James Brown: Apprehending a Minor Temporality

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John Scannell BA (Hons) University of New South Wales

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Media, Film and Theatre University of New South Wales

July 2006 ABSTRACT

This thesis is concerned with popular music's working of time. It takes the experience of time as crucial to the negotiation of social, political or, more simply, existential, conditions. The key example analysed is the funk style “invented” by legendary musician James Brown. I argue that James Brown's funk might be understood as an “apprehension of a minor temporality” or the musical expression of a particular form of negotiation of time by a “minor” culture. Precursors to this idea are found in the literature of the “stream of consciousness” style and, more significantly for this thesis, in the work of philosopher Gilles Deleuze on the cinema in his books Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. These examples are all concerned with the indeterminate unfolding of lived time and where the reality of temporal indeterminacy will take precedence over the more linear conventions of traditional narrative. Deleuze’s Cinema books account for such a shift in emphasis from the narrative depiction of movement through time (the “movement-image”) to a more direct experience of the temporal (the “time-image”), and I will trace a similar shift in the history of popular music. For Deleuze, the change in the relation of images to time is catalysed by the intolerable events of World War II. In this thesis, the evolution of funk will be seen to reflect the existential change experienced by a generation of African-Americans in the wake of the civil-rights movement. The funk groove associated with the music of James Brown is discussed as an aesthetic strategy that responds to the existential conditions that grew out of the often perceived "failure" of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Funk provided an aesthetic strategy that allowed for the constitution of a “minor temporality”, involving a series of temporal negotiations that eschew more hegemonic, “common sense”, compositions of time and space. This has implications for the understanding of much of the popular music that has followed funk. I argue that the understanding of the emergence of funk, and of the contemporary electronic dance music styles which followed, would be enhanced by taking this ontological consideration of the experiential time of “minorities” into account. I will argue that funk and the electronic dance musics that followed might be seen as articulations of minority expression, where the time-image style of their musical compositions reflect the “post-soul” eschewing of a narratively driven, “common sense” view of historical time.

i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

An early version of chapter 5 is published in issue 26 (Spring) of the journal Context (2003) as entitled “James Brown: The ‘Illogic’ of Innovation”.

Financial assistance for the writing of this thesis came in the form of an Australian Postgraduate Award, and I would like to thank the Department of Media, Film and Theatre at UNSW for their continued support of my project, including the research grants which assisted my attendance at a number of conferences. The department also graciously provided me with study space and computer facilities at various stages of my candidature. Special thanks to the administrative staff Julie Miller and Jennifer Beale. The Department of Media, Film and Theatre is blessed with some of the most devoted academic staff imaginable and all of whom continue to contribute to the collegial atmosphere that made the completion of this task more pleasurable than it would have otherwise been. The opportunity to teach in the department has also contributed significantly to my own learning, and so to the work in this thesis. I would also like to thank members of the Australia-New Zealand branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music has been a remarkable source of encouragement and friendship over the period of my candidature.

There are so many people that I would have to thank by name, Gay Hawkins, Charles Mudede, Alison Huber, Fred Wesley, Denis Crowdy and indeed all of the staff at the Centre for Contemporary Music Studies, Tigger Wise – and anyone that in my haste I have forgotten – all of whom have provided me at some stage with vital information and/or excellent advice and have contributed to the thesis in their own way.

Of course an extra special thanks needs to be extended to my supervisor, Andrew Murphie, whose assistance continues to extend beyond the call of duty. His countless hours of support and guidance not only in regard to this thesis, but many other extra- curricular matters, have been invaluable. Andrew’s reputation precedes him anyway, but I will continue to sing his praises forever. Finally I want to thank my parents, Joan and John Scannell, they know what they had to put up with over the years. I dedicate this work to them with all my love.

ii Table of contents Page Number

ABSTRACT i Acknowledgements ii Table of Contents iii

INTRODUCTION/PREFACE 1

1. The Apprehension of a Minor Temporality 13 The One 13 Duration, Art and Thought 16 Soul and Post-Soul Aesthetics 19 The Intolerable 19 Restoring Belief In The World 22 James Brown as Political Figure 25 Deleuze and Guattari’s “Minor” 28 “Minor” Literature, “Minor” Music 31 The Literature on James Brown 33 Musicology and Essentialism 36

2. Creating Rhythms in an Any-space-whatever 42 The Black Atlantic 42 Augé’s non-place and Deleuze’s any-space-whatever 47 Recollection, Virtuality and the Post-Soul Aesthetic 51 An Aesthetic Expression of “Blackness” - Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song 53 The Body 57 Ethology – Brown as Linking Different Minority Becomings 58 Histories Major and Minor 61 Post-Soul Recollection 64 Creative Responses to Intolerable Circumstances 68 Deleuze and Popular Music 72

iii 3. The Rapture and the Rupture 79 Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture – Please Please Please 79 Difference and Repetition 85 The Gospel Years 90 Baraka’s Changing Same 94

4. The “I” Becomes “We” - Contextualising the Soul Aesthetic 98 The “I” Becomes “We” 100 Brown and Africa 105 Perspectives on Time - Aion/Chronos 107 The Irrational Cut 111 The Splitting of Time 114 Minimalism 116 Affect 122

5. Soul as Movement-Image 129 Soul as Movement-Image 132 The T.A.M.I show 134 Countering the British Invasion 137 Appropriation or Becoming? 139 What Can a Body Do? 143 Overcoming the Limits of Representation 146 The Foundations of Funk 152 Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag 154 Funk’s “Industrial” Elements 161 An Expedient Production of Territory 165 Don’t Do No Soloing Just Keep What You Got 169

iv 6. Funk as Thought without Image 175 Brown’s Departure 176 The Idiot 179 Brown as “Seer” 188 Musical Thought Without Image 195

7.FromColdSweattoNoSweat 200 The Decline of Soul’s “Action-Image” 201 The Post-Soul any-space-whatever 205 Tougher Grooves for Tougher Times 209 The Proxy Politician 214 “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose” 216 The Breaks 221 From Sequence to Series 225 The Crystalline 228 The “Seers” of the Turntable 231 The Medium of a New Duration 235 Irrational Cuts and Existential Statements 239 From Cold Sweat to No Sweat 241 Brown’s Crystalline Refrains 244

v 8. When He Returns 248 Accounting for Brown’s Return 251 The Simulacrum 254 Powers of the False 258 Representation and Appearance 260 Becoming Rather Than Stories 264 Sampling and the Subversion of Representation 266 Post-Human Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music 269 James Brown as Cliché 271 Capital M Memory 274

BIBLIOGRAPHY 277

vi INTRODUCTION

This thesis gives a much more complete account than has been given before of the importance of James Brown’s musical innovations. In doing so, it develops a concept of importance to the junction of popular music and social theory. The concept proposed is the “apprehension of a minor temporality”, or the way in which certain forms of expression, and in the case of this thesis, the music of James Brown, might catalyse the experience of minorities and allow them to move into the future differently.

KnownalsoasSoul Brother No.1, The Godfather of Soul, The Minister of the New New Super Heavy Funk and The Original Disco Man,1 James Brown was born in the midst of the Depression into the heavily segregated, Deep South of Barnwell, South Carolina in 1933.2 Given the adverse circumstances from which he would make his spectacular ascent, Brown’s life may well be construed as an exemplary protraction of that observation made by the philosophers, Deleuze and Guattari, that out of chaos, milieus and rhythms are born.3 In addition, they write: “[f]orces of chaos, terrestrial forces, cosmic forces: all of these confront each other and converge in the territorial refrain”.4 There have been few territorial refrains that have converged on the world with the impact of Brown’s trademark downbeat of “the one” - that rhythmic lynchpin of funk, and the rhythmic foundation of much dance music to the present day.

For fifty years, Brown’s jubilant rhythms have forged all manner of musical syntheses, not least are those that have emerged from decades of DJing and digital

1 The most creative reference to Brown’s monikers might be found in the Grammy winning four CD box set Star Time (1991). Each CD is titled after the title afforded, or promoted by Brown himself, for that respective period - Mr. Dynamite (mid 1950s-early 1960s), The Hardest Working Man in Showbusiness (mid 1960s), Soul Brother No. 1 (late 1960s – early 1970s) and The Godfather of Soul (early 1970s – early 1980s) (Brown 1991c). All of these titles are discussed in more detail by Brown himself in his 1986 biography, written with Bruce Tucker, James Brown, The Godfather of Soul(Brown & Tucker 1986) 2 For the record, James Brown was not born in 1928. The derivation of this incorrect attribution of a 1928 date of birth for James Brown is discussed in detail by Geoff Brown in his biography, James Brown: Doin’ It To Death, (Geoff Brown 1996: 26-27). In short, a UK journalist uncovered the records of a different James Brown (who also happened to be a singer), who was born in Pulaski Tennessee, rather than Barnwell, North Carolina. Once published however, these details have continued to be reiterated by subsequent Brown biographers. Lazy journalism prevails, as does the 1928 birth date. 3 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 313) 4 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 312)

1 sampling and have contributed to the widely held belief that Brown is ‘…the most sampled African-American recording artist in the history of recorded entertainment’.5 Whilst the actual number of samples ceded to James Brown is perhaps impossible to accurately measure, at the turn of the 1990s, it was a number already estimated to be at least in the thousands6 and in the meantime is more likely to have approached the tens of thousands.7

Such observations are testimony to the fact that Brown’s musical pulse continues to resound through contemporary musical aesthetics. This is a legacy so readily mandated that it moved DJ Shadow to write in the liner notes of his 1996 album Endtroducing: 8 “All Respect Due to James Brown and his countless disciples for inventing modern music”.9 Whilst a heartfelt, and perhaps overly generalised tribute, Shadow’s comments reflect a common assessment of Brown’s musical legacy: “Whatever anyone says about Brown, however, he has exerted the greatest influence on modern dance music”.10

Whilst the extent of Brown’s legacy, musically, culturally and otherwise, continues to inspire, the simple fact is that, despite such enthusiastic proselytising on Brown’s behalf, there has not been a sustained account, academic or otherwise, of the ongoing endurance of his musical innovations.11 To be sure, Brown has been the subject of

5 As Geoff Brown writes in his introduction to James Brown: Doin’ It to Death (1996), “James Brown dominated the black American music ratings for nigh on 15 years. And 15 years later he was being so extensively sampled that, internationally, his original recordings could be heard more frequently than the music of any other individual pop star”(Geoff Brown 1996: 10). For example, the site FunkyStuff.com lists a string of James Brown’s “most sampled” tracks. From a list of a dozen of Brown's most sampled songs they have derived a list of 650 samples (and this list is hardly exhaustive). Among Brown’s most sampled songs are titles such as Funky Drummer (1970), Get on the Good Foot (1972), The Payback (1974) and Funky President (1975) (funkystuff.com). This assertion is now commonly accepted based on estimates, and its reiteration can be found, for instance, in the following texts – See (Geoff Brown 1996: 10) and (Rice 2003: 463). 6 (Weinger & White 1991: 44). As White and Weinger write, “Aficionados estimate that between two and three thousand recorded raps of the late 1980s featured a James Brown sample in some form” (Weinger & White 1991: 44). 7 ‘…architect of funk, godfather of soul and the source of 10,000 hip-hop samples’ (Christensen 2003). 8 (DJ Shadow 1996). The album alternately known as both Endtroducing/Entroducing (both titles appear on my CD), topped the February 2002 edition of DJ culture magazine Muzik of the “Top 50 Dance Music Albums of all Time” (Muzik 2002: 51). 9 (DJ Shadow 1996) 10 (Brewster 1993: 66). Rather strangely Brown doesn’t figure highly in Brewster’s otherwise superlative discussion of DJ culture, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life (Brewster & Broughton 1999). 11 Whilst not available at the time of writing, Wesleyan University Press has announced a November 2006 release for Anne Danielsen’s, Presence and Pleasure-The Funk Grooves of James Brown and Parliament (2006).

2 several biographies, and his musical contributions have been referenced in numerous academic texts. 12 Yet many of these studies fall short when it comes to qualifying Brown’s sustained impact upon a creative evolution of electronic dance music culture. This is the aim of this study. Rather than merely assimilate Brown’s work within a general history of funk, or simply name check him amongst a litany of artists responsible for electronic dance music,13 I felt that what was required was an ontology that would more actively account for Brown’s emphatic assault on popular music's working of time.

I have always been of the opinion that the emergence of Brown’s funk, commonly dated to the 1965 release of Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag, and appearing at the very peak of civil-rights optimism, was something more than just mere coincidence. Whilst accounts of funk’s innovative nature are many, there has been no explanation as to why this style would occur at this particular time. In this thesis I will argue that the propulsive drive of the new funk aesthetic might have been channelling the imminent existential conditions surrounding the music of the time and attempting to enunciate it in musical form.

In order to mobilise my arguments I draw extensively on the work of the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who impressed upon me some of the philosophical concerns that would inspire this ontology of “the one”. I was particularly struck by the

12 Brown’s musical innovations have been discussed in numerous titles such as, Gerri Hirshey’s Nowhere To Run (1985) Rickey Vincent’s Funk (1996), Geoff Brown’s James Brown: Doin” It To Death (1996) or Craig Werner’s A Change is Gonna Come (2000) to name but a few of the more distinguished accounts. 13 (Poschardt 1998). There are many texts that do discuss Brown’s musical legacy in one way or another, although due to the more encompassing perspectives of their respective texts are perhaps limited to discussing Brown with either the soul tradition or part of a more general genealogy of electronic music cultures. Some of the texts in which Brown does figure in some way, include: Michael Haralambos, Right On: From Blues to Soul in Black America (1974). David Toop (1984) The Rap Attack: African Jive to New York Hip Hop, Gerri Hirshey, Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music (1985). Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom (1986). Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm and Blues (1988). Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994). Rickey Vincent, Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the one (1996). William Eric Perkins, Droppin' Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture (1996). Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race Relations (1998). Ulf Poschardt, DJ Culture (1998). Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey (1999). Jeremy Gilbert and Ewan Pearson, Discographies: Dance Music, Culture, And The Politics Of Sound (1999). Craig Werner, A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America (2000). Murray Forman, The 'Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop. Music/Culture (2002). Cheryl Lynette Keyes, Rap Music and Street Consciousness. Music in American Life (2002). Guthrie P. Ramsey, Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (2003).

3 idea that they attribute to Paul Klee, that the role of the artist is to “render visible” rather than render or reproduce that which is already visible.14 In their account of what the musical composition might “render visible”, Deleuze and Guattari write, “… music molecularizes sound matter and in so doing becomes capable of harnessing such nonsonorous forces as Duration and Intensity.” 15 Foregrounding this idea of music’s otherwise nonsonorous apprehensions, this study attempts to account for some of these many “nonsonorous forces” that might be revealed through an analysis of Brown’s musical compositions. It suggests that funk’s timely emergence might have been a musical expression of a more immanently sustained minor temporality.

This is not to say that Brown’s music was a product of calculation. Much to the contrary, it was his commitment to experimentation that produced a musical mutability that was perhaps even alienating to Brown himself at times. He explains this in reference to the release of Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag:

‘It’s a little beyond me right now,’ JB told a radio audience upon the single’s release. ‘I can’t really understand it. It’s the only thing on the market that sounds like it. It’s different. It’s a new bag, just like I sang’.16

Whether or not this “new bag” marks the actual invention of funk is moot. Indeed, the well-versed musical devotee might contend otherwise; that the real roots of funk can be heard in sounds predating Brown, such as the “New Orleans beat” of Huey “Piano” Smith and the Clowns, practiced in turn by Earl Palmer.17 Yet it is not where funk came from that is of concern, but rather what it would become. In this sense Brown can legitimately claim to have harnessed the power of the funk into a force of becoming, and one that would connect to the future with much greater force than the contributions of his closely related musical peers and contemporaries.

14 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 342) 15 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 343) 16 (Weinger & Leeds 1996) 17 See (Payne 1996: 2-11) and also (Shapiro 2002: 138). Drummer Charles ‘Hungry’ Williams who played with Huey ‘Piano’ Smith and the Clowns is considered the first funk drummer. Williams gave lessons to drummer Clayton Fillyau who was James Brown’s first discernibly “funky” drummer (Shapiro 2002: 20).

4 I posit that Brown’s musical achievement is predicated on his ability to have “rendered visible” the durational alterity of the “minority” subject. Furthermore, I argue for Brown’s music being conceived of in terms of an expression of an alternative duration - in contradistinction to the more hegemonic, “common sense” notions of time. It is for this reason that Brown’s work might be better considered by evaluating what his music would give to the future, rather than what it took from the past. This should not be understood as a discounting of Brown’s musical or cultural inheritance, but rather as a reflection of his own commitment to insist upon a future for a minor people.

