility." (http://www.black-rose.com/cuiru/archive/2-6/kinkymag.html for the curious; search on "Black Sheets" if you're more curious.)

For six years, I had a part-time career as a sex party host -- it helped finance the publication of that zine, several editions of The Black Book (a pre-Web reference guide to the sexual underground), and several anthologies of literary erotica. James Brown was always a good choice for the music mix early in the evening -- lively, energy-raising, and too assertive to blend into the background later on, but great to kick things off with.

This is a man's world ... but it wouldn't be nothing, nothing, without a woman or a girl.

I like how James Brown's vocal is raspy on this famous song -- more than on most of the others here -- and I wonder if Paul McCartney took a cue from JB here when he recorded the vocal for "Helter Skelter," his attempt at making "the most raucous ... loudest" possible track.

Man got to have a woman ... he needs a woman ... man make everything he can, but a woman makes a better man.

I'm not convinced that four decades of feminist thought have improved on this sentiment.

The chord structure of this classic tune is so simple -- two chords, really -- and you can hear how, with a different beat, this could be a reggae song, or be reinterpreted into any number of genres, which indeed has been the case. (For a really warped version, tune into: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcGknYx4sxQ .)

"Bewildered" has such a soul-stirring vocal, so high-pitched and vulnerable, I wonder how many casual listeners thought at first they were listening to a woman singing, maybe Etta James. But the next cut, "Out of Sight," leaves little doubt about the singer's gender: You're beautiful, mama!

Just the yelp that starts out "I Got You" (right before he sings, "I fe-e-e-l good, like I knew that I would...") could have served as a touchstone for countless vocalists that came afterwards. (Think of Jim Morrison's cry that kicks off "When The Music's Over," perhaps.) The harmony and rhythm on this cut are particularly chromatic and tight. There's an organ that rises like a mirage at the onset of the turnaround (bridge) to increase the tension. It's subtle, just a sustained chord or two, yet it's critical to build the surging emotion in that song.

The disc has one jarring quality, and that's the way it veers from Brown's younger, more balladic studio efforts ("Try Me [I Need You]," "Prisoner of Love,") to the rougher, more aggressive quality of his later, funkier cuts. I might have put them in chronological sequence or even stretched out the material over two discrete discs. Still, it's hard to believe there's only a two-year gap between "Prisoner of Love" (1962) and "I Got You" (1964), the cut that precedes "Prisoner" on this disc. Stylistically, they're a world apart.

"Licking Stick -- Licking Stick," like "Super Bad," has such inherent rhythm that powerhouse drumming would kill it. There are drums and cymbals, but they are way down in the mix; the only up-front percussion is a syncopated click, possibly a wood block.

The subtle yet effective use of reverb on "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag," along with that simple dee-da-lee-da-lee-da-lee-da-lee-da-lee-da-lee volley of sixteenth-notes (an amazing single-note guitar riff) sounds as fresh today as it did when this take was cut in 1965.

There is not a weak track on this CD, which is why it made such good party-kickoff music. For me, though, the album ends two cuts from the end, with the question posed at the end of "Sex Machine": Can we hit it and quit? JB poses as a repeated call-and-response with his players. How many vocalists would have the nerve to create such sustained drama out of a question with such a predetermined answer? It's pure foreplay, and yet another assertion of Brown's confidence. Then the brass section hammers in the nail with five orgasmic blasts: BOM-BOM-BOM-BOM-BOM! And it's quit.