1969 SPECIAL REPORT: "JAMES BROWN"

By 1967, Brown’s emerging sound had begun to be defined as funk music. That year he released what some critics cited as the first true funk song, “Cold Sweat”, which hit number-one on the R&B chart (Top 10 Pop) and became one of his first recordings to contain a drum break and also the first that featured a harmony that was reduced to a single chord.

The instrumental arrangements on tracks such as “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose” and “Licking Stick-Licking Stick” (both recorded in 1968) and “Funky Drummer” (recorded in 1969) featured a more developed version of Brown’s mid-1960s style, with the horn section, guitars, bass and drums meshed together in intricate rhythmic patterns based on multiple interlocking riffs.Changes in Brown’s style that started with “Cold Sweat” also established the musical foundation for Brown’s later hits, such as “I Got the Feelin'” (1968) and “Mother Popcorn” (1969). By this time Brown’s vocals frequently took the form of a kind of rhythmic declamation, not quite sung but not quite spoken, that only intermittently featured traces of pitch or melody. This would become a major influence on the techniques of rapping, which would come to maturity along with hip hop music in the coming decades. Brown’s style of funk in the late 1960s was based on interlocking syncopated parts: strutting bass lines, syncopated drum patterns, and iconic percussive guitar riffs.

The main guitar ostinatos for “Ain’t It Funky” and “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose” (both 1969), are examples of Brown’s refinement of New Orleans funk; irresistibly danceable riffs, stripped down to their rhythmic essence. On both recordings, the tonal structure is bare bones. The pattern of attack points is the emphasis, not the pattern of pitches as if the guitar were an African drum or idiophone. Alexander Stewart states that this popular feel was passed along from “New Orleans—through James Brown’s music, to the popular music of the 1970s”.

Those same tracks were later resurrected by countless hip-hop musicians from the 1970s onward. As a result, James Brown remains to this day the world’s most sampled recording artist, but, two tracks that he wrote, are also synonymous with modern dance, especially with house music, jungle music, and drum and bass music, (which were sped up exponentially, in the latter two genres).”Bring it Up” has an Afro-Cuban guajeo-like structure. All three of these guitar riffs are based on an onbeat/offbeat structure. Stewart says that it “is different from a time line (such as clave and tresillo) in that it is not an exact pattern, but more of a loose organizing principle.”It was around this time as the musician’s popularity increased that he acquired the nickname “Soul Brother No. 1”, after failing to win the title “King of Soul” from Solomon Burke during a Chicago gig two years prior.

Brown’s recordings during this period influenced musicians across the industry, most notably groups such as Sly and the Family Stone, Funkadelic, Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, Booker T. & the M.G.s as well as vocalists such as Edwin Starr, David Ruffin and Dennis Edwards from the Temptations, and Michael Jackson, who, throughout his career, cited Brown as his ultimate idol. #jamesbrown

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