Indeed Brown’s music has already been accounted for historically, as well as anthropologically and of course, musicologically, although the results of such endeavours have often been rather humdrum.18 Eliciting some of my more subdued responses, for example, are those musicological studies that tend to absorb funk into a general “African” aesthetic.19 It probably goes without saying that such historically inclined perspectives do not really tell us anything about why the refrains of James Brown continue to “work”. Thus, at the heart of my analysis of Brown’s work is a

18 One of the more unappealing examples might be David Brackett’s analysis of James Brown’s Superbad (1995). Brackett dedicates a chapter of his book, Interpreting Popular Music to a deconstruction of James Brown’s Superbad titled, “James Brown’s Superbad and the Double-Voiced Utterance”. More unfortunate than the essay itself is that fact that it is one of the few academic studies of Brown’s music. Whilst Brackett rightfully points out that musicological analysis has traditionally been heavy handed and loaded with stereotypes such as articulating difference through essentialised tropes and the like, he really does little to avoid the trap himself. At one instance he is telling us how much Europeans love judging music by such “analytical metaphors” as the Golden Mean or Golden Section, “As is usually the case with analytical techniques used in conjunction with the European tradition, why the reader/listener should feel that the presence of GS proportions (or another proportional system) is important is rarely explained” (David Brackett 1995: 149). However, after criticising this type of essentialism Brackett moves directly into the assimilation of Superbad into such an analytical metaphor. Not only does Superbad fit perfectly into such a GS system he tells us (David Brackett 1995: 155), but also that the apparent spontaneity of the recording of Superbad belies its perfect fit of the GS, providing evidence that Brown is either “a constructive genius” or “one could assert that this proves the “naturalness” of James Brown’s music”(David Brackett 1995: 154) and leaves us with the rather spurious conclusion that “[music] flows out of [Brown] like leaves grow out of a tree”(David Brackett 1995: 154). Whilst Brackett offers that this emulates ‘the kinds of myths reproduced in much writing about James Brown and about black music in general”(David Brackett 1995: 154) this doesn’t stop him from making it, or ending his piece with the standard binary between cultures European and “black”. Brackett writes, "...the more I analyzed and thought about James Brown’s music, particularly Superbad, the more I found that I could not avoid discussing the “critical difference” between African-American and Euro-American music and culture – that this text compelled me to confront the issue” (David Brackett 1995: 155). 19 From Werner’s A Change is Gonna Come, “…there’s no doubt that once the Godfather of Soul took his rhythm stick to ‘the one," American music became something different, blacker, and more African than it had ever been before”(Werner 2000: 25).

5 consideration of the vitality of his musical legacy, the rhythmic affordances that would lead to so many experimental forms of popular music.

Perhaps in common with other all genre-defying artists, Brown’s nonconformity kept his musical innovations fresh. In the mid-1960s Brown made some radical decisions that would drive his musical divergence from the more orthodox compositional styles of popular soul. Reflecting a commitment to difference, Brown’s music would gravitate away from the lyricism of soul, and toward the minimalist beats and grooves that would so greatly inform later musical movements. I will discuss in detail in chapter 6, suggesting that Brown’s creativity is a result of the fact that his music was of an “untimely”20 nature, and furthermore, that it would provide for a future by imploring “a people to come”.21

This “people to come” might be observed among those generations that had to live life in the wake of the soul era, that period of history subsequently theorised by scholars such as Nelson George and Mark Anthony Neal as the “post-soul” generation. This is a generation whose aesthetic values are marked by their indignant perspective of the soul years. For, unlike their forebears, this generation was bereft of the promises of social change and would instead have to contend with a state of existential disarray. Despite this being an “intolerable” state of affairs, it would of course stimulate change; a change that I believe would be reflected in a new compositional orientation to time.

In this respect, my aesthetic ontology is informed by the theoretical model set out in Deleuze’s Cinema books, in which the intolerable events of the Second World War would create a crisis in a belief in action, and thus exacerbate the shift from “movement-image” to “time-image” in the process. In my opinion, the decline in soul experienced after the assassination of Martin Luther King offers a similar existential crisis, one that might subsequently inform a break between the aesthetic orientations of the soul and post-soul periods.

20 The “untimely” might be understood as a condition that enables a future. In the preface of Difference and Repetition, “Following Nietzsche we discover, as more profound than time and eternity, the untimely: philosophy is neither a philosophy of history, nor a philosophy of the eternal, but untimely, always and only untimely – that is to say, ‘acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come’” (Deleuze 1994: xxi). 21 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 345)

6 In the middle of all this social upheaval experienced by the African-American community, Brown was on the cutting edge of a musical style that would galvanise the imminent existential forces of the time into musical form. For a decade spanning the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, arguably Brown’s most artistically accomplished, he would ‘prepare’ modern music in a similar way to that described by Deleuze in relation to cinema directors such as Welles or Hitchcock, who Deleuze saw as having “prepared” the modern cinema.22

I realise that my choice of methodology – the use of books on cinema to explain a reworking of time in music – might appear odd. However, I hope to demonstrate that Deleuze’s Cinema books might accommodate a discussion of time in popular music. Whilst I will defend their utility in detail within the thesis, the point that needs to be noted at this stage is that the Cinema books are primarily concerned with how certain aesthetic formations might reflect “images of thought”, as well as the broader existential/ontological concerns of their respective eras. Hence the attraction of the Cinema books for this study is precisely their ontological approach. Instead of attempting to “read” various films, Deleuze enquires of the cinema what it is, precisely, that makes it work, in terms of its affecting our capacity to think about time and space.

The structure of the thesis, then, attempts to reflect these theoretical concerns. In chapter 1, I will outline some of the broader considerations of this concept of an “apprehension of a minor temporality” and how it might be applied to Brown’s musical expression. I will then use this idea of artistic apprehension to address my assertion of funk’s compositional distillation of existential time. The “untimely” appearance of funk, I argue, might be seen as a bifurcation point from which two compositional orientations - of movement and time respectively - can be seen to diverge. This divergence might be otherwise observed as the shift from the more orthodox “movement-image” form of composition, which reflects logical, sequential progression, to the more “time-image” infused grooves informed by the funk style. This is a shift to a “time-image” oriented composition, one that takes on

22 (Deleuze 1986: x)

7 characteristics found in Deleuze’s cinematic concept of the time-image, including “irrational cuts” and non-linear composition, rather than the more typical, compositional characteristics of sequential and teleological melodic progression.

I will broach some of the artistic precursors to this catalysing of the duration of the “minor” subject as found, for example, in the “stream of consciousness” literature at the turn of the twentieth century. I argue that in common with these authors, Brown has also enunciated his immanent existential circumstances, with the musical force of “the one” reflecting a “minor” temporality.

Having canvassed this more general proposition of a “minor” temporality, it is in chapter 2 that I turn my attention to its constitution. Drawing not only upon work from Deleuze and Guattari, but also from fields of cultural studies and diaspora theory, I attempt to formulate some of the immanent existential concerns of the minor subject. I also attempt to assess Brown’s cultural position with reference to Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, to both discern the veracity of what has been written about Brown’s music but also to qualify his often-complex relationship to Africa and his apparent musical inheritance. However, rather than simply attribute Brown’s music as a reiteration of African diasporic musical legacy, I am more concerned with how African-American forms of music such as gospel and funk will look toward the production of new forms of time. In particular, I examine the ways in which they might represent an attempt to transcend hegemonic temporal constraints. I will then discuss this idea in relation to an example of post-soul cinema such as Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, arguing for it as an informative cinematic example of an apprehension of minor temporality.

In chapter 3, I consider the effect of gospel music on the funk aesthetic. For it was gospel, in particular, that informed funk’s composition, not only aesthetically but also in its orientation to “time” rather than “movement”. Gospel would impress upon the musical world a compositional sensibility that embraces groove, affecting in turn funk and electronic dance musics. To examine Brown’s relationship to gospel I turn to James Snead’s famous essay “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture”. Snead’s essay is mandatory to any discussion of Brown’s music as it details how the gospel style provided the compositional devices that would be taken up by Brown’s funk. Having

8 established the centrality of repetition to Brown’s work, I then examine repetition itself from a philosophical point of view, with a particular emphasis on Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. I use Deleuze’s ideas to demonstrate repetition’s relationship to time –a repetition that Brown would rechannel back into popular music through funk.

In chapter 4, "The ‘I’ Becomes ‘We’: Contextualising the Soul Aesthetic”, I will discuss the civil rights struggle on prevailing existential conditions. I will argue that such conditions, whilst reflected lyrically in the composition of the soul aesthetic, might be even more acutely felt though Brown’s experiments in rhythm. I will then compare the shift in existential outlook between soul music and Brown’s music in general and attempt to set up a framework for examining the ontological conditions for Brown’s musical departure. Brown’s increasing use of repetition in his music, I argue, appeals to a new conception of time, and one that would demonstrate the beginning of funk’s break with the modernist regard of the telos. I will distinguish Brown’s approach from the more progressive/virtuosic styles of jazz that have emerged since World War II, arguing that the minimalist Funk aesthetic was more concerned with collectivity rather than virtuosity.

Chapter 5, "Soul as Movement Image”, I conceptualise the inherent teleology of the soul aesthetic as outlined in the previous chapter. I posit that the popular soul composition might be understood as a reflection of the movement-image due to its narrative-driven existential logic. Furthermore, I will discuss the impact of the British Invasion on the burgeoning soul genre and assess the impact of this “invasion”, discussing some of the differences between appropriation and becoming in the process. Perhaps because of his increasingly idiosyncratic inclination, Brown’s music was not subject to as much coverage by the groups of the British Invasion. I will assert that this was partly because the more radically minimalist identity embraced by funk encompassed a vital political will, directed toward a more expedient and effective production of minor territory.

In chapter 6, I argue for Brown’s musical experimentation as an exhibition of “thought without image” or that disbelief in convention which Deleuze contends enables creative thought to transpire. Brown’s continued resolve in the face of

9 conventional criticism is at turns both humorous and admirable - in both cases exemplary of the Deleuzean “Idiot”.

This is not least because Brown’s seminal funk experiments were often considered by his own musicians as untenable. I will explore this tension through the recollections of Brown’s ex-bandleader Fred Wesley, which appear in his recent book, Hit Me Fred: Confessions of a Sideman (2003). As Wesley details, Brown’s personnel thought he was a musical illiterate and Wesley himself held Brown in contempt for getting Wesley to play such “silly music”.23 Yet whilst this “silly” music was establishing Brown as the most successful African-American performer of all time,24 the jazz heroes of his band members, such as Miles Davis, were also listening it to and taking notes. I will suggest here that Brown’s musical radicality lay in the fact that his music was addressing the future and a “people to come” rather than the present.

In chapter 7, I detail the break in soul’s “action-image” as symptomatic of a decline in the belief in a narrative view of the world. It was with this decline that the funk aesthetic would increasingly assert its presence through repetition, the groove and more open-ended compositional forms. Soul’s discernibly linear trajectory and melodic artifice would be usurped by an emphatic, and non-linear, beat driven music indicative of the time-image style of music that would appear from the post-soul generation.

I should add here that I do not consider Brown himself to be working solely within the “time-image” tradition. Instead, I contend that Brown’s music set up the affordances for the ensuing “time-image” styles that were capitalised upon by electronic dance music cultures. I should also add here that the history of such genres is so complex as to warrant their own historical accounts. Thus, I have elected to use only those examples that will demonstrate my broader concerns with time, and the groove’s increasing usurpation of the more orthodox linear pop song. I argue that the increasing prevalence of the groove, particularly among some of the most disaffected

23 This is what James Brown bandleader Fred Wesley thought of funk (Wesley 2002: 158-159). 24 According to the Billboard Chart (published on James Brown’s official site), Brown has had a total of 104 Pop and 98 R&B hits (James Brown Official Site 2004). Brown not only maintains a record number of R&B hits, but his pop chart success makes him the second most successful pop performer in terms of pure chart hits and bettered only by Elvis Presley (Eliot 2005: 32).

10 populations, was due to the open ended nature of that form – the longer the groove, the more they could put off having to re-enter the “real” world.

My assessment of such groove based styles then extends beyond my previous concentration on African-American musical styles to include groups such as Kraftwerk, who were also creating amidst their own post-war existential malaise. It is in deference to Kraftwerk, that I refer to in the chapter’s title "From Cold Sweat to No Sweat”. For their puritan sensibility would use electronic means to achieve the rhythmic exactitude set by Brown’s bands, but “without sweating”.25 In general, the emphasis on the groove, I argue, is reflective of the shift from broader narratives to the micropolitical – the idea that a micro-liberation of desire might assist processes of becoming and transformation.26 This is a change in the musical image of thought. Such a change is reflected in the musical practices used by DJs and samplers of the post-soul generation and beyond, providing a superlative demonstration of linear causality making way for the more “irrational” breaks that inform the new aesthetic.

Having outlined the role of these musical styles as demonstrative of a more “time- image” informed music, in Chapter 8 I will attempt a more stringent assessment of this form of composition. Whilst much discussion in regard to recent musical practices such as DJing and sampling continue to be framed through the perspective of the Platonic model/copy distinction, I argue that such theoretical assessments would perhaps be otherwise better served if discussed through the Deleuzean concept of the “powers of the false”. Having qualified this theoretical distinction I will discuss the use and misuse of Brown’s music and what this has meant for the aesthetics of contemporary electronic dance musics.

Finally, a brief caveat. As a James Brown fan of many years standing, I am more than aware that many of Brown’s long suffering band members and extended alumni are often slighted in accounts of Brown’s work. I will say here that I am more than aware of the symbiotic relationship that existed between Brown and the group, and thus when I attribute all of this innovation to Brown in general I am more often than not referring to the James Brown musical assemblage in a metonymic sense. As fans of

25 (Flur in Reiss 2001) 26 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 213 )

11 Brown’s music are also more than aware, there is much dispute over the authorship of Brown’s music and ex-members of the group have seen their contributions uncredited, or unpaid for, by Brown.27 It is apparent, however, that even those who felt slighted by Brown’s behaviour could still be positive about his achievements. See, for example, the gracious assessment of Brown by Wesley:

Once you get away with something, you've set a precedent. And back there in the '60s, James set a hell of a precedent. All music that we hear today is influenced by James Brown. I stand on that - everybody today who calls himself a creator of music has been influenced by James.28

It is accounting for what this music did that I will now address as Brown’s “apprehension of a minor temporality”.

27 For example, his old friend and collaborator Bobby Byrd sued Brown in 2003 for unpaid royalties (Moody 2003) 28 (Wesley in Cynthia Rose 1990: 37)

12 CHAPTER ONE APPREHENSION OF A MINOR TEMPORALITY

“The One”

Any assessment of James Brown’s contribution to popular music usually begins with a celebration of “the one”. This name is derived from Brown’s emphasis on the downbeat, occurring on the first and third beat of each 4/4 bar, rather than emphasising the more common second and fourth beats of the bar. What might initially appear to be a rather slight musical gesture would affect a radical impact on the musical styles to follow. For “the one” would instil within popular music an unprecedented drive that would characterise not only the funk style, but also dance music to the present-day. Brown is hardly sanguine about his contribution to popular music and will freely remark, “…I moved the music from two and four, to one and three with Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag, which means all the music since ‘65, 95 percent of it, was copied from me”. 29 Whilst Brown has never been one to shy from such self-promotion, the importance of this rhythmic shift cannot be so easily written off either. The enigmatic musical concept of “the one” has subsequently acquired a mythology precisely because it appeared to emerge out of nowhere. As Peter Guralnick recounts in Sweet Soul Music, Brown’s origination of the funk style was derived of an almost mystical vision of purpose: “[h]ow Brown achieved this sense of security and mission remains as much a mystery today as it was in 1964 and 1965, when first OutofSightand then Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag sprang as full-blown new rhythm conceptions from their creator’s mind.30 This strange new implementation of rhythm would mark Brown’s ten-year spell as the most popular and cutting edge of any black artist. As Dom Foulsham was to remark in an article for Blues and Soul magazine, “…[b]efore Brown, there was music with a beat. After Brown music had found a groove”. 31 Much of Brown’s subsequent musical success was predicated on the drawing out of this “groove”, which in turn was leveraged, on “the one”.

