(Polydor)
!!! A+ BOXED SET !!!
Fellas, I'm ready to get up and do my thing. You grow up knowing that James Brown was a giant of soul, popular music, rock & roll, the '60s, the '70s, funk and hip hop. The validity of such an argument is unquestioned because his gift to us is so foundational. It might seem there's no real benefit to double-checking, to making the rounds for youself and realizing the level of his charisma and genius, the revolutionary fervor and continued relentless pleasure of the singles he laid down for decades. You can hear about the Beatles or Chuck Berry all your life and unless you're actually reared on that music, it's only when it really sings directly to you, when the initiative to explore it becomes yours, that its mysteries and magnificence are absolutely clear. Star Time is what brought Brown to me. That, and the experience of seeing firsthand how infectiously his music could light up a dance floor -- how body music is an irreducible art form that he above all provided with a zenith.
Brown is the greatest innovator in all of rock & roll, but why should you be loaded down with hyperbole? It seems faintly silly -- and reductive in terms of genre or, if you like, race -- to consider him in light of what some would call his peers: Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, Wilson Pickett, on and on. Brown's in a different class; for resourcefulness and a stirring need to communicate, he's most analogous to Chuck Berry and John Lennon. For gigantic grandness of performance and impulsive excitement, he has no peer. He is it. Musically alone, his standing apart is simple -- he wasn't a technically magnificent singer, wasn't really a strong or distinctive songwriter in any conventional or classic sense, certainly wasn't a romantic like Cooke or a pained soldier of passion and fear like Marvin Gaye. But Brown danced in ways that made Smokey Robinson and even Sam & Dave seem derivative, tired, ordinary. He was manic by comparison to the previous champions of the manic. Elvis would seem to melt.
He wasn't interested in the silky seductions of someone like Ben E. King -- his task with his Famous Flames was to inflict chaos in rhythm and shake. His barked orders to his band, his histrionic vocal channelings of the grind and rumble in their music, and his sense of constant action, imbued with both sexual abandon and a legendary streak of social consciousness that never would come to feel affected or forced, these portray Brown as the maven of funk who takes charge like the leader of the party, whose chief paradox is that he engineers and mitigates the noise being impulsively generated, never "crafted," but also seems nearly always to be losing himself, to be letting the music itself take control over him. Maybe Curtis Mayfield shared his completeness of vision. Maybe Prince later would. No one in conventional rock music. Why even talk about conventional anything here?
Star Time is a career-spanning collection amounting to four discs and 71 tracks, a handful of them rarities or unreleased items, but mostly hits, smashes, classics, revelations. It is also, to the best of my knowledge, the best boxed set ever released, and one of the few that can likely be classified as a definitive portrait of a great artist; indeed, Star Time almost single-handedly justifies the emergence of the medium in the CD era. For the student of rock & roll and Brown's music in particular, for a novice to his mad-scientist rush and jump factory or to the person who already knows a hefty percentage of these songs and 12" grooves by heart, the set is a fascinating document of consistency -- because the compilers cut out in the early '80s, it never lets up -- and moreover of the evolution and variance in a phenomenal career. The discs are labeled "Mr. Dynamite," "The Hardest Working Man in Show Business," "Soul Brother No. 1" and "The Godfather of Soul," and each is a world unto itself; each can, in fact, be appreciated as its own LP or greatest hits package. All are full of blistering surprises, and all are crucial in every possible way.
But the reason I'd advise everyone to have Star Time on hand is far away from scholarship and closer to the reason I initially bought it. When I started DJing in 2008, I assumed that a Brown collection would be essential and splurged on the big one. I used it a lot, and it invariably brought in the heat, but I couldn't have imagined how much of joy it would bring into my own small apartment for the years to come. Yes, it's an immersive listening experience, but it is utterly flawless for dancing, and it keeps the manic energy mounting all through the night, and its pleasures never once grow stale or repetitive. It's among the most joyous rock & roll experiences you can have the pleasure of knowing that involves neither a live show at a club or a stack of 45's.
A stack of 45's, nevertheless, is pretty much what this box replicates. The way the tracks leap off and electrify in their hot, focused mixes and then relentlessly build on one another is an effective replacement for a sock hop or effectively jockeyed dance party. Despite being a collection of disparate songs, it blends wonderfully and is brilliantly curated. Context can be everything even for music that automatically resists it. Brown's songs might be in their natural state disconnected and separate from one another, but taken together they amount to an accumulated case for greatness, and a party like you've never heard in your life.
The first disc, then, is all soul colors: melancholy, desperation, impeccably arranged horns and shouts. Brown's early records for King are devoted to the illusion of rawness. "Please Please Please" and "Try Me," his two key early cuts, are from some standpoint just impassioned doo wop records, but Brown always has a charisma that bursts beyond all things, and his relationship to the band is always monumentally coy and confident. Though overshadowed in fame by the groveling, sensual "Please, Please, Please" early evidences of his propensity for the boisterous, unstoppable rhythm and propulsion can heard on the otherworldly, quick "Mashed Potatoes, Part 1," the searing "Think" and more than anything the demented deconstruction of "Night Train," which eventually resembles the howling blues at its core less than a manic exorcism. Along the way, Brown can evoke a more straightforward R&B swagger on brilliant sides like "I've Got Money" while never losing his way or violating his temperament; underneath all of this is a sense of steely-eyed purpose manifested initially by the remarkable demos that close out the disc. Early versions of "It's a Man's World," "I Got You" and "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" are all demonstrative feelers unfit for general release but have now the unmistakable breathlessness of history in the making.
