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Everything from his groundbreaking Live From The Apollo album of 1962 to his 1980s comeback hit Living In America, without sensing the deeply political nature of everything he did. Brown was one of the towering giants of 20th century American popular music, inventing entire genres and inspiring a musical following that remains undiminished decades after he first came to prominence. He was born in Bardwell, South Carolina, abandoned by his parents when he was four and forced to fend for himself on the streets of Augusta, working as a shoe-shine boy and cotton-picker. He wound up first in reform school and then, at the age of 16, in juvenile prison following an armed robbery bust. Brown was also the prototype musician as celebrity, buying radio stations and restaurants and flaunting his sudden wealth by flying around in a private jet. One of the radio stations he bought, WDRW in Augusta, was a place where he had shined shoes as a boy. Brown’s first flush of fame coincided with the Civil Rights era, and he did as much as anyone to validate the cause espoused by Martin Luther King and his followers. “Say it once and say it loud - I’m Black and I’m proud,” was one of Brown’s signature slogans of the era. When Dr King was assassinated in 1968, all eyes turned to Brown as he performed a nationally broadcast concert in Boston. “There are a lot of people who think they’re in the system, but they’re really not in the system,” Brown was more than just a Black musician. He belonged, and was appreciated, by everybody. Brown had the perfect response. “Everybody’s got soul,” he once said. “Everybody doesn’t have the same culture to draw from, but everybody’s got soul.”
— By arrangement with The Independent
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Funky, James Brown once said, “is about the injustices, the things that go wrong, the hungry kids going to school trying to learn.” Funky is about what Brown was. The consummate showman, a performer who didn’t just own the stage so much as seem possessed by it, a singer and a dancer who seemed to defy defied gravity and the laws of ordinary musicology with his crazy rhythms, vocal inflections and, above all, his boundless energy. He poured everything into his music, his sheer determination to make something of himself against the odds, the rags-to-riches trajectory. That unswerving authenticity didn’t just make him a great musician, and an enduring influence on generation after generation of new styles—from soul to funk to disco and rap. It also made him continually subversive, a true revolutionary.