29 James Brown the Godfather of Soul: A Portrait (1995). Brown was to also recount a similar accusation on the recent BBC series on the history of Soul music, Soul Deep (2005). 30 (Guralnick 1986: 221-222) 31 (Foulsham 1993: 26)

13 Yet for all the discussion of the rhythmic innovations introduced into popular music in his name, one of the most glaring oversights is the lack of a more significant account of the historical timing of his signature emphasis on “the one”. If, as McLuhan so famously suggested, that the medium is the message, then it would appear a fair proposition to suggest that Brown’s change in rhythmic emphasis might reflect the imminent existential circumstances of its emergence. Given “the one” would appear in 1965, at the very apex of the soul movement, could it be that this rhythmic shift was an apprehending of imminent social forces? Bearing this proposition in mind, I will argue that the trademark rhythms that emerged through Brown’s funk, might be otherwise understood as the aesthetic expression of a “minor temporality”.

In order to more readily evaluate Brown’s music as a “minor temporality”, in this chapter I will:

1. Begin to outline the importance of Brown's musical innovation and assemblages to social life, and the social theory of minority becoming. 2. In doing so, differentiate this minor politics from a) majoritarian politics b) common senses c) major events, in favour of a consideration of the intolerable conditions of everyday life. 3. Discuss the relationship of such a politics to time, art and thought 4. Begin to outline the specific contexts of the thesis, namely the post-soul aesthetic, and electronic dance music. 5. Begin to outline crucial theoretical approaches, such as that of ethology.

The theoretical framework of this thesis relies heavily on the theories of Deleuze and Guattari. In particular, I turn to Deleuze’s books on cinema, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989), to elaborate how

14 aesthetic change in musical “composition” 32 might reflect a shift in “mental” orientation, as proposed in these texts. Whilst using cinematic theory to explain musical composition may appear a strange proposition, I do believe that Deleuze’s Cinema books can be instructive for thinking beyond cinema and about changes in aesthetic direction in general.33 For one of the main philosophical points of these texts is that, via the example of cinema, Deleuze will elucidate a Bergsonian questioning of time. That ultimately it is time that forces one to think. To extrapolate this idea, Deleuze turns to the cinema to provide an empirical example of this transcendental form of time – or that concept proposed by Bergson as durée, “…whose reality is an indivisible, ceaseless, and ever-changing flow”.34 As Deleuze argues in his Cinema

32 I should add here that by using the term “composition” that I am perpetuating a idea that might be considered problematic. For example in his essay, “Becoming-Music: The Rhizomatic Moment of Improvisation” (2004), Jeremy Gilbert takes exception to the sense in which Deleuze and Guattari have employed the use of “composition” mainly because of the implicit hierarchical “…ordering which places composition clearly above performance in terms of importance to the process of music- making”(Gilbert 2004a: 121). Furthermore that the way Deleuze and Guattari make use of the term “composition” tends to assimilate the idea as a manifestation of the Western classical tradition. As Gilbert argues, “when writing about ‘music’, [Deleuze and Guattari] almost invariably write about composers: music it is implied, is something that composers do” (Gilbert 2004a: 121). This demarcation, says Gilbert is a vestige of the former division of labour in the Western classical tradition that had for so many years maintained a hierarchical relationship between composer and performer. The most direct response I can give to this argument, is that I have not had a problem with the way Deleuze and Guattari have used the terms “composition” and “improvisation” synonymously, although I am sympathetic to the way it is objected to by Gilbert(Gilbert 2004a: 121). I am aware, that this may reflect on my part a more “relaxed” reading of the Deleuze-Guattarian concept of “composition”, and reflective of my reading into their use of the term as a reiteration of my own convictions. For before my encounter with the theory of Deleuze and Guattari, I had always believed that improvising was composing. In this sense I find myself in the strange position of being in accord with Gilbert’s point that the notion that “improvisation” should be considered differently from “composition” is based on the point that improvisation as “…real-time composition-in-performance – is a practice which upsets [the distinction between ‘composers’ and ‘performers’]”(Gilbert 2004a: 121). Even though this is a criticism of Deleuze and Guattari. Gilbert’s point is given salience though his discussion of the “improvisation” at the core of the Indian raga tradition which he writes, provides, “…a striking example of a rhizomatic musical culture which has developed along quite contrary lines to that of Western modernity, acquiring and refining a whole conceptual framework and technical vocabulary, as well as a system of training, designed to enable the transmission of a growing and developing body of knowledge and tradition of skilled practice which, despite its traditionality, retains improvisation at its core” (Gilbert 2004a: 133). I understand that this concern over the intent of the score versus the more collective becoming that occurs through improvisation. Indeed the collective “body without organs” produced through collective improvisation is something that I see in gospel too. I guess I still do not see a problem, and Gilbert is aware that other Deleuzean inspired discussions of music, such as those by Ronald Bogue, have also accepted this lack of distinction between the terms (Gilbert 2004a: 121). In summation I will add that whilst I have not made this distinction myself, Gilbert’s point has given me food for thought and something to consider in future discussion. 33 It would appear that I am not alone in this assessment. In the essay, Affect and Individuation in Popular Electronic Music (2005) found in Deleuze and Music, author Drew Hemment writes, “[m]uch in the way that Deleuze found the time-image to provide a direct perception of time within cinema, timestretching and the scratch might be said to present a direct perception of time. We see the emergence of a temporality of multiplicity, time-affect” (Hemment 2005: 91). I, of course, can only agree. 34 (Rodowick 1997: 122)

15 books, even if we can never truly make sense of the transcendental form of duration, we might arrive at it intuitively, and, to this end, Deleuze endows cinema with an ability to make us think about time in new ways.

Duration, Art and Thought

How does duration force one to think? This is perhaps the driving question behind Deleuze’s Cinema books. For Deleuze, such duration might be expressed through two discernible types of mental image, each of which might encompass different potential relations to time. The first Cinema book is concerned with the “organic” cinema of the movement-image, whose duration was considered a product of cumulative actions in space, that is, movement. This is the form of time that is most familiar to us. The time-image of the second Cinema book concerns the transcendental image of time. This is the form of time that Bergson refers to as durée.35 Bergson’s concept refers to a subjective form of time experienced as mental movement, rather than an “objective” or quantifiable chronos, or chronological time, that we are perhaps most familiar with. Bergson’s durée derives from an attempt to describe this direct experience of time, such as in recollection. This understanding of time is unlike that of a simple “passing present”. Instead, Bergson introduced the idea, subsequently taken up by Deleuze of a passage of time that is continually forking between a past and future and that seem to slip into each other.

Deleuze refers to this forking model of time as “…the most fundamental operation of time”, 36 where every moment is constantly undergoing a bifurcation between the “… present that passes and past which is preserved”.37 Here Laura Marks is helpful, offering a concise summary of these operations and worthy of the lengthy quote:

35 The concept of durée was originally discussed in Bergson’s 1921 essay, Durée et simultanéité: essai sur la théorie de la relativité d'Einstein, the English translation of which appears in (Bergson, Durie, & Lewis 1999). The idea of Bergsonian duration has been dealt with in many texts, including Bergson (1989), (Lacey 1989) and also, Bergson: Key Writings (2002), (Bergson, Ansell-Pearson, & Mullarkey 2002). 36 (Deleuze 1989: 81) 37 (Deleuze 1989: 82). As Deleuze says in this passage, “Bergson’s major theses on time are as follows: the past coexists with the present that it has been; the past is preserved in itself, as past in general (nonchronological); at each moment time splits itself into present and past, present that passes and past which is preserved” (Deleuze 1989: 82).

16 Drawing on Bergson’s philosophy of duration, Deleuze proffers an image of time as always splitting into two parts: the time that moves smoothly forward, or the "present that passes"; and the time that is seized and represented (if only mentally), or the "past that is preserved." What Deleuze, following Bergson, refers to as the actual image and the virtual image are the two aspects of time as it splits, the actual image corresponding to the present that passes, the virtual image to the past that is preserved. Thus we see that at the very moment that they diverge, the two types of image create two disjunctive representations of the same moment. ("Image" in Bergson signifies not simply the visual image, but the complex of all sense impressions that a perceived object conveys to a perceiver at a given moment.) An example may be found in home videos of family gatherings. At the moment that the video is shot, the two aspects of time look the same; but the present-that-passes can never be recalled (I feel ill; I am angry at my mother), while the past-that-is-preserved (we were gathered around the table, smiling) becomes the institutionalized representation of the moment. Virtual images tend to compete with recollection- images-the memory I have of the gathering that is not captured in the video - and, as we know, their power is such that they often come to stand in for our memories.38

In the final analysis then, the effect of the split of time is the production of a “…past- that-is-preserved [which] has hegemony over the representation of the event”. 39 In fact any moment of the past-preserved can be selectively recalled as the official version of the former present, recalling, of course, the old cliché that history is written by its victors. Thus, we might generally understand that to be in possession of political power is having the capacity to maintain dominance over the images of history, and to capitalise on the dynamism of the “past in the present”. I will further discuss this struggle over the reclamation of memory in chapter 8, namely, how the active recollection-image – or, the past in the present - has the power to falsify official history, and also why “[v]irtual images tend to compete with recollection-images”. 40 The result of this complex splitting of time between actual and virtual makes it impossible to distinguish time as simple linear flow. Furthermore, it is drawing upon the creative power of these relative perspectives on time, that art forms such as music or cinema are chiefly concerned.

38 (Laura U. Marks 2000: 40) 39 (Laura U. Marks 2000: 40) 40 (Laura U. Marks 2000: 40)

17 The work of art as an expression of temporal duration has conceptual precedents in other fields, as examined in Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel (1962). The author of this book, Shiv Kumar, analysed the influence of Bergsonian duration on the emergence of the “stream of consciousness” style that had emerged relatively contemporaneously with Bergsonian philosophy in the early 20th century. The “stream of consciousness” style had counted among its practitioners authors such as Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf whose work would expose the effect of Bergsonian durée on thought at this time. This notion of durée, or duration, can be more simply understood as the subjective experience of time – a less simple, less linear experience of time. For example, a ride in the bus that takes 40 minutes in chronological, or “clock time”, might seem considerably longer (or shorter) in terms of lived durational experience. The “stream of consciousness” approach emerged as a method of bringing the expression of the transcendental durée to the fore. For instance, instead of describing the action of characters as occurring within a universalised notion of linear time and fixed space, the “stream of consciousness” style would instead emphasise the explorations of the composition of time to the point where it obscured the more predetermined time/space of the traditional narrative form. As Kumar has argued, this “stream of consciousness” approach would capitalise upon Bergson’s revised perspective on time.41 The writers engaged in this style would proceed to capture these more existential notions of duration in their writing.

Taking my cue from the artistic depiction of time as illustrated by these “stream of consciousness” authors, I will attempt to describe how various forms of musical expression might further divulge the broader existential forces that lay behind aesthetic change. Within a musical context, we might think of the shift in rhythm instigated by Brown through his concept of “the one”, as a new apprehension – or capture - of time. To discuss this idea of an artistic capture of temporality more fully, IwillturntoDeleuze’sCinema books and his explication of the shift in cinematic aesthetics from movement-image to time-image. This aesthetic shift provides a rather neat correlation with the historical periods that I have elected to analyse, defined respectively as the “soul” and “post-soul” eras.

41 (Kumar 1962: 5-10)

18 Soul and Post-Soul Aesthetics

It was writer Nelson George who coined the term “post-soul” aesthetic, in reference to an African-American population trying to come to terms with life in the aftermath of the civil-rights struggle. Studies of this “post-soul generation” have, in turn, been the subject of books such as B-Boys, Baps, and Bohos: Notes on Post-Soul Black Culture (1994, 2001) and the recent Post Soul Nation (2004). Mark Anthony Neal would give George’s literary concept a more academic embellishment in Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002). For both authors, the post-soul aesthetic reflects a retraction from the narratives of the soul aesthetic, and thus from the values once subscribed to by African-Americans in the preceding civil rights era.

Building on the insights of commentators such as George and Neal, I will emphasise how the failure of soul would lead to a change in perspective on history – and perhaps a revised notion of temporality, where the latter will become intrinsic to musical practices such as DJing and sampling. This idea, in turn, assumes what I will call a new musical “image of thought”. Deleuze and Guattari describe this notion of the “image of thought” in What is Philosophy? as “…the image thought gives itself of what it means to think, to make use of thought, to find one’s bearings in thought”.42

I will argue that this new image of thought arose out of the “intolerable” circumstances accompanying the decline of the civil rights era. As Deleuze and Guattari write in What is Philosophy? the role of the artist is to respond to the “intolerable” forces of a life otherwise imposed upon by the “common sense” of thought. 43 To address this idea more fully, I will tease out the concept of the “intolerable” and the way in which a “common sense” can create intolerable conditions for the minor subject.

The Intolerable

42 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 37) 43 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 171). It should perhaps be noted that this concept has been interchangeably translated as both the “intolerable” (Deleuze 1989: 169-170), in the case of Cinema 2 or the “unbearable” (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 171) in What is Philosophy?

19 This intolerable condition might, in some cases, reflect the truly catastrophic, but it may also just as readily refer to the banality of the everyday. 44 As Deleuze has written in Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989):

For it is not in the name of a better or truer world that thought captures the intolerable in this world, but, on the contrary, it is because this world is intolerable that it can no longer think a world or think itself. The intolerable is no longer a serious injustice, but the permanent state of a daily banality. Man is not himself a world other than the one in which he experiences the intolerable and feels himself trapped.45

Such intolerable, daily banality was perhaps characteristic of the experience of a majority of African-Americans in the 1960s, who invested their hopes for social change within the “grand narrative” 46 logic of the soul era (a logic that might be found, for instance, in the teleological projection implicit to the refrains of “We Shall Overcome”). Although, as I shall discuss in detail in chapter 7, the optimism of the civil-rights era would be symbolically brought to a close with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, and give way to the pessimism surrounding the post-soul era.

An ongoing concern of this study is to further develop this relationship between the soul and post-soul periods with those concepts of movement-image and time-image proposed by Deleuze in his Cinema books. For the decline in the belief in the narratives of soul reflect a similar loss of faith in teleology as that which Deleuze finds so significant in the change in cinema after World War II. As Deleuze writes, the war would exacerbate a loss of faith in a narrative depiction of the world, and this change in existential circumstance would cause the cinema to undergo an “empiricist conversion”:

…the problem that now concerns the one who believes in the world, and not even in the existence of the world but in its possibilities of movements and intensities, so as once again to give birth to new modes of existence… It may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task, or the task of a mode of existence still

44 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 171) 45 (Deleuze 1989: 169-170) 46 This use of “grand narrative” is an allusion to the work of postmodern philosopher, Jean François Lyotard and his idea of a teleological view of the world predicated upon such master narratives as discussed in his groundbreaking, The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge (Lyotard 1984)

20 to be discovered on our plane of immanence today. This is the empiricist conversion.47

In short, this “empiricist conversion” may be as simple as asking one’s self how best to go on in the face of intolerable circumstances. To explain the type of belief required to proceed in such intolerable circumstances, Jonathan Rajchman provides a concise summation here of Deleuze’s idea of a belief in the immanent as the means for this “empiricist conversion”:

Deleuze says that the role of belief in the “synthesis of time” geared to unknown futures, or to what is yet to come, was best formulated by religious philosophers like Kierkegaard, Pascal and Péguy. For in relation to their respective religions they replaced the question of belief in God with a question of the mode of existence of the believer, pointing the way to another kind of conversion: a belief or trust placed in this world rather than in another, transcendent one. It is this kind of “empiricist conversion” that Deleuze then thinks the “time-images” in cinema offered us, after Hitler and the war. The problem it worked out together with postwar philosophy was a whole crisis in “movement” – for example, in the “dialectical montage” and the movement of the masses to self-consciousness in which Eisenstein could still put his trust.48

The ensuing crisis in “movement” as it might be perceived within the context of the soul era, will be discussed more explicitly in chapter 7. Presently, however, I want to advance the idea that Brown himself will respond to these “intolerable” circumstances through the creation of funk, demonstrative perhaps of a type of musical “empiricist conversion”. For funk can be generally considered as the belief in the more imminent idea of a “brand new bag” rather than reflect a faith in teleological change that, as Sam Cooke would sing, “…was gonna come”.49 Brown’s music would emerge from the trying circumstances of the civil-rights experience, to offer its audience a belief in this world rather than a teleological projection. Furthermore, Brown’s music gave the bodies of a disaffected minor population a resource to return to, to inspire belief in the world in the face of the incommensurable sense of loss assumed in the aftermath of the failed civil rights struggle.

