Recommendations of the Editorial team
The best songwriters of all time (26): James Brown
After interpreting R&B classics such as “Please please please” and in 1963 with “Live at the Apollo” the biggest live album of all time, James Brown increasingly dealt with the aspect of the lodge.
He approached the topic by turning traditional wisdom upside down and subordinate his “songs” to a precise rhythmic scaffold, which was later to be known as radio.
“Aretha and Otis and Wilson Pickett made a career while I was still the soul singer,” he recalled. “I still have no problems with the expression today, but musically I had hit a new direction. I had discovered that my real strength did not come from the wind section, but from the bare rhythm.”
James Brown – “Sex Machine”:
The best songwriters of all time (26): James Brown
Brown not only proved to be a brilliant arranger, but also created a new language from slang and keywords, which was later eagerly taken up by the hip-hop. The “Hardest Working Man in Show Business” always shot out of the hip and wrote down his spontaneous lyrics on paper bags (“Sex Machine”) or napkins (“Say It Loud-I’m Black and I’m Proud”).
“He was responsible for the feeling,” said Bootsy Collins, Brown’s bassist in the early seventies, the working method “while we had to write down things. We were something like his interpreter.”
Iggy Pop about James Brown:
For me, James Brown was never just a voice, but the whole package. But the effect of this voice gave me hope because it was served without a great frillary and had nothing to do with a supposed giant voice. And this cry, which seemed to come from very deep and demanded the rights of a primal man: “I am alive, I can do anything!” He called his dance movements “African nerve control”. That made sense. In his very early records he tried to sing standards. But it was not quite enough.
I listened to “Live at the Apollo” for the first time, it was a few years later. At that time I worked in a record store. There are still a lot of traditional songs on “Apollo” – “Try Me”, “Lost Someone”. But what tore me off the chair and gave me new ideas was the continuity with which he brought these things. First the long intro and this incredibly detailed input music. And when James gets in, he holds back very well, works with dynamic effects, loudly and then again very gently.