Heliocentric Worlds: James Brown 1933-2006

This morning brings the sad news that the man known variously as the Godfather of Soul, Mr. Dynamite and the Hardest Working Man In Show Business has clocked out and left the building for the final time. James Brown passed away in an Atlanta hospital early on Monday after checking in Sunday with what was diagnosed as severe pneumonia. He was 73.

Brown's influence on contemporary music, from soul and rhythm & blues to jazz, funk and hip-hop, was vast. (I had actually planned to feature Brown in a post next week, so this tribute is a mix of some previously gathered material and some stuff found on short notice after hearing the news.) The earlier clips of Brown's songs like "I Feel Good" and "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag" are still fun to see even today, but absent the context of everything else that was going on in that era, it may be difficult to fully appreciate how radical his sound and stage presentation really were. Brown's stripped-down approach to music made the whole band into a rhythm instrument, and his over-the-top vocal style and lightning stage moves set the bar for R&B performance styles to reach a new level of intensity.

Brown did many things over 50-plus years in the music business, trying everything from jazz to Broadway standards, but he always came back to the funk. He also provided memorable moments in several movies, one of the earliest being a cameo in the mid-1960s teen comedy "Ski Party" in which his appearance (doing "I Feel Good" in front of a ski-lodge fireplace) is basically dropped in out of nowhere, unconnected to anything else in the film - "Hey, look everybody - It's James Brown! How about a song, James?" - so that it could be cut from the prints that would air in certain parts of the Southern USA.

Ironically, years later, Brown's cameo in one of the "Rocky" films presented him as something of an icon of America, albeit a rather gaudy one. After another classic cameo in which he played a preacher in The Blues Brothers, Brown endured later-life troubles involving drugs, domestic violence, the law, and jail, eventually becoming an object of pop-culture parody and even derision.

Some of the clips floating around on the 'net of a drug-addled Brown being interviewed on TV and making no sense are, for fans of his music, painful to watch. But even the most diehard Brown devotee has to appreciate the genius of Eddie Murphy's "Celebrity Hot Tub Party," a Saturday Night Live sketch that demonstrates considerable knowledge of and appreciation for Brown's music.

And give Brown his props: despite his personal flaws and tribulations, he kept performing and recording pretty much up until the end, leaving a vast amount of material to appreciate and a legacy that seems certain to remain influential for years to come. So, let a man come in and do the popcorn, and remember James Brown.

"I Feel Good"

"Please, Please, Please"

"Papa's Got A Brand New Bag"

"Sex Machine"