47 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 75) 48 (Rajchman 2000: 26) 49 This is in reference to the Sam Cooke song, A Change is Gonna Come (1964) (Cooke 1986).

21 Within this context, Brown’s musical work might be conceivably imbued with the power of belief in the world and similar to that which Deleuze attributes to the neo- realist style of Roberto Rosselini.50 For Deleuze, Rosselini’s neo-realist style would set in motion a style of cinema that would “…replace the model of knowledge with belief'”.51 That is to say, this cinema will demonstrate the vital difference between a belief in the world and the more subjective knowledge of the world. The belief in the world is remaining open to the potential connections that might be discovered when one relinquishes a more dogmatic image of the world. The intolerable results of such “common sense” visions of this world, culminating in World War II, drove the crisis in this adherence to the logic of action-image and instead, “…the link between man and the world is broken”.52 Deleuze finds this crisis in the action-image reflected in several periods of European cinema, in the Italian neo-realist cinema of the late 1940s, the French Nouvelle Vague of the late 1950s and 1960s, and in West German cinema roughly a decade later.53 That these cinematic periods were working through their own particular existential crises can be evidenced in the new methods sought to depict time and space differently in their respective oeuvres. The more indeterminate concepts of time and space facilitated through the voyages and any-space-whatevers of these cinematic styles are provided as evidence of the break from the “organic” notion of sensory-motor connection.54 From this decline in the logical flow of action and chronological time, the resulting time-image aesthetic will interrupt these more commonsense notions of time and space.

Following Deleuze’s cinematic model, my own proposition is that the post-soul aesthetic might also reflect a similar type of artistic reaction to a crisis in action- image. This breakdown of a simple linear form of time will emerge as the result of the decline in soul’s belief in a teleological revelation of “truth”.

Restoring belief in the world

50 (Deleuze 1989: 171-172) 51 (Deleuze 1989: 172) 52 (Deleuze 1989: 171-172) 53 Deleuze himself says “[t]he timing is something like: around 1948, Italy; about 1958, France; about 1968, Germany” (Deleuze in Flaxman 2000: 34) 54 These ideas are discussed in the first chapter of Cinema 2, “Beyond the Movement-Image” (Deleuze 1989: 1-24).

22 In the midst of this break in soul’s action-image, I shall assume, following Deleuze that Brown’s role as an artist is to restore “belief in the world”, in the way that Deleuze might speak of a Rossellini or a Godard in the Cinema books. As Deleuze says in this section of Cinema 2, “…the less human the world is, the more it is the artist’s duty to believe and produce belief in a relation between man and the world, because the world is made by men”.55 The artist must be able to look beyond a default image of thought that espouses belief in a representation of the world, for as Deleuze has written, “[t]he modern fact is that we no longer believe in this world”.56 This is perhaps because the conditions for a belief in the world have become too difficult. Therefore, it is up to the artist to restore belief in the world by presenting new possibilities for thought.

Brown’s own artistic response to the intolerable, might be witnessed through the musical expression of the funk style, a movement that would similarly effect a lasting contribution to a change in the depiction of musical time, just in the way that the post- War European cinemas would. Whilst the first reaction to this breakdown in the hegemonically maintained ideas of time and space might be one of disconcert, I believe that it was more than fitting given that the civil-rights era suffered such an untimely blow in its aspirations.

As I shall discuss in chapter 4, Brown recreates one possibility for belief in the world through his promotion of new connections between thought and the affective. Whilst I will discuss the importance of affect more explicitly in that chapter, for present purposes, affect might simply be understood as a bodily feeling derived from an experience of an event. The body encounters these affects as forces, which are subsequently translated (and reduced linguistically) into more general, but enunciable, “emotions”. Perhaps the main point to bear in mind here is that for Deleuze and Guattari, such affects, “…are becomings”57 and of specific interest to this study is how such affects are mobilised into social possibilities.58

55 (Deleuze 1989: 171) 56 (Deleuze 1989: 171) 57 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 256) 58 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 256)

23 It is true that any creative act is distinguished by its production of affects, yet these affects will always come up against social limitations, or rather, be framed by those limitations. The task of a more radical work of art is to re-activate affect, outside of “the frame”. Distinguishing these affective relations is the basis of the Deleuze- Guattarian concept of ethology.59 Whilst I will discuss this idea in more detail in the next chapter, what concerns us here is giving due emphasis to the instigation of new affective relations as a means toward a more immanent form of politics. This is a more micro-political process based around experimenting with the capacities of a body to affect new relations upon the world; relations that may hopefully move beyond those imposed by a “common sense” image of thought. The artist, which includes Brown himself, will have to mediate at this important juncture between unrestrained affective possibility and “common sense”. As I will argue in detail in chapter 6, it is only the artist who is sufficiently naïve to attempt to overturn the majoritarian representation of events, and it is through their art that a minor politics is given affective substance.

This is not always a completely intentional process on the part of the artist. Brown’s approach to music becomes political through its accommodation of new bodily expressions that will ultimately extend into alternative means for thought. This “empiricist conversion” begins with a “belief in the body”, and this is why Deleuze contends that a belief in the world is a belief in the body itself.60 To understand what Deleuze means by “a body” here, I am referring to a non-referential sense of the body rather than being a body of something, for instance, a predetermined, gendered or racialised body. Becoming, then, might result from attempts to make that body work for itself rather than be beholdened to the terms of its representation. Through a belief in the world (and body) we might be able to connect people with the world again, and perhaps restore the artificial divisions that we have created between the body and the

59 Deleuze provides the most concise definition of “ethology” in one of his course lectures. “…if I ask myself what is the most immediate sense of the word ethics, in what way is it already other than morality, well, ethics is better known to us today under another name, the word ethology…When one speaks of an ethology in connection with animals, or in connection with man, what is it a matter of? Ethology in the most rudimentary sense is a practical science, of what? A practical science of the manners of being. The manner of being is precisely the state of beings (étants), of what exists (existants), from the point of view of a pure ontology” (Deleuze 1977/1998). 60 (Deleuze 1989: 172)

24 “outside”. 61 From here we might begin to more readily embrace the unpredictable results that will undoubtedly ensue:

We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions or passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body.62

If any performer has been synonymous with pushing the boundaries of what a body could do, it is James Brown. This is an assessment based not only on the intensity of Brown’s dance routines and performances, but also as a reflection of his idiosyncratic approach to musical expression. Approaching Brown’s legacy this way may appear to be precariously headed up some essentialist path, such as conferring “blackness” a synonymous relationship with the “body”. This is most certainly not the case, although it is true that the specificity of bodies matters. For a start, the question is one of the body as always the mediator of affects and, as such, of what the body can contribute to thought. If Brown brought hope to the African-American community at the time when it was needed most, this was perhaps via the body. Brown was – via affective expression - redefining what it meant to be human at a time when the political processes of a world that appeared to be anything but human. This is precisely why the artist must intervene, or in the words of neo-realist director, Roberto Rosselini: “…the less human the world is, the more it is the artist’s duty to believe and produce belief in a relation between man and the world”.63 Brown might be seen as exemplary here as he tried to push the boundaries of what a body could do “between man and the world”, at a time when there were so many of these boundaries in a segregated American society.

James Brown as Political Figure

Yet Brown’s idiosyncratic approach to the more traditional forms of politics has always clouded his legacy. Take for instance, the now oft-cited, Boston Garden

61 (Deleuze 1989: 172) 62 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 257) 63 (Deleuze 1989: 170)

25 performance that Brown performed on the 5th April 1968, the very day of Martin Luther King’s assassination. Brown allowed the concert to be televised as a way of “cooling down” the expected civil unrest in the city. 64 This apparent collusion with “the man” would place some significant strain on the goodwill that had been extended to Brown by African-American audiences. Thus began the recasting of Brown into “Uncle Tom”65 a position that was further exacerbated when he personally requested to play for the troops in Vietnam shortly after.66 Brown appeared to be taking the side of the government during the very same period that the Black Panthers were setting up neighbourhood chapters to defend themselves against the “man” and as Muhammad Ali would declare that, “…no Vietcong ever called me nigger”. 67 In light of that prevailing social climate, it is easy to see how Brown could be perceived as being rather politically ill informed.

However, it would be unfair to attribute Brown’s famous riot quelling performances on television as a simple collusion with the enemy. Undoubtedly, from the point of view of a “visible” politics, there are real problems with these performances. However, there are other aspects to politics. Brown was perhaps naively attempting to address the African-American’s ultimate enemy, its lack of visibility. At least if Brown was on stage addressing a televised audience he might demonstrate the potential of African-American political power through what he considered a more productive approach to the situation at hand. For as Nelson George would subsequently comment in The Death of Rhythm and Blues (1989), the riots only had the effect of devastating the little infrastructure that black communities had managed to develop up to that point.68 One might contend that the communities of the cities in question have never fully recovered. Brown was undoubtedly aware of the irony of

64 As Brown historians Harry Weinger & Cliff White explain in the Grammy award winning liner notes to the Star Time (1991) box set: “Brown stepped to the fore. The day after King’s assassination, he was televised in concert at the Boston Garden to calm the rioting. He was flown to Washington, D.C. to speak on the radio and urge brotherhood. Brown and his wife were also invited to a White House dinner with President Johnson” (Weinger & White 1991: 34). 65 “But the gestures to government didn’t endear him to black militants. To them, Soul Brother No. 1 was siding with ‘the Man’” (Weinger & White 1991: 35). Gerri Hirshey provides a more detailed account of the ensuing fallout in Nowhere to Run see (Hirshey 1985: 281-282) 66 An article dedicated to Brown’s Vietnam Tour, entitled “Death or Glory” can be found in the July 2003 edition of Mojo magazine (Maycock 2003). 67 Ali’s legendary comment, made to a reporter in 1966 is depicted in Michael Mann’s film, Ali (2001). 68 (George 1988: 97-98)

26 this situation, 69 and for his part, attempted in his own way to contain the more destructive effects of the civil-rights struggle, including the untimely deaths of some of its most significant leaders - Medger Evers, Malcolm X and of course Dr. Martin Luther King.

In general, it is the realm of the macropolitical that tends to be most commonly accepted method of guaranteeing a political future, via Brown we might begin to think in terms of a politics of the everyday. For it is the artist, rather than the State, who can most expediently catalyse imminent affective concerns into a form collective enunciation. If the teleology that drove the soul aesthetic was collapsing at this time, alongside the failure of the civil rights trajectory, there is little that the State can do to circumvent the demise of an existential relation to history. Within such disconcerting circumstances, Brown would have to maintain the most important attribute of the artist, the promotion of a belief in the world rather than merely succumbing to its failures:

The whole relation of thought to action or agency had to change; the problem of "representing the masses" would be rethought in relation to the space and time of minorities in accordance with a new pragmatism, a new empiricism in relation to the world or to trust in the world.70

In this thesis I will credit Brown as helping to inspire the means towards a vital and wholly necessary empiricist conversion; that his music could inspire a belief in the world as imminent possibility when the bottom fell out of the “transcendent” narratives of soul. I will contend that through innovations such as funk, Brown might be seen as attempting to restore belief in a future reminiscent of the neo-realist filmmakers who helped to usher in the modern “time-image” cinema. However in the place of neo-realism, Brown gave the world funk. Through funk, Brown would create “affordances” that would be subsequently capitalised upon in a creative evolution of DJing and sampling culture. One of the most significant affordances of Brown’s funk might be seen in the way that it has opened up compositional practice and the expression of duration in new ways.

69 In the documentary, James Brown: Man To Man (1968), Brown can be seen ruminating on the plight of African-Americans living in the ghettos of Watts, Washington and Harlem. 70 (Rajchman 2000: 26)

27 Funk, in effect takes on these new expressions of musical time as a “rendering visible” of broader existential circumstances. As the social movement underpinning the civil rights struggle began to collapse, Brown’s funk would present possibilities for a body in the world. Rather than engage in the teleology of traditional politics, Brown’s extrovert performances were indicative of an awareness that only a belief in the body can provide as the means to “become”, and that “becoming” is ultimately the only real political possibility for a “minor” people.

Deleuze and Guattari’s “Minor”

The “minor” thus proposed within this notion of a “minor temporality” is based on the Deleuze-Guattarian concept originally appearing in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975) and further elaborated in their subsequent works, most notably A Thousand Plateaus (1980). It is important to note that Deleuze and Guattari do not propose the categories of major and minor in terms of quantitative relations, but instead posit they should be perceived as reflections of relative power:

The difference between minorities and majorities isn’t their size. A minority may be bigger than a majority. What defines the majority is a model you have to conform to: the average European adult male city-dweller,forexample...Aminority,ontheotherhand,hasno model, it’s a becoming, a process. One might say the majority is nobody. Everybody’s caught, one way or another, in a minority becoming that would lead them into unknown paths if they opted to follow it through. When a minority creates models for itself, it’s because it wants to become a majority, and probably has to, to survive or prosper (to have a state, be recognized, establish its rights, for example). But its power comes from what it’s managed to create, which to some extent goes into the model, but doesn’t depend on it: A people is always a creative minority, and remains one even when it acquires a majority: it can be both at once, because the two things aren’t lived out on the same plane.71

For Deleuze and Guattari, the minor is always in a process of “becoming” in relation to the majoritarian or dominant forces of “stratification” (as static framing). Quite simply if the majoritarian is a conformity to the general state of things, then the minority is becoming something else. The differences between the two can perhaps

71 (Deleuze 1995: 173-174)

28 be understood in the following way. The purpose of the majoritarian is to maintain stasis via common sense, similitude, habit, banality and pretty much all of the other methods of maintaining the apparent stability of everyday life. The majoritarian culture must, by nature, embrace conformity as it tries to keep bodies moving in a given space rather than allowing a shifting space to move through changing bodies.

The minor, then, can be perceived as the escape route from the dominant culture. In this sense, given that life is change, the minor culture is always better oriented to embrace this change compared to its major counterpart. Deleuze and Guattari have summarised these opposing orientations in the following way: “…we must distinguish between the majoritarian as a constant and homogenous system; minorities as subsystems; and the minoritarian as a potential, creative and created, becoming”.72

As it is always becoming, the minor has no identity per se, and thus eludes a place in the official truths of history. For this reason the minor will instead take up what might be perceived as the “false” (from the point of view of “official truth” or “common sense”). In this respect the minor is not faithful to a concept of identity so much as one of becoming. Moreover, as a concept, the minor shows this potential to become, an orientation made possible through an openness to the infinite dimensions of coexistent alterities that might be used to oppose official (and rather more static) versions of history:

History is made only by those who oppose history (not by those who insert themselves into it, or even reshape it). This is not done for provocation but happens because the punctual system they found ready-made, or themselves invented, must have allowed this operation: free the line and the diagonal, draw the line instead of plotting a point, produce an imperceptible diagonal instead of clinging to an even elaborated or reformed vertical or horizontal. When this is done it always goes down in History but never comes from it.73

As I will discuss in detail in chapter 7, funk’s emphasis of the groove might be considered a musical expression of an opposition to the “punctual system” or the “common sense” version of the linear flow of time. Or, perhaps rather more simply,

72 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 105-106) 73 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 295-296)

29 the groove of funk reinforces a sense of becoming-time rather than an ideologically constructed one. In fact, from the minor point of view, the purpose of time is to throw the “truths” that constitute official history into question.74 Thus, a revised orientation to time can only be found through a falsification of such “truths” and a recognition that such falsity virtually co-exists with the truth’s apparent actuality.

This is why I argue in chapter 8 that it is through the power of the “false”, the eruption of the virtual, of possibilities of becoming, into the actual, that we can more readily pursue Brown’s contribution. This is not to say that Brown should be valued for falsifying history himself, but rather, for setting the affordances into place that allowed a future people to do so. To provide for a future of DJ and sampling culture that would make such decisive use of Brown’s refrains. The artists of future electronic dance music cultures that would emerge in the wake of the soul, would set about creating the instruments needed to challenge history in a way that evokes the time- image’s challenge to a given, state-sanctioned recollection. In both, the minor assumes a position oriented to a future rather than maintaining the identity of an official past. This is why Deleuze and Guattari assert in A Thousand Plateaus,that “[b]ecoming is an anti-memory”.75 To become, one must spend one’s life turning one’s back on habit, and otherwise act in service of the new. Becoming is not tied to history, because one can only transcend the shackles of one’s past by attempting to forget it. The work of art, then, might intervene in the body’s relation to history as it demands its audience to make sense of its chaos and thus challenges our more habitual experiences of perception.