That's because as the second disc opens, the legend of James Brown really takes hold. "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" speeds up into the oblivious staccato and barely-logical maneuvering of funk; the recording virtually invents an entire subgenre single-handedly, in two minutes seven seconds. It's followed swiftly by the retitled "I Got You (I Feel Good)," a song so much a part of the culture at this point that one might see little point in actually listening to it, but placed next to its progeny here it becomes a source of richest ecstasy, as was once imagined for it. And "It's a Man's World" is violently refashioned into "It's a Man's Man's Man's World," a nearly chilling piece of alienation, loss and dread somehow fused with a grippingly flowery string arrangement and perhaps the tensest waltz ever put on record. The record captures not the first but arguably the best instance of Brown completely losing himself. "Man's World" was cowrittern by Brown's girlfriend at the time, Betty Jean Newsome, who is said to have intended the lyrics sardonically. In Brown's hands, they're easy to hear as the sexist ravings of a known violent asshole -- let us not mince words -- but also as the wide-eyed ravings of a man at the end of his rope. At the end, when Brown inexplicably wails "He's lost in the wilderness / He's lost in bitterness" just as the track tantalizingly fades long before we're ready, the effect is genuinely disturbing -- and brilliantly economical. It's one of the most conceptually impressive, emotionally effective singles ever released.
Yet we've only started; "Don't Be a Dropout" proves that Brown could do just about anything, including justify shameless didactics through rhythm and passion, and as the '60s wear on, "Cold Sweat" and "I Can't Stand Myself (When You Touch Me)" and the immortal "Licking Stick -- Licking Stick" usher in the years of Brown's nearly supernatural command of the jerking, audacious rhythms of dance music and funk in particular. What marks these records is that they are unapologetic -- often stretching to nine minutes, like "Get It Together," and winding their occasionally melodic, usually just pounding chant-like structures around often incredibly political or sexual lyrical ideas, like "Say It Loud -- I'm Black and I'm Proud" and "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose" -- their immediacy remains astonishing. At any point, night or day, in any place, a James Brown record communicates just what it always meant to -- and the crowd responds as they always would have.
Brown's chutzpah is inconceivable, and across the expanse of this collection he's a wonder to behold. Early in his career he was already upstaging everyone on the bill of a show like that seen in The T.A.M.I. Show, and by the end of the '60s his utter command of rhythm, beat, message, impact is beyond comparison before or since. The Famous Flames were perhaps the strongest band of the '60s, technically second only perhaps to Sly & the Family Stone, but Brown used them to further himself -- and further himself he did, impeccably. His outcries and orders make Archie Bell sound like SSgt. Barry Sadler -- "we're gon' do somethin' funny right here," he announces on "Talkin' Loud and Sayin' Nothing" before unexpectedly stopping the band so he can jerk and mutter a cappella for a few deliriously godlike moments; elsewhere, as on "Sex Machine," he spends more time announcing and programming the proceedings than performing in any conventional sense, hence his emceeing ("can we hit it and quit?") essentially becomes the performance, hence entirely new ideas about R&B and ultimately hip hop emerge.
For these and other, mostly clear reasons, the 1969-72 period covered on the third disc of Star Time is certainly Brown's most innovative and adventurous. The lists of tracks reads like a catalog of all-time classic party anthems; it almost seems irrelevant that they all share a primary artist, performer, composer. "Mother Popcorn," the absolutely glorious "Funky Drummer," the authentically perfect "Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine," the rare song that cannot possibly miss in a dancefloor setting, the fiery and impassioned one-two punch of "Talkin' Loud and Sayin' Nothing" and "Get Up, Get into It and Get Involved," and more yet? Of course -- "Hot Pants," "Make It Funky" and "I Got Ants in My Pants" all capture sounds, tics and beats that would resonate in R&B forever afterward, and Brown reaches a new apex of social consciousness with the hard-hitting "King Heroin," a sobering and more than slightly creepy party comedown (effective partially but not exclusively because it borrows the riff from "It's a Man's Man's Man's World").
That song consists largely of Brown just talking, going on and on rather improbably from the perspective of heroin itself. Though its surrealism is slightly comedic, it serves in large part as a despaired crawling out from under the hedonistic excess of the prior hours. But that interpretation would be such a violation of Brown's central ideas and message, of the real joy to be found in his music. It's appropriate, then, that I expected the final disc of Star Time on first encounter to be probably the comeback malaise that affects so many artists decades on, for "King Heroin" to be the first act in a bland self-improvement regime. Delightfully, the box never quits; even the obligatory "for the kids" cut, the Afrika Bambaataa collaboration "Unity," is no embarrassment. And the finale is piled on with minor classics "My Thang," "Hot (I Need to Be Loved, Loved, Loved)," "Stoned to the Bone," "Papa Don't Take No Mess," and the brilliantly titled "It's Too Funky in Here," but moreover with major hitters aplenty: "The Payback" is one of the best and most influential Brown singles ever, and even it pales across from the balls-to-the-wall triumph "Get Up Offa That Thing (Release the Pressure)," issued so late as 1976 and six minutes of searing, grunting brilliance.
The story of Brown's career is effectively told by Star Time, sure; his increasingly beat-driven output coalesces with his equally blossoming savvy and opportunism, as he becomes clearer on how to flow with the times, to spin the dime of a moment. But this is not an enlightening, revelatory, enrapturing journey because of its historical interest. These songs haven't aged in any meaningful way, and this collection is one of the most impeccably great times you can have listening to music. You owe this one to yourself. And if you already love these songs, this is for my money the very best way to hear them.
[SEE ALSO:]
In the Jungle Groove (1969-86)
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