James Brown’s legacy is today’s ‘ black and proud’ pop music
NEW JAMES BROWN BIOGRAPHY PROFILES AN ARTIST MISUNDERSTOOD BY FANS, AND BY HIMSELF
Nearly 10 years after James Brown’s death, his fingerprints are all over popular music, from Bruno Mars’ slithery vocals on “Uptown Funk” to Kendrick Lamar’s “King Kunta” growls. Brown’s “Say It Loud ( I’m Black and I’m Proud),” recorded at the height of the civil rights movement, is an antecedent to Black Lives Matter. But even though his voice is still regularly sampled, Brown’s name is rarely invoked in a modern-day context. As James McBride puts it in Kill ’ Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul, he “is tumbling toward history as an enigma.”
McBride, who won the National Book Award for his 2013 novel about slavery, The Good Lord Bird, scrutinizes Brown’s tarnished legacy in hopes of understanding why he might be underappreciated and misunderstood. Although he’s far from the first biographer to take on Brown, McBride is the only one to have driven through the backwoods of South Carolina in the dead of night to a junk-filled shack to interview one of Brown’s relatives — acting on a tip from a mysterious man who pitched him on “the James Brown story. The authentic one. From the family.” McBride was offered the introduction, crucially, because he’s black.
This family story, as McBride tells it, is at heart one of complex race relations in the American South. There, black descendants of slaves “do whatever needs to be done, say whatever needs to be said, then cut for the door to avoid the white man’s evil.” It’s the story of a man whose hometown was razed by the U. S. government to build a bomb factory, and who learned from this to hide his money from the taxman. According to Brown’s long-time manager, Charles Bobbit, the singer was afraid of “the white man” who controlled the record business. And yet, Brown hired a white lawyer and a white accountant, both of whom, after his death, were accused by family members of exerting “undue influence” on him — because he left his rela- tives only his personal effects, while willing his estimated $100-million fortune to needy schoolchildren. McBride writes with great emotional heft about how the family’s own lawyers have fought the will and greatly depleted the estate.
Brown was never an easy person to get to know. In his later years, family members could see him only by appointment. Throughout his life, he would also avoid fans, would- be hangers- on and celebrity well- wishers by slipping away after gigs. “Kill ’em and leave” was his philosophy. What he “revealed” to the public was sometimes made up: Bobbit tells McBride that in the interviews with ghostwriter Bruce Tucker that generated his autobiography, The Godfather of Soul, “he just told the guy whatever he wanted” — including that he was dedicated to drug prevention.
The year after it was published, in 1988, he went into rehab, and then to prison for three years for drugs and weapons possession. Later, Brown was arrested multiple times for domestic violence. The enduring image of his old age is his infamous 2004 mugshot, showing him with wild hair, stubble, a furrowed brow, and his collar slipping over his shoulder like an errant bathrobe. In two 2014 films about Brown, however, the implosion of his personal life was either ignored (in the Grammy-nominated documentary Mr. Dynamite) or as McBride points out, caricatured (in the biopic Get on Up).
McBride, himself a sax player who as a boy in 1960s Queens would hang around outside Brown’s house in hopes of seeing him, takes a dim view of the Internet’s effect on Brown’s reputation: “the information machine … transforms superstitions and stereotypes with such ease and flu- idity.” In other words, speculation swoops in to fill the vacuum Brown left by not sharing more of himself.
McBride’s interviewees tell us much about Brown’s strength and conviction, but as Brown’s friends or colleagues, they’re either hesitant to speak about his faults or resolutely on- side; Brown’s tyranny over his bandmates ( as detailed in trombonist Fred Wesley’s autobiography, Hit Me) and his beating of women are acknowledged but never illuminated. Sometimes McBride treats the hurt inflicted on Brown as equivalent to the hurt he inflicted on others: Brown’s vision, McBride writes, “was to see children happy … But he could not account for lack of business acumen, relatives who would slice his money up … the divorces, the business ideas gone to pot, the women who tired of his abuse, the bands who quit.” Surely at the very least he could control his abuse of those women, and of the band members on whom he might even pull a gun?
Clearly, James Brown was a lonely man. The documentary Mr. Dynamite relates this solitude to the self-reliance he preached. He could bring large parts of the black community together with “Say It Loud (I’m Black and Proud)” in 1968, but alienate them with his support for Richard Nixon and his individualistic model of “black capitalism.”
McBride is more sympathetic to Brown’s ideals, and to the importance of transmitting a polished dignity. In one story he cites, the Godfather berates kids for approaching him “dressed in hip-hop style, wearing their pants down around their butts and their baseball caps twisted backwards,” with McBride’s sneering language — “butts,” “twisted” — conveying his agreement. Likewise, McBride diminishes many of Brown’s musical descendants by dismissing most hip- hop made after the conscious work of its pioneers — work that he sees as selling out to the industry, presumably because it doesn’t jibe with Brown’s overt positivity.
McBride’s advocacy for Brown’s music is stirring; he writes of children he teaches who are delighted when they hear the Godfather’s songs. And yet perhaps Brown’s most important legacy is found in the music of those, like Kendrick Lamar, who keep his black and proud spirit alive — but who, as would- be role models, come clean about their flaws.
HIS FINGERPRINTS ARE ALL OVER POP MUSIC, FROM BRUNO MARS TO KENDRICK LAMAR.