The work of art is predisposed to this opening up of the “past-preserved” – to undermine the represented past upon which official histories are dependent. The minor will thus embrace art as the means to overturn this dominant form of historical time. For this reason, art’s minor status, established through the production of affects or becomings will be understood in contradistinction to the concept of opinion as the organisational property of the majority.76 As Deleuze and Guattari write in What is Philosophy? “[t]he essence of opinion is will to majority and already speaks in the

74 (Deleuze 1989: 130) 75 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 294) 76 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 146)

30 name of majority” 77 and they explain this through the example of the competition which asks its audience to provide its opinion but where you can only “win”, “…if you say the same as the majority of those participating”. 78 To break from this stultifying majoritarian world of opinion we require that character who is not out to win any such competitions, the character that Deleuze refers to as the “seer”.79 For the seer’s innocence of the dominant constructions of truth thus subverts its perpetuation.

The “seer” or the “idiot”, are Deleuzean characters of naïve difference who play a vital role in the overturning of orthodoxy.80 As I will argue in chapter 6, Brown too might be seen as an “idiot”, as his music would make possible alternative means of expression for a “minor” people who have no place in a dominant history, or as Laura Marks has offered in her discussion of post-colonial cinema the “…violent histories to which its dominant population is blind”.81

“Minor” Literature, “Minor” Music

Through the example of Brown’s funk, we might also demonstrate how the concept of minority is one synonymous with collectivity.82 In regard to this idea of collectivity, I will discuss in chapter 6, how Brown’s ensemble approach to composition might be seen to resist the type of “mastery” or virtuosity that characterised the compositional practices occurring concurrently in fields such as rock and jazz. This might be a provocative assertion, but it makes sense if contextualised through Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a “minor literature”. The post-war styles of jazz from bebop to “cool” to “free jazz” styles shared correlations with a majoritarian idea of authorship, where the author/genius expounds some great insight about the world. In this respect

77 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 146) 78 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 146) 79 The “seer” is a figure that Deleuze will ascribe to the films of Rossellini namely, “a cinema of the seer and no longer of the agent” (Deleuze 1989: 126). Deleuze will contend that the characters of films such as Rosselini’s (and other Neorealist auteurs) might “see” but this does not necessarily provide them with an accompanying capacity to act. Just like the cinema audience itself, the characters of the neorealist films are able to see situations but are unable to act or react to them (Deleuze 1989: 126). 80 See (Deleuze 1994: 130-131) and also (Deleuze 1989: 128). As Deleuze writes in Cinema 2, ‘Sensory-motor situations have given way to pure optical and sound situations to which characters, who have become seers, cannot or will not react, so great is the Dostoevskian condition as taken up by Kurosawa: in the most pressing situations, The Idiot feels the need to see the terms of a problem which is more profound than the situation, and even more pressing” (Deleuze 1989: 128). 81 (Laura U. Marks 2000: 27-28) 82 (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 17)

31 the rather more populist outlook of the funk style would eschew the values of virtuosity, and as I will recount in detail in chapter 5, Brown’s more general shift to an idea of “don’t do no soloing brother, just keep what you got”, 83 as articulated in his 1970 track, Funky Drummer (1970). The maintenance of the groove, as the vehicle of collective experience and its promotion of a minor becoming, presents some similarities with Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the “minor literature”. For instead of expounding the virtuosity of the author/genius, the “minor literature” is instead directed towards the formation of a collective. Deleuze and Guattari find such collective formation in the “minor literature” of Franz Kafka, who they say, does not define or write on behalf of any current people in particular, for a “minor literature” refers to no subject, but rather appeals for future “collective assemblages of enunciation”.84

To explain how a minor literature might mobilise such collective assemblages of enunciation, Deleuze and Guattari explain how Kafka as a Czech Jew, would express his minority by assuming a writing style that would utilise a variety of languages - the Czech vernacular, Hebrew (what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the mythic language), Yiddish, which itself is a “…nomadic movement of deterritorialization that reworks German”, 85 as well as the literature of his milieu, Prague German. Prague German itself, Deleuze and Guattari add, “…is a deterritorialized language, appropriate for strange and minor uses. (This can be compared in another context to what blacks in America today are able to do with the English language)”.86

Kafka’s literature will thus produce a new assemblage of enunciation in relation to this specific minority circumstance.87 Working between these languages, Kafka becomes “a sort of stranger within his own language”.88The result is a “minor literature” which makes use of a plurilingualism that reflects the writer’s

83 (Brown 1970a) 84 (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 18) 85 (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 25) 86 (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 17) 87 (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 18-19)As Deleuze and Guattari write the “…minor no longer designates specific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature” (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 18) . The “minor literature” then, is a “revolutionary force for all literature” and uses“dryness” and its “poverty” whereby it will push “…deterritorialization to such an extreme that nothing remains but intensities” (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 19). 88 (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 26)

32 environmental assemblage. This is why Deleuze and Guattari argue that a minor literature should not be understood as the product of an individual subject, but rather as a collective enunciation of “a people” and an expression of a “revolutionary machine-to-come”.89 Deleuze and Guattari write further on this idea in A Thousand Plateaus, offering that the form of this revolutionary machine-to-come is manifest, “…as seeds, crystals of becoming whose value is to trigger uncontrollable movements and deterritorializations of the mean or majority”. 90 Here I shall argue that Brown’s/funk’s shifting of rhythmic emphasis to “the one” evokes a similar minor becoming, a method of re-assembling duration in a way that would allow for new and increasingly radical affective relations and associations between bodies.

Brown’s music will receive this inordinate amount of attention by the generations of dance music producers “to come”, because of certain rhythmic “affordances” that beckon the music to be re-assembled again at a later time. Such “affordances” might be considered in the following way: when the early hip-hop DJ’s such as Kool Herc decided to take two turntables and synthesise James Brown records into new compositions, the components of Brown’s music must have indicated something of this future utility. This is what I mean when I argue that Brown helped to virtualise the conditions for a future electronic dance music.

The Literature on James Brown

One must assume that it is testament to Brown’s minor status that when compared to other popular music contemporaries such as The Beatles or Bob Dylan, there is a relative dearth of investigative literature compared to the scale of his musical impact.91 Perhaps as a way of counteracting this shortfall, Brown involved himself in not one, but two separate autobiographies. The first of these was The Godfather of

89 (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 18 ) 90 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 106) 91 Just days before I finalise this thesis, an article entitled, “Being James Brown” is published in the June 2006 edition of Rolling Stone magazine (Lethem 2006). The authors Jonathan Lethem and Douglas Wolk write, “Someday, someone will write a great biography of James Brown. It will, by necessity, though, be more than a biography. It will be a history of a half-century of the contradictions and tragedies embodied in the fate of African-Americans in the New World; it will be a parable, even, of the contradictions of the individual in the capitalist society, portentous as that may sound. For James Brown is both a willing and conscious embodiment of his race, of its strivings toward self-respect in a racist world, and a consummate self-made man, an entrepreneur of the impossible” (Lethem 2006).

33 Soul (1986) written with Bruce Tucker (and timed to coincide with Brown’s induction into the Rock’n’roll hall of fame), and more recently Brown has seen fit to tell all again in another account titled, I Feel Good (2005) with Marc Eliot. Whilst the latter title is full of factual errors and inconsistencies, 92 Brown’s lack of fidelity to his very public past is further testament to the arbitrary nature of historical facts, and perhaps how little they explain about a life at all. Indeed, if Brown is so used to becoming, why stop creating now?

To get closer to understanding what might have driven Brown’s musical experimentation, one might turn to former Brown bandleader Fred Wesley, whose Hit Me Fred: Confessions of a Side Man (2002) has provided an illuminating addition to the still comparatively slim body of Brown scholarship. Wesley’s book provided the first detailed descriptions of what it was like to operate as part of the James Brown machine. Wesley’s book does not disappoint, providing an insider account of the arduous and mostly unnecessary, band rehearsals, and rather more surprisingly, an expression of the contempt that Brown’s band members felt for their leader and his music.

By their very nature, biographical accounts are limited in regard to a more rigorous accounting of the ontological considerations of their subject’s work, the process of how things become rather than simply recounting what a particular personality did. Much of the shortfall might be found in articulating decisive links between Brown’s work and the DJ culture that embraced it so emphatically. Whilst the late 1980s and early 1990s were watershed years for the sampling of James Brown’s music, there was a relative drought in terms of its more theoretical documentation. The only book

92 This latest “memoir” was almost certainly ghost written by co-author, Marc Eliot. Music writer and James Brown aficionado, Douglas Wolk writes in his review of the book, that instead of updating Brown’s previous autobiography, the latter merely not only offers a tired re-tread but one filled with errors to boot. Wolk writes, “ I Feel Good—with an introduction credited to Marc Eliot, who pretty obviously ghost-wrote the rest—starts from the beginning and ignores The Godfather of Soul altogether. That's a curious decision, since it results in passages like this one, about the group he brought with him to perform for American soldiers in Vietnam in 1968: "Sadly, with the exception of Danny Ray, my so-called 'Cape Man,' they've all passed on. There were Waymon Reed on guitar, Clyde Shubble on drums, and Tim Drummond on bass." Clyde Stubblefield, possibly the most famous funk drummer ever, would probably be very surprised to hear that Brown thinks he's dead (and thinks that his name's "Shubble"); so would singer Marva Whitney, who was in that group, too. Waymond Reed has indeed passed away, but he was the Vietnam crew's trumpeter; the late Jimmy Nolen was the guitarist. If, for some reason, Eliot was unclear about this stuff, he could have checked it by looking at the older book—or the liner notes of any number of James Brown CDs”(Wolk 2005).

34 to appear at that time is the excellent, and now difficult to find, Living in America: The Soul Saga of James Brown (1990) by Cynthia Rose. Rose’s account was the first attempt to illustrate Brown’s ongoing effect on contemporary music and the then burgeoning sampling culture. In addition, the book also provided some of the first insider accounts of working with Brown to be had at the time. Rose draws on interviews with Brown and his former band members, in an attempt to unearth the roots of what she refers to as Brown’s “surrealistic” musical outlook.93 Rose’s enticing proposition of Brown as “surrealist” is unfortunately never extrapolated explicitly. This does not detract from my enthusiasm for the book, and its engaging critically informed profile of Brown.

Inspired perhaps by the wave of sampling of Brown’s music in the preceding decade, by the mid-1990s, more titles did begin to appear, and in relatively close proximity. One was Geoff Brown’s James Brown: Doin’ It to Death (1996). Geoff Brown’s book provided the most encompassing biographical profile yet, based as it was on decades of research undertaken by world-renowned Brown scholar (and confidante), Cliff White. The other, equally illuminating title was Rickey Vincent’s award-winning Funk (1996). The latter, however, attempts a broader overview of the funk genre in general, and as such, Brown’s contribution to the genesis of the style was condensed into the space of a chapter.

Prior to Rickey Vincent’s publication, the funk genre had been subject to relative theoretical neglect, and as Vincent himself pointed out, his book attempted the first dedicated text on the genre.94 In terms of tracing the evolution of Brown’s “One” into an aesthetic, Vincent’s book attempted to provide an erudite genealogical account that previously had to be gleaned from a myriad of sources, for the specificity of the funk genre tended to become subsumed by more general accounts of the soul aesthetic. Of these titles, an early and perhaps more esoteric title, was Michael Haralambos’ Right On: From Blues to Soul in Black America (1974). Haralambos discusses the emergence of soul and its impact and decline through chart statistics. Whilst Haralambos’ work is overtly empirical in nature, Gerri Hirshey’s Nowhere To Run (1983) on the other hand, would proffer a series of contemporary portraits of the

93 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 38-39) 94 (Vincent 1996: xvii)

35 major artists to emerge in the soul period. At the time of writing, in the early 1980s, many of Hirshey’s subjects, were considered as “washed up” as the soul aesthetic they espoused. Hirshey’s detailed portraits expertly capture much of the pathos to be drawn from the performers’ experience of life after soul. With the benefit of retrospect, and knowing that sampling culture was waiting around the corner, Hirshey’s text captures an interesting time, appearing as it does just prior to the sampling culture that would change the fortunes of many of these artists in an inconceivable way. Having spent significant time on the road with Brown, Hirshey succinctly captures the Godfather during one of his least successful periods, and is rendered in the exquisite detail that such levels of access might potentially bring. Following Hirshey’s book was another equally noteworthy entry in the field, Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music (1986). Guralnick’s book provided a comprehensive historical account of the rise of the soul music style. Just as one would expect, Soul Brother No. 1,95 is inordinately represented throughout Guralnick’s account, although given the scale of his task, the Brown story is mostly confined to a lengthy chapter.96

However, with the exception of Cynthia Rose’s book, which makes the odd reference to postmodernism and critical theory, none of these books is what you might call a sustained academic account of Brown’s work. In fact, with their focus more resolutely cast on the vagaries of biographical detail, these types of books are aimed specifically at accounting for the past, rather than addressing how Brown’s music would affect the future. In this regard, one would hope that academia would perhaps pick up the slack. However, this has not yet been the case.97

Musicology and Essentialism

Musicology for instance, has, by and large seemed to have failed Brown’s work. The available texts tend to invest too heavily in the idea that funk was something of a

95 (Weinger & White 1991: 41) 96 I have deliberately left out titles such as Dave Thompson’s book Funk (2001) which is subtitled “a listening companion” and is mostly a compendium of record reviews (David Thompson 2001). 97 Unavailable at the time of writing and to be released by Wesleyan University Press in late 2006 is a new text by Anne Danielsen entitled, Presence and Pleasure: The Funk Grooves of James Brown and Parliament.

36 rekindling of African diasporic history98 without accounting for the more imminent (and immanent) circumstances that produced it. For instance, in one of the few academic discussions of Brown’s music, David Brackett’s “James Brown’s Superbad and the Double-voiced Utterance” (1992/1995)99 we are ultimately presented with an analysis of James Brown’s Superbad (1970), that rather underwhelmingly concludes with the observation that the song is significant of the “critical difference” that exists between African-American and Euro-American compositional approaches.100 Brackett’s approach is obviously well intentioned, and it would appear that his study is an attempt to restore interest in Brown’s musical contribution in light of the legal difficulties of the late eighties, which “…made him a frequent subject of caricature and derision”.101 Yet Brackett’s legitimisation of Brown’s compositional approach is based on its apparent adherence to the European derived mathematical proportions of the so-called Golden Section, (of which Brackett asserts that James Brown's "Superbad" conforms to aesthetically by maintaining a ratio of 0.618 to 1).102 This will lead to Brackett’s observation that Brown’s “naturalness” allows him to achieve the same results as the “calculated” composition of European art musics.103 Targeting such “essentialisation of ethnic characteristics in music”, 104 noted musicologist Philip Tagg singles out Brackett’s essay for criticism. In particular, Tagg takes offence at Brackett’s ascription of Brown into a generally unspecified “Africanness”, declaring that: “…Brackett knows there is a problem but seems sometimes to be trapped within it. The terms of reference defining this problem need to be criticised and widened to make real historical sense”.105

98 From Werner’s A Change is Gonna Come, “…there’s no doubt that once the Godfather of Soul took his rhythm stick to ‘the one," American music became something different, blacker, and more African than it had ever been before”(Werner 2000: 25). 99 First published in (David Brackett 1992) and reprinted in collection (David Brackett 1995) the text to which this thesis refers. 100 (David Brackett 1995: 156) 101 (David Brackett 1995: 155) 102 (David Brackett 1995: 152) 103 (David Brackett 1995: 154) 104 (Tagg 1998) 105 Tagg’s problems with Brackett’s essay include the following, - “…the essentialist risk of projection that I think comes to the surface in the Billie Holiday and James Brown sections of the book. Similarly, it seems to me that these traces of ethnic essentialism are compounded by the author’s implicit acceptance of the common US-centric assumption that by “Africa” is meant only those regions of West Africa from which humans were deported as slaves to end up in what is now the USA. It is as though music from Central or East Africa, not to mention music from the Khoi-San and Arabic areas of the same continent was in some sense not equally African. In short, Brackett knows there is a problem but seems sometimes to be trapped within it. The terms of reference defining this problem need to be criticised and widened to make real historical sense” (Tagg 1998).

37 Perhaps the problem of such musicological analysis is that it attempts to “interpret” composition in terms of identity, a presupposition that forever pushes it precariously into essentialism no matter how valiantly it tries to avoid it. Whilst the predisposition to identify will probably remain with us, the point is that it should not be the crux of musical analysis, because the intention of music itself is otherwise. Always otherwise, as imperceptible becoming, or as Deleuze and Guattari write in A Thousand Plateaus, a becoming that requires a “… forgetting as opposed to memory”.106 The most radical musical composition is not concerned in the least about its identity but rather, its forgetting.

I am aware, however, that such apparent indifference to identity and inherent to a minor temporality, might be seen as my own anti-essentialist denial of important cultural legacies. This, however, is not the case. As I will discuss in detail in the next chapter, my own perspective on the matter of cultural identity is informed by Paul Gilroy’s idea of an “anti-anti essentialism” 107 - that is, neither an essentialist appeal to authenticity nor a denial of identity, but rather a commitment to articulating the complexity of hybridity. Approaching any attribution of identity with caution can only mitigate the genealogical approaches that reify Brown’s identity, for example, into more general “African” characteristics: “the Real Thing was James Brown…Brown was proof that black people were different. Rhythmically and tonally blacks had to be from somewhere else. Proof that Africa was really over there for those of us who had never seen it - it was in that voice ...”108

The only problem with this idea, as I will address in detail in chapter 4, is that Brown professed to have little idea as to why his music was compared to with African musical forms: “I went over there and I heard their thing, and I felt their thing. But I honestly hadn’t heard their thing in mine”.109 Bearing the admonitions against the more simplistic appeals to identity, as delivered for example via Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, firmly in mind, I will attempt to endow Brown’s music with the complexity it deserves.

106 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 296) 107 (Gilroy 1993: 101) 108 (Davis in Guralnick: 243) 109 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 126)

38 A complexity that not only dispenses with proselytising Brown’s African pedigree, but one that might circumvent the other popular essentialist trap; the disturbing inclination to perpetuate a false dichotomy that attributes an “authenticity” to funk that is judged against the “artificiality” of electronic music practices, evident in the following excerpt from Rickey Vincent’s book Funk (1996):

Funk returned to the ideals of the African ensemble just as technology began to push American music toward artificiality. Just as the electric Fender Rhodes piano, the Moog synthesizer, Hohner clavinet, and ARP ensemble synthesizer were introduced into black popular music, the conga player, percussion section, Kalimba, and the extended jam were also incorporated. Funk became the medium by which electronic sound effects never before heard on synthesizers of the future could be channelled through a black aesthetic, complemented by traditional sounds of the past, creating a better understanding of the present. From the extremes of a simple drumbeat, to orchestrated polyphonic arrangements played by multiple musicians in unison, to a celebration of deep individual expression, funk music was arranged to bring “soul” to the people through the new formulas of popular music.110

Perhaps it would be more reasonable to argue, that it was black music forms, and funk in particular, that introduced many of the compositional elements that were subsequently capitalised upon by electronic music. For rather than dichotomising funk and the electronic, the most pertinent gesture would be to bring them closer together.

For Brown’s music, in particular, proposed no less than a new compositional mentality, which, as John Cale confirms below, would bring an unprecedented, almost clockwork, exactitude and precision to popular music:

…it was a search for perfection…He would say, "If you play the wrong note I’m going to dock your pay one hundred dollars!" There was a kind of mentality of absolute exactitude. The electric metronome came in and it would not change by one iota. It was rigid all the way through”.111

Despite such evidence, there has been a relative lack of attention to the direct contribution of black music forms to contemporary electronic music styles, a criticism

110 (Vincent 1996: 19-20) 111 (Cale in Gilbert & Pearson 1999: 123)

39 made by Tricia Rose in her book, Black Noise (1994). Responding to an otherwise well received essay, Andrew Goodwin’s “Sample and Hold: Pop Music in the Age of Digital Reproduction” (1990), Rose takes exception to the fact that whilst Goodwin can proclaim that, “[w]e have grown used to connecting machines and funkiness”, 112 he offers no further discussion of the black music practitioners who created this funkiness:

[Goodwin] refers to four major contemporary black dance forms-disco, hip hop, Hi-NRG, and house-as the bases for his argument regarding the way in which technology is made funky and the community-based nature of these forms without one reference to black cultural priorities, black musical traditions, or black people. He makes no mention of black practitioners and the possibility that these dance artists are using sampling technology to articulate black approaches to sound, rhythm, timbre, motion, and community.113

This study hopes to elucidate some of the connections that need to be made between this apparently symbiotic relationship between funkiness and technology. The use of “technology” should not be limited to just music expressed through an electronic medium, rather, machines should be seen as being necessary in order to take up the affordances provided by these “…black approaches to sound, rhythm, timbre, motion, and community” that Rose refers to. This requires a precise study of the conditions of the emergence of all of these together.

Brown’s subjection to an unconscious dichotomizing, illustrated by Vincent’s opposition of soul to the “artificiality” of machines, has only served to “other” Brown from his own history of experimental, even “avant-garde” musicianship. Whilst Brown was not necessarily a pioneer in utilising electronic instruments in the way that one might think of Stockhausen or Schaeffer, 114 his approach to rhythm was equally experimental. This commitment to experimentation was precisely the attribute that would set Brown apart from performers that emerged from similar circumstances, artists such as Ray Charles or Al Green for example. Unlike these performers,

112 (Goodwin 1990: 263) 113 (Tricia Rose 1994: 84) 114 I refer here to the German composer associated with the European serialist movement, Karlheinz Stockhausen and French sound technician/composer Pierre Schaeffer associated with “musique concrète” movement. Both of these composers are given pride of place in a post-war history of electronic music, Stockhausen for his work in electronic synthesis and Schaeffer for pioneering the tape manipulation of the “musique concrète” style. See (Morgan 1991: 463-467).

40 however, Brown would maintain an authority in future electronic dance musics and the emergence of minor genres - from Afrobeat to hip-hop – to a degree not readily enjoyed by his peers.115

Funk was so stylistically radical, that in its audacity alone, a challenge was sent out to the more “common sense” methods of composition. Funk expressed a commitment to difference over an adherence to identity. This commitment to difference, rather than identity, would enable Brown to transform such “common sense” even outside the musical field. Brown’s iconic status among the more minor populations of the world was perhaps testament to his audacity.

As I will discuss in the next chapter, Brown’s enduring popularity among African- Americans, is a result of his ability to catalyse the inner experience of the hybrid subject in musical form. I will attempt to articulate this idea of a “minor” sense of duration through Paul Gilroy’s concept of the Black Atlantic subject and thus propose that the musical composition might capture something of the experience of the split subjectivity or “double consciousness” of the hybridity of the diasporic subject. However in my efforts to maintain a theoretical fidelity with the concepts of the Cinema books, I will also attempt to marry the notion of the Black Atlantic with that of Marc Augé’s concept of the any-space-whatever, for the perpetual transitional subjectivity of the Black Atlantic subject, is perhaps characteristic of a more enduring embodiment of this any-space-whatever, a circumstance that I will describe as significant of the “intolerable” conditions that African-Americans have had to endure. Accordingly, Brown’s funk might be understood as an apprehension of the intolerable forces of this existence and the style gives tangibility to the experience of “double consciousness”, or the inherent split subjectivity, of the Black Atlantic subject.

115 Evidence of Brown’s pre-eminent position of the “most sampled artist ever” is given in footnote 5

41 CHAPTER TWO CREATING RHYTHMS IN THE “ANY-SPACE-WHATEVER”

In the previous chapter, I proposed that radical changes in musical composition might be conceived as an expression of an apprehension of a minor temporality. This chapter will, then, attempt to account for the existential conditions that might constitute the complex inner time of the minor subject. The first of these is the condition Paul Gilroy has referred to, after African-American scholar W.E.B. DuBois, as the “double consciousness” of the Black Atlantic subject. It is this idea that I attempt to bring into correspondence with Deleuze’s any-space-whatever,as discussed in his Cinema books. Using these concepts in tandem, I will analyse how the arduous of an existence of enforced and constant transition might be rendered visible through artistic creativity. Having established some the existential tensions inherent to the minor subject, I will then outline some of the attempts made to articulate an aesthetic that might more accurately reflect the intolerable conditions a of “black” subjectivity, an observation that became more apparent to me after seeing Melvin Van Peebles’ film, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Van Peebles’ film is considered by Neal in Soul Babies as an exemplary post-soul text, and whilst he provides a detailed reading of the film in terms of a newfound “empowerment” of the black male, he says nothing about the film’s pioneering temporal composition.116 I will make use of this example to illustrate how a revised notion of time might be at the heart of the post-soul aesthetic, and that Van Peebles’ film should be considered alongside of the work of James Brown as an enticing example of an artist attempting to apprehend a minor temporality.

The Black Atlantic

Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) has deservedly assumed an esteemed place in diasporic theory. The Black Atlantic is a concept used by Gilroy to denote the continual process of the transcultural becoming that emerges from this region as a

116 (Neal 2002: 24-27)

42 result of African migration - enforced or otherwise.117 Rather than engage in discussion built around notions of Eurocentrism or Afrocentrism, Gilroy has instead conceived the Black Atlantic as an attempt to provide a theoretical vehicle for "…an explicitly transnational and intercultural" approach.118 This approach utilises the concept of the Black Atlantic subject as making sense of an ongoing transcultural exchange between Africa and the West. The appeal of Gilroy’s work is that it emphasises the flows constitutive of the fluidity of becoming, rather than attempting to reduce this emergent subjectivity to a nominal identity. Gilroy’s perspective provides an analysis of “routes” rather than one of “roots”. 119

This focus on “routes” allows Gilroy to present the complexity of the pan-continental becoming of the Black Atlantic subject, rather than approach its theorisation through a more simplistic, linear migratory pattern leading from Africa into the West. Instead, Gilroy emphasises the ongoing becoming of both Africa and the new world as a result of the transcultural passages of the Black Atlantic subject. Gilroy argues that the best approach to theorising the intellectual and artistic expressions of this ongoing cultural becoming is through an “anti-anti-essentialism”. 120

Gilroy argues for a third way – an anti-anti-essentialist approach that might be employed to otherwise overcome the rigid perspectives of essentialism and anti- essentialism, both of which he writes have, “…become an obstacle to critical theorising”. 121 Whilst the problem of essentialism might seem self-evident, manifest in “... the idea that an untouched, pristine Africanity resides inside these forms, working a powerful magic of alterity in order to trigger repeatedly the perception of absolute identity”,122 Gilroy also contends that an anti-essentialist perspective might dismiss completely the necessary relation between race and musical/intellectual production.123 Broadly defining these polarities between essentialist and non- essentialist as, “…the relationship between racial identity and racial non-identity,

117 As discussed in Paul Gilroy’s first chapter, "The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity," in The Black Atlantic, (Gilroy 1993: 1-40). 118 (Gilroy 1993: 15) 119 (Gilroy 2004: 87). This play on words is the work of cultural studies theorist, Iain Chambers and appears in the text Border Dialogues (New York: Routledge, 1990). 120 (Gilroy 1993: 101) 121 (Gilroy 1993: 101) 122 (Gilroy 1993: 101) 123 (Gilroy 1993: 101)

43 between folk cultural authenticity and pop cultural betrayal”, 124 Gilroy looks to an anti-anti-essentialism as a position flexible enough to take into account the concerns of both theoretical positions, to stress the importance of connection without fetishizing “authenticity”:

The preeminence of music within the diverse black communities of the Atlantic diaspora is itself an important element in their essential connectedness. But the histories of borrowing, displacement, transformation, and continual reinscription that the musical culture encloses are a living legacy that should not be reified in the primary symbol of the diaspora and then employed as an alternative to the recurrent appeal of fixity and rootedness.125

Thus Gilroy’s appeal to an anti-anti-essentialist approach allows for a discussion of a concept of a “black music” without it being unduly hampered by the metacommentary on the ethicality of such a description, yet at the same time being aware enough to maintain a vigilant resistance against the more essentialist appeals to authenticity.126

Gilroy looks to musical examples that are creations of the Black Atlantic and exhibit “the syncretic complexity of black expressive cultures”127 that emerge from the space. To demonstrate the Gilroy solicits examples as diverse as The Fisk Jubilee Singers, Jimi Hendrix and The Impressions128 as those Black Atlantic subjects that might reflect its complex “circulatory systems”. 129 Yet I would argue that James Brown’s music is also representative of a Black Atlantic syncreticism. Whilst Gilroy does in fact mention James Brown’s music, it is only in passing.130 I will of course attempt to examine Brown’s relationship to the Black Atlantic in more detail within this chapter.

124 (Gilroy 1993: 99) To quote the passage in full, “My point here is that the unashamedly hybrid character of these black Atlantic cultures continually confounds any simplistic (essentialist or anti- essentialist) understanding of the relationship between racial identity and racial non-identity, between folk cultural authenticity and pop cultural betrayal. Here the idea of the racial community as a family has been invoked and appealed to as a means to signify connectedness and experiential continuity that is everywhere denied by the profane realities of black life amid the debris of de- industrialisation”(Gilroy 1993: 99). 125 (Gilroy 1993: 102) 126 (Gilroy 1993: 100) 127 (Gilroy 1993: 101) 128 (Gilroy 1993: 89-96) 129 (Gilroy 1993: 88) 130 (Gilroy 1993: 104-105) In this section of the Black Atlantic, Gilroy discusses the appearance of a sample of the Average White Band’s Pick Up the Pieces, which Gilroy refers to as “…a Scottish pastiche of James Brown’s JBs” (Gilroy 1993: 104-105).

44 Whilst Brown does not have the same Black Atlantic pedigree as say a peer such as Jimi Hendrix, 131 Brown is still very much a product of this conceptual space. Evidence of this might be perceived on the most general level in terms of his attempts to reconnect with Africa – I will cover details of his visits there in chapter 5.

Whilst Brown was by all accounts exceedingly popular in Africa, 132 his popularity was also problematic, in the sense that it would negatively impact upon the local musicians.133 The reason that I will introduce Brown’s problematic relationship with Africa here, is to foreground the often conflicting existential conditions that might constitute the complex hybridity of the minor subject. For in common with many other Black Atlantic subjects, Brown would also have to contend with what African- American scholar, W.E.B. DuBois, has attributed to the African diaspora as the condition of “double consciousness”.134

131(Gilroy 1993: 93-94). Hendrix becomes a prime candidate for the Black Atlantic treatment as he would find fame in England after going unnoticed in his native United States. Hendrix would then reconquer the world via his newly adopted base. As Gilroy adds Jimi was implicated in many of the politics of the time. “Jimi’s shifting relationship to black cultural forms and political movements caused substantial problems when he returned to play in the United States and was denounced as a “white nigger” by some of the Black Power activists who could not fathom his choices in opting to cultivate an almost exclusively white, pop audience” (Gilroy 1993: 93) 132 Long time friend and colleague, Leon Austin, describes Brown’s popularity in Africa to Gerri Hirshey: “You should see him in Africa. Somebody says, ‘James Brown.’ Even whisper,‘James Brown.’ Every corner you pass, it’s like an echo, even out in the bush. And by the time you get to the corner you see them in thousands. Like bees. Come out of mud shacks with James Brown albums, don’t never play them, no electricity, for sure no Victrola. But they know who is James Brown”(Hirshey 1984: 282) 133 Kuti is quoted in Werner (1998) as saying how difficult it was in his home country of Nigeria trying to compete with Brown, “Brown’s popularity in Africa reached such heights that Nigerian superstar Fela complained that Brown had taken over African music entirely: ‘The attack was heavy, soul music coming in the country left and right. Man, at one point I was playing James Brown tunes among the innovative things because everybody was demanding it and we had to eat"(Kuti in Werner 2000: 138). Although I should also add that during my research I came across an interview with Fela Kuti’s son, Femi Kuti (now a star in his own right) entitled, “Here Comes the Son” (2000). The interviewer, Kelefa Sanneh speaks to Kuti about the James Brown factor “KS: What about your father's influences? Everybody talks about how James Brown impressed your father in 1969, inspiring him to start playing Afro-beat. Was James Brown important to you? FK: Actually, I never really heard my dad talk about James Brown. He talked more about the jazz scene in America, and the Black Panthers. But he must have heard James Brown. I think James Brown made him think, ‘Oh, I need my own kind of music. I need to do my own stuff’ (Femi Kuti in Sanneh 2000). 134 The concept of “double consciousness” derives from W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk (1903). It appears in the following passage from the opening chapter “After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, - a world which yields him no true self- consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, —an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder”(Du Bois 1903).

45 Paul Gilroy considers DuBois’ notion of “double consciousness” as an inherent existential condition of the Black Atlantic subject. This is a condition symptomatic of the postcolonial subject, who is thrown into an assimilation of multiple worlds, yet lacks any physical territory to which they can wholly belong. As Gilroy says, "[a] preoccupation with the striking doubleness that results from this unique position-- in an expanded West but not completely of it-- is a definitive characteristic of the intellectual history of the black Atlantic".135

This “double consciousness” inherent in the hybridity of the Black Atlantic will exacerbate a split subjectivity, a condition that many African-Americans, including Brown himself, would have to negotiate. Whilst I will further discuss the problems Brown had to contend with more fully in chapter 5, his identification with ‘the Man’ would be one of the more overt manifestations of having to mediate “between” cultures. Although I should add that it is not the hybridity itself that is the problem – in fact hybridity is something that is common to us all – the problem is that it affects us in different ways in relation to imminent social circumstances. The Black Atlantic/minor subject has to endure the constant becoming of hybridity, yet is also denied the means to express that difference in an overtly political fashion. For this reason a minor people including this Black Atlantic subject, might be regarded as a “people who are missing” . This is the people that is produced through the work of art and might emerge in the future,asDeleuzehascontendedinrelationtohisown example of a cinematic becoming.136 What I propose here is that musical artistry, whether jazz, blues, funk and beyond might be seen to contribute to this necessary “…invention of a people”.137

It is in this facilitating of an invention of a people that the arts come into their own. Within intolerable circumstances, the artwork will facilitate an expression of the coexistent temporalities of “double consciousness” into durable existential territory. The successful artist, then, might be the one who attempts to express the inner temporality of the minority situation through a creative synthesis of time that allows an existential territory to come into being. The artwork provides an appropriate

135 (Gilroy 1993: 58) 136 (Deleuze 1989: 217) 137 (Deleuze 1989: 217)

46 catalyst for these new syntheses of time and space, creating a patch of relatively stable territory within a broader state of existential flux. This returns us to the importance of music as a territorialising force, for it expresses time in a new way, often reconceiving relations to broader social movements in the process. This is why I shall argue in this thesis for the importance of music as something that enables social movements to “become”, and to assemble new territories through time. The creation of territory is a vital need in the minor existence of “nomadic space” of the Black Atlantic. I shall now discuss the nature of this “nomadic space” as possessing the characteristics of the any-space-whatever.

Augé’s “Non-Places” and Deleuze’s Any-Space-Whatever

In Cinema 1, Deleuze introduces the concept of the any-space-whatever (espace quelconque).138 This would appear to be Deleuze’s interpretation of the “non-places” originally theorised by Marc Augé.139 For Augé, these “non-places” are “…spaces which are not of themselves anthropological places”140 but are instead, “…spaces formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure)…”141 These transitory spaces are mediated only through the signifiers of commerce and exist only for commodification. Augé’s examples of these “non-places” include airport transit lounges, supermarket checkouts, fast food restaurants and even road signs. 142 Vast numbers of individuals move anonymously through these abstract spaces mediated only for the purposes of fulfilling commercial contracts.143 The “non-place” thus differs from the organic, “anthropological space” for the very reason that “…anthropological places create the organically social” in distinction to these “non- places” that “…create solitary contractuality”. 144

138 (Deleuze 1986: 109) 139 There has been some confusion as to the attribution of authorship. For Deleuze will refer to Marc Augé as “Pascal” Augé. Given that the concept of the “any-space-whatever” whilst similar, is not a direct translation of “non-lieux" which as Charles Stivale notes whilst authors such as Reda Bensmaia will draw “…extensively from Marc Augé in his essay…it is not clear at all that Marc Augé uses the actual term "espace quelconque" itself” (Stivale 2005). 140 (Augé 1995: 78) 141 (Augé 1995: 94) 142 (Augé 1995: 96-101) 143 (Augé 1995: 101-102) 144 (Augé 1995: 94)

47 As Jeffrey A. Bell discusses in his essay “Thinking with Cinema: Deleuze and Film Theory” (1997), Deleuze takes up Augé’s concept of the “any-space-whatever” as “…a nomadic space, a point of transit between places of “importance”, such as the metro, which is merely the space one passes through between home and work”. 145The Deleuzean any-space-whatevers are those spaces where, “… individuals become depersonalized. No one notes or concerns themselves with one another. The place is crowded but everyone is alone. It is for this reason, that Augé’s “any space whatsoever” is a homogenous, de-singularizing space”.146

I think there is an enlightening theoretical juxtaposition to be had by aligning the any- space-whatever and Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic. For example, slavery may well be the most deplorable example of the breakdown of anthropological space. The slave emerges from the Black Atlantic as a token of capital exchange and identified only as commodity. Hence this historical precondition of the Black Atlantic subject might present a pertinent correlation to the Deleuzean analysis of Augé’s any-space- whatever.

It is the lack of determination of the Black Atlantic and the any-space-whatever which might be the basis of their relationship and a situation that may well be traced right into the present, although in bringing the conceptual considerations of Gilroy and Deleuze together, I am not attempting to deny the vast cultural legacy of the Black Atlantic. If anything the opposite is the case. The creative opportunities of the any- space-whatever are perhaps more readily grasped through the more optimistic Deleuzean version of the concept than the dystopian, spiritually bereft, “non-place”. This is why I believe it might be more suited to the Black Atlantic condition.

Deleuze himself contends that the subject of the any-space-whatever lacks the sense of belonging in these spaces. Yet, in distinction to Augé’s more dystopian vision of the proliferation of “non-places”, this lack of identity might also offer infinite possibility for connection. 147 Whilst I will return to this more productive concept of the any-space-whatever later in the chapter, for present purposes we need only to

145 (Bell 1997) 146 (Bell 1997) 147 (Deleuze, 1986:109)

48 understand that this productivity is a result of the inherent chaos of these any-space- whatevers pushing their inhabitants into a creation of territory. This territorial creation is what constitutes the artistic process, to signify presence in this space, even if its subject will never really fully belong to such territories. This situation explains the emergence of the “elements” of hip-hop culture, DJing, MCing breakdancing and graffiti – as territorial reactions to their any-space-whatever existence. There is perhaps much to gain theoretically by conceiving of the Black Atlantic as one of the most encompassing of any-space-whatevers. Using Deleuze’s concept, this space can retain its vast cultural legacy and at the same time as enduring, becomes potential. Indeed, the creativity of the minor in these any-space-whatevers is perhaps due to being thrown into the chaos of an intolerable position. This might be understood as the ongoing “pain” that Gilroy has argued that the Black Atlantic subject continues to endure, 148 a pain that has required a sustained campaign of territorial creation ever since.

As such, we can approach musical composition as an “apprehension of a minor temporality”, as one arrived at in the hope of co-opting a sense of rhythmic order from within the chaos of the social. Taking this musical apprehension of an existential temporality as central to the Black Atlantic subject requires an extrapolation of how this subject might be composed through a complex interplay of the forces of time. Hybridity, by nature, is always precariously balanced between coexistent forms of time. As a result, the apprehension of a minor temporality is “minor” precisely because it opens up the possibility of a becoming-time appropriate to the minor, one that will provide a reworking of the state of a “double consciousness” of the hybrid subject.

I should also add here that by extending the type of becoming spaces discussed by Gilroy and Deleuze/Augé into a more holistic idea of the “apprehension of a minor temporality”, we might overcome some of the criticisms that have been directed at the ascription of such “double consciousness”. For example postcolonial scholar, Annabelle Sreberny says that Gilroy’s model does not adequately account for the

148 (Gilroy 2004: 207)

49 complexity of contemporary diasporic consciousness.149 Whilst she generally speaks admiringly of Gilroy’s work she says that “double consciousness”, “…remains too bipolar to adequately capture the complexity and richness of some contemporary diasporic consciousness: we seem to need even more than simply ‘here’ and ‘there’”.150 Sreberny proffers Brah’s idea of “diaspora space” as offering this complexity as it “…is precisely the contradictions of and between location and dislocation, the ‘border crossings’ and the ‘diasporic identities’ that need to be explored in their complexity: “diaspora space is the intersectionality of diaspora, border and dis/location as a point of confluence of economic, political, cultural and psychic processes, of peoples, cultures, capital, commodities”. 151 Taking the ideas of Gilroy and Brah into account, Sreberny contends that “[a] further shift seems to be needed, to examine the movements across space and time that lead to novel hybrid, complex ‘third spaces’ of cultural practice and identification. Global diasporic consciousness may be a particular vivid example of this imaginary third space of identification”. 152 Her rationale being that “such a construction supports the conceptual move from identity viewed as ‘either/or’ to a sense of identifications as ‘and/and’ [which] seems preferable to the claim of identity as ‘hybridity’ [and] a new mixing which seems to simply highlight some putative pristine original states”. 153 Sreberny’s argument against identity, diasporic or otherwise is hardly a novel concept and if anything resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’s own concerns about identification which is behind their own conceptualisation of the more encompassing notion of the minor.

Deleuze and Guattari’s “minor” is far more accommodating to a more general assimilation of becoming and it allows for infinite complexity. The concept of the “minor” also encompasses an inherent sense of creativity in the sense that the minor must find ways of escaping majoritarian temporal domination. Hence, the artistic creativity of the minor subject might be found in the tensions between the official forms of limited and regulated recollection granted by the majoritarian “image of thought” on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fuller virtuality or potential of

149 (Sreberny 2000: 181) 150 (Sreberny 2000: 181) 151 (Brah in Sreberny 2000: 181) 152 (Sreberny 2000: 181) 153 (Sreberny 2000: 181)

50 the complete past-preserved, as a reservoir for the creation of alternatives. This is a tension identified that might be identified as the “minor” nature of the time-image in comparison to the more majoritarian aims of the movement-image cinema. I contend that these tensions will provide a source of creative agitation as both the compulsion behind the formulation of a new cinema, or similarly, a new music, at the hands of an artist such as James Brown.

Brown’s music operates on a similar existential basis to minor cinema, an artistic engagement with the potential of becoming, achieved through attempts at a form of recollection more dynamic than that provided by majoritarian images of thought and culture. However, it should be noted, that despite this achievement, upon such recollection the subject is still caught up in the inherent doubling of senses of time and this process leads to a split subjectivity even if with a different political constitution to that aligned with majoritarian culture. The precariousness of this situation, considering the intolerable circumstances of the minor, might also be foundational to those described as the post-soul generation.

Recollection, Virtuality and the Post-Soul Aesthetic

As discussed in chapter 1, Nelson George would develop the concept of a “post-soul” generation as a general description of the generation that followed the decline of the soul aesthetic of the preceding civil-rights generation. Mark Anthony Neal further builds on this concept in his Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), giving the concept further theoretical rigour through postmodern critical thinking. Neal’s proposed “post-soul aesthetic” provides a concept that attempts to demonstrate how the aesthetic practices of the post-soul generation were marked by a cynicism toward the narratives of the preceding soul generation. To this end, “…components of post-soul strategies…willingly ‘bastardize’ black history and culture to create alternative meanings, a process that was largely introduced to the post-soul generation via the blaxploitation films of the 1970s”.154

154 (Neal 2002: 22)

51 Neal quite reasonably interprets the post-soul aesthetic through postmodern theory, although he is very much aware of the cultural problems that continue to surround this type of analysis:155

Many have described the contemporary American experience, including the experiences of the black diaspora within it, as an example of postmodernity, a term that is at best foreign within the African- American community and contentious among some traditional black intellectual circles…Much of the criticism directed at the use of postmodern theory by black intellectuals has sprung from discomfort with the import of decidedly European-based theories to explore African-American life.156

Whilst there is much to be gained from Neal’s insightful postmodern analysis, my own appropriation of this notion of an inherent “bastardisation” of the post-soul aesthetic will not be understood as a form of negation of previous African-American cultures, but one of the working of a creative difference through a revising of them. I make this point, because the framing of electronic dance musics, central to the expression of the post-soul generation, is often understood through negative, rather than positive difference.157 Such negativity is evident in the following example, recounted by Nelson George, as producer and songwriter Mtume launches into a

155 Neal writes, “Much of the criticism directed at the use of postmodern theory by black intellectuals has sprung from discomfort with the import of decidedly European-based theories to explore African- American life. As bell hooks relates, postmodern thinking is ‘dominated primarily by the voices of white male intellectuals and/or academic elites who speak to and about one another in coded familiarity’” (Neal 2002: 1). Although Neal writes in the preface that as his work has been described as “postmodern” he has come to accept his fate (Neal 2002: x). 156 (Neal 2002: 1) 157 As stated in the thesis there are some theoretical similarities between Deleuze’s Cinema books and postmodernism. Whilst Deleuze and Guattari have never referred to themselves as postmodernists (in fact Guattari hated the term), their broader project often has much in common. For a more detailed discussion see, Ronald Bogue’s essay, “Is Deleuze a Postmodern Philosopher?” in his book Deleuze’s Wake (2004) (Bogue 2004). Whilst commenting in detail on the similarities and differences would take a thesis in itself, I will just add that Deleuze’s Cinema books, as I have indicated in the thesis, share some distinct similarities with the postmodern project. For example Deleuze’s concept of a new “image of thought” in cinema that occurs in the wake of World War II has some similarities to Lyotard’s idea of the war’s impact on “grand narratives” (and for Deleuze cinematic narrative). However it is in the translating of this position where Deleuze’s work differs from the card-carrying postmodernists, in particular to what it might mean for “affective” relations in the social. For instance, according to Frederic Jameson’s understanding of postmodernism and contained in his famous text Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic Of Late Capitalism (1991) – the era is defined by its “waning of affect” and an “effacement of history”(Jameson 1991). These ideas are much distinguished from of Deleuze, for whom there is never any such “waning of affect” - affect is a constant and is not historical in this way. Furthermore, the Jamesonian notion of an “effacement of history” apparently robs us of knowing where we are situated in time, which again might share some surface resonances with the time-image, although Deleuze’s theory of time is never considered in such a linear, causal fashion.

52 tirade against the unauthorised sampling of his hit “Juicy Fruit” in the Notorious BIG’s, Juicy:

Mtume spent much of this particular Sunday morning blasting hip hop record production for its slavish reliance on record sampling. He barged that ‘this is the first generation of African-Americans not to be extending the range of the music’ and that the resulting recordings ‘were nothing but Memorex music.’158

Here I will suggest that there must be a more fruitful way of examining the practices of the post-soul aesthetic, within which electronic dance musics play such a decisive role. Whilst the preceding generation of musicians might perceive this new generation of artists as impostors, a more pertinent examination might ask exactly why and how the practices of these impostors emerged. Such an analysis of sampling practices would require an interrogation of the existential circumstances of the sample’s return as offering a far more interesting proposition than simply castigating it as appropriation.

To this end, we might further accommodate the concept of “bastardisation” as a practice inherently concerned with drawing out the alterity of any official history. Proposing an alternative perspective on time will allow a minor people to draw out one of many possible futures. In later chapters this idea will be demonstrated through the way sampling culture will reassemble “sheets of past” as a means of creating new temporal juxtapositions within the composition, for a new future is always virtually contained in the present, although to draw it out, requires what Deleuze describes in Cinema 2 as a “shock to thought”.159 Conceived in terms of the example of the post- soul aesthetic, this “shock to thought” might have been produced by the “intolerable” decline of the preceding soul aesthetic.

An Aesthetic Expression of “Blackness” - Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song

The attempt at fashioning an aesthetic that would more effectively express the sensibility of the minor subject aesthetically was precisely the impetus for Melvin

158 (George 1999: 99) 159 (Deleuze 1989: 156)

53 Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971). Van Peebles comments here on his attempts to portray cinematically a more specific temporal expression of “blackness”:

“All of the films about black people up to now,” director Melvin Van Peebles told Newsweek in 1971, “have been told through the eyes of the Anglo-Saxon majority-in their rhythms and speech and pace. In my film, the black audience finally gets a chance to see some of their own fantasies acted out…rising out of the mud and kicking ass”. 160

The radical form of composition employed in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is predicated on this new approach to the depiction of time. For Van Peebles’ attempts to express this new black cinematic aesthetic would provide inspiration for his disjunctive approach to temporality that would resist the more “common sense” linear narrative of the typical Hollywood film. The compositional aesthetic employed in his film elicits a more serial, rather than sequential, aesthetic, in which time and space would appear to become dislocated from the more common form of narrative causality. There are at least a couple of reasons why Van Peebles was likely to have strayed from convention. The first was that he undertook his film education in France,161 the home of experimental cinema, and secondly, some of his cinematic composition was perhaps influenced by approaches to musical composition, as he was also a musician.162

Many of the characteristics that Deleuze ascribes to the “time-image” are clearly discernible in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. One such characteristic, and a vital one to this thesis, is the use of irrational cuts. For example, the movie depicts shots of Sweetback running from the law, which are then jarringly intercut with images of black people at work, or of shots of machinery or industrial spaces of all kinds. In addition, various excerpts of dialogue are deliberately, serially, repeated throughout.163 Other sounds are presented non-diegetically, such as the Greek chorus

160 (Van Peebles 1996) 161 Van Peebles’ background is recounted by him in the documentary, Classified X (1997). 162 Melvin Van Peebles has released albums from the late 1960s. A select discography includes the albums, Brer Soul (1969), Ain't Supposed To Die A Natural Death (1970), Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song OST (1971), What the…You Mean I Can't Sing? (1974) and Ghetto Gothic (1995). 163 : “…I may have had a Leroy…but I don’t rightly remember” (Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song).

54 style chanting of the refrains164 that accompany the cuts of Sweetback running through various nondescript locations within the urban landscape. Central to all of this is the characteristic funk driven soundtrack. This was so revolutionary at the time but soon to become a staple of the emerging genre of the blaxploitation film (for which Brown himself would compose two soundtracks).165

However, whilst Van Peebles’ film has been credited with inspiring the blaxploitation genre, it was a connection that he was not at all happy about.166 Indeed the only real similarity between his film and the ensuing blaxploitation genre was that the lead characters of the respective films were black. In fact, rather than approach anything like an adequate example of time-image cinema, the blaxploitation genre that followed Van Peebles’ film was typical of what Deleuze would describe as the action- image film. For instance, there was no attempt to engage a non-narrative form of composition like Van Peebles had developed in Sweetback. Furthermore, the ensuing films were referred to as blaxploitation precisely because they would merely reduce “blackness” to the shallowest form of identity – the stereotype. Yet, the innovative aesthetics championed by Van Peebles in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song were never really built upon by Hollywood in any meaningful way, this was perhaps because it was almost impossible for a black writer/director to raise the necessary funds.167 It is true that Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song was a revelation to the studio bosses because prior to its very successful cinematic release, an African- American market was not even perceived to exist. When it was proven with Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, however, Hollywood responded with blaxploitation.168

Whilst Van Peebles’ film is offered here as a seminal example of an “apprehension of a minor temporality”, I should add that this is hardly an exclusively African-American phenomenon. Rather, it is a strategy for becoming minor within any imposed order of a hegemonic temporality. Yet, it is also true that black music is nearly always on the

164 For example, the audience will encounter chants such as, “you bled my mama, you bled my papa…but you won’t bleed me…” and “…come on feet”, which serve as reflections of Sweetback’s inner dialogue and is repeated throughout the film, (Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song). 165 Brown contributed the soundtracks for the films Black Caesar (Brown 1973a) and Slaughters Big Rip-Off (Brown 1973b) 166 Baadasssss (2003) 167 Baadasssss (2003) 168 This can be seen in the film made by Melvin Van Peebles’ son Mario, about the making of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, entitled Baadasssss (2003).

55 vanguard of creativity. “Double consciousness” contributed to a perception of constant “chaosmos” described by Deleuze and Guattari as a “consistent chaos”,169 an aggravation and perhaps often painful, but forces one to come up with concepts to make sense of it. 170 Hence this forced assimilation of co-existent minor temporalities calls forth artistic expression as a means to provide structure to existential conditions.

Parallels to the cinematic example of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song can be found in the ongoing sampling of James Brown. In the hands of DJs and sampling culture, the “bastardisation” of James Brown’s music has assisted in the assembling of new territories and cultures out of the any-spaces-whatever and the intolerable situations of the any-spaces-whatever. The brilliance of DJs in their use of Brown’s refrains offers a challenge to the more institutionally established recollection - in favour of instituting difference. Examples of this creativity might include the emergence of electronic dance music genres to emerge from the any-space-whatevers of ghettos and warehouses. As I have begun to explain, the development of these new forms of composition reflect characteristics similar to those that Deleuze has attributed to the evolution of cinematic composition, and its shift from movement- image to time-image. In particular we are concerned with how this shift might reflect a different set of ontological relations - Deleuze describes these as “becomings rather than stories”.171 These becomings arise as the culmination of the breakdown in the action-image, and therefore the breakdown in the “natural”, given, orders of movement and time. This break in common sense relations to time and space, which governs the workings of the sensory-motor links of habit, throws a clear sense of simple chronological time and space into disarray.172 Simple narrative logic, once expressed cinematically through rational forms of montage, will instead assume the productive disarray of the “irrational cut”.173 Whilst I will deal with the latter concept in detail in chapter 7, the main concern for us here is a process whereby the “…the sensory-motor scheme breaks down to leave disorientated and discordant movements,

169 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 208) 170 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 208) 171 (Deleuze 1995: 59) 172 (Deleuze 1989: 3-6) and (Deleuze 1989: 20) 173 (Deleuze 1989: xi). In the “Preface to the English Edition” of Cinema 2, Deleuze discusses the “…importance of false continuity in modern cinema: the images are no longer linked by rational cuts and continuity, but are relinked by means of false continuity and irrational cuts. Even the body is no longer exactly what moves; subject of movement or the instrument of action, it becomes rather the developer of time, it shows time through its tiredness and waiting” (Deleuze 1989: xi).

56 [where] you get other patterns, becomings rather than stories”.174Yet in order to give an account of how such a decisive aesthetic shift might occur, I must give an account of the accompanying existential conditions. This account will involve a consideration of the conditions that might have forced the DJs and samplers into the process of remaking one’s self in the face of “official” history.

The Body

Other expressions of alterity might also be witnessed in the close relationship of African-American culture and musical invention. It is no accident that the production of dance music should mobilise such a dramatic reappraisal of compositional methods and processes. The obvious point is that music and dancing provide a superlative means for overcoming the banality of the everyday, whilst simultaneously challenging the limits of what a body can do. Bodily movement is always the first act in any political change, and dance musics will always be crucial to minor cultures for this very reason. We only have to look at the musical innovations to have emerged from minor cultures, for example, the black or gay communities discussed in the following example by Timothy D. Taylor from his book, Strange Sounds (2001). In the following example, Taylor expresses some concern that the minor cultures that contributed so much to the production, and ongoing evolution, of these electronic dance musics, are also often marginalised in their subsequent historical accounts:

Contemporary musicians have cultivated interest in [older electronic] musics for a variety of reasons, reasons that would be difficult to theorize adequately under the rubric of some kind of postmodern nostalgia or a pure aesthetic appreciation. Instead, it seems as though today’s DJs and remixers seek out these earlier musics as a way of attempting, in part, to discover a musical past for themselves, or to join a preexisting tradition, effectively resuscitating a residual tradition (in Raymond William’s conceptualization) of which they can be the contemporary heirs…[t]his history, however, usually omits the African-American and gay musicians who are more demonstrably the real precursors of techno music, for it is mainly being championed by heterosexual suburban white men. For them, a lineage going back to the European avant-garde is more compelling than a more historically accurate one that traces their music to African Americans and gays. As

174 (Deleuze 1995: 59)

57 such, these latter groups are almost wholly exscripted as techno is championed as an intellectual music to be listened to, not danced to.175

Whilst I cannot completely concur with Taylor’s criticism - as there have, for instance, been many accounts of DJ culture that have detailed the contributions of the minor cultures in question176 - it is true that music history often does suffer from a conveniently rearticulated genealogy. The seminal importance of affectively inspired connections has become obfuscated through popular music histories that have (over) emphasised the aesthetic impact of European fine music practitioners on its emergence. A more judicious account of electronic dance music should perhaps concentrate more fully on the modulation of specific affective and social relations. This might allow a more equitable account of the contributions of minor cultures, such as the African-American/gay populations that Taylor cites in his example.

Perhaps any commentary on an evolution of electronic dance musics should be more dedicated to making the body and affect central to its discussion. It is for this reason that I will dedicate the next chapter to emphasising the role of the gospel genre in the emergence, not only on Brown’s work, but also by extension, the broader evolution of electronic dance musics. For gospel would play a significant role in shaping the hyper affectivity of the music to which African-American culture would make such a considerable contribution.

Ethology - Brown as Linking Different Minority becomings

To understand how music’s hyper-affectivity connects bodies will require then what Deleuze and Guattari term an appropriate “ethology”. Ethology is normally understood as the science of animal behaviour. However, Deleuze and Guattari derive their concept of ethology from the philosophy of Spinoza. Here ethology attempts to consider how a body functions in relation to behavioural connections rather than classification via form within particular phyla. Deleuze and Guattari give the example that “[a] racehorse is more different from a workhorse than a workhorse is from an

175 (Taylor 2001: 67) 176 Such accounts are developed in texts such as, DJ Culture (Poschardt 1998), Techno Rebels (Sicko 1999), Last Night A DJ Saved My Life (Brewster & Broughton 1999), Discographies: Dance Music, Culture, And The Politics Of Sound (Gilbert & Pearson 1999), Modulations (Shapiro 2000)

58 ox”.177 At the core of this ethological approach is the role of the body and its affective encounters in the world. As Deleuze and Guattari would say: “…in Ethics the organic characteristics derive from longitude and its relations, from latitude and its degrees”.178 That is to say, that a body is inseparable from its composition with the world, and our propensity to subject bodies to discursive classifications of the subject or species is precisely what negates the vital connections between body and world that might otherwise be made. Attending only to a formal categorical explanation of things will never be as enlightening as giving attention to the connections made, however differently such formed objects and processes may have appeared from each other at the outset.

Proceeding via an ethology, I will contend in this thesis that Brown played a distinct role in the creative evolution of electronic dance music by mobilising new relations or connections between bodies and existential conditions. Tracks such as Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag (1965), Cold Sweat (1967) or even perhaps Sex Machine (1970), will set up a pattern of relations for future electronic dance musics. In terms of relations between bodies and existential conditions, Brown’s tracks are far more important than compositions such as Max Matthews digital rendition of Bicycle Built for Two (1961) or Pierre Schaeffer’s EtudeAuxCheminsDeFur(1948), as interesting as those pieces are. In terms of relative capacity to inspire an ongoing minority culture, Brown is in a class of his own. Brown’s refrains express new minor temporalities in an ongoing way. For instance, we might cite a fairly recent and particularly interesting example, the track Learn Chinese (2004)179 by Chinese-American hip-hop artist Jin. Learn Chinese is propelled by a 30-year-old sample of a James Brown break beat from the 1973 track BlindManCanSeeIt.180 In general the number of producers who have sampled Brown runs to at least the tens of thousands.181 Whilst a brief search online will uncover much support by young Asian-American Hip-Hop fans for

177 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 257) 178 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 257) 179 (Jin 2004) 180 (Brown 1973a) 181 For those inclined to check out some of these many thousands of samples of Brown’s work reconstituted into new works, a great web site dedicated to the purpose of sample “trainspotting” is The-Breaks.com(The-Breaks.Com 2005).

59 “representing” on their behalf, why did Jin, like so many before him, feel the need to “represent”182 through Brown’s music?

The most obvious answer might be that to use a Brown sample is to expediently appropriate a creditable position within the cultural relations of hip-hop. In this respect, Jin achieves “credibility” through the inclusion of the Brown sample. This transformation is further evidenced in the accompanying video, as Jin’s hip-hop skills allow him to transcend his banal existence as a take-away delivery boy, and is able to metamorphose into a Triad-like gangster figure.183 Whilst hardly transforming any stereotypes, there is a complex cultural assemblage taking place, one made increasingly complex by the use of the Brown sample in the musical text. Although making use of a James Brown sample might be significant in terms of its “authenticity”, the interesting question may be “authentic” in relation to what? Perhaps we can say that the use of Brown’s music guarantees a broader reception, enables one to participate in a new set of relations, also indicating its performer’s possession of the requisite knowledge of the powers of the culture he’s apparently embracing. The culture that samples Brown has had a long and distinguished history. To take a different example, Tricia Rose proposes that the use of a sample of James Brown’s 1962 recording of Night Train in Kool Moe Dee’s HowYaLikeMeNow (1987): 184

… not only verifies Brown as the author, it paradoxically undermines any fixed link his sound has to the label on which it was "originally" recorded. Brown’s exclamation in the context of Moe Dee’s piece is employed as a communal resource that functions in opposition to the recording industry’s fixation with ownership. In the opening moment of HowYaLikeMeNow, James Brown is affirmed and valorized, Kool Moe Dee is situated within an African-American music tradition, and a self-constructed affirmative and resistive history is sounded.185

Yet, as might be gleaned from the example of Learn Chinese, it is fair to say that emergence of new minorities through the use of Brown’s refrains has long transcended a purely African-American tradition. This is perhaps also why Sreberny

182 Used in the Hip-Hop slang sense. 183 As seen in the accompanying video. An interesting discussion of the images that appear in Jin’s video have been by musician and writer, Oliver Wang, on his blog site (Wang 2003). 184 (Kool Moe Dee 1987) 185 (Tricia Rose 1994: 89)

60 has argued that Gilroy’s work has limits when it comes to more recent examples of diasporic consciousness. There are many apprehensions of a minor temporality that might be less exclusive, and could be more encompassing of the vast diasporic populations who now engage with Brown’s music. These often lie outside the Black Atlantic diaspora.

Further evidence of dance cultures outside of the Black Atlantic is to be found in this Time magazine profile on British producer Bally Sagoo, the New Delhi-born and Birmingham-bred, Anglo-Indian dance music producer. Sagoo extols the virtues of Brown samples in his production work. To quote Sagoo:

“Indian songs normally have a loud vocal, with a very loud string,” he says. “Something had to give, and what gave was the heavy Eastern flavor. Basically, you have to give them a bit of tablas, a bit of the Indian sound. But bring on the basslines, bring on the funky-drummer beat, bring on the James Brown samples”.186

It might be argued that Brown’s music is so generally attractive due to its ability to hint at a transcendental duration that offers an escape from a more hegemonic form of temporality. As dance music, Brown’s superlative grooves inspire a becoming linked to a series of minor expressions. Brown allows the creation of new spaces of affect within the any-space-whatever circumstances of the minor.

Histories Major and Minor

As I have already mentioned, the apprehension of a minor temporality expressed through music might counteract a majoritarian temporality. For minor cultures, the latter is enforced through the time of everyday life, leading to a more oppressive sense of majoritarian imposed duration in the intolerable banality of the everyday, as described by Deleuze in the Cinema books. This is an intolerable that has existed from enforced slavery to the continuing imposition of enforced economic uncertainty. In regards to the latter, we only have to think of the pilgrimages by African- Americans from the 1940s onward to the North of the US to find work. The African- Americans who fled the South had to take on menial jobs out of economic necessity,

186 (Sagoo in Hajari 1997)

61 along with the disconnection that continual migration requires. Neal informs us in Soul Babies:

…that for many blacks, whose families migrated to cities like Chicago and Detroit after World War II in pursuit of better job opportunities, the promised land was just that, only a promise. As witnessed by the dire living conditions that the Evans family faced, black migrants were often forced into economic conditions arguably worse than those in the South.187

This economically driven state of enforced transition continues to impose itself upon diasporic communities. Indeed, the lyrics of the black popular music tradition have long referenced such nomadism, enforced or otherwise. Such expression constitutes the whole genre of blues alone, and is also to be found in gospel, work and folk songs.188 Indeed as Brown’s songs often reworked, covered, or merely appropriated this legacy, his music would continue in this tradition. The development of these styles would be significant of an attempt to create a musically articulated territory for lives often lived in a state of flux. As such, many of Brown’s songs capture a sense of a (often enforced) nomadism that was common to the experience of many African- Americans. This is an experience articulated through tracks such as 1961’s Night Train, in which Brown sings out the major stops of the “Chitlin Circuit”, or 1967’s There Was a Time in which the audience is invited to chant the praises of his hometown, “…Augusta GA” from all points across North America.189

Indeed James Brown’s fondness for mythologising the South might be perceived as the epitome of a nostalgia for a virtual time and space that is itself an “apprehension of a minor temporality”. The South provides a source of common cultural association and is about as close to home, existential or otherwise, for many African-Americans as they can plausibly lay claim to. We only have to think about the use of the term “down home”, as many African-Americans have referred to the South, as an example

187 (Neal 2002: 63) 188 By way of example, one need only to point to the repertoire of an artist such as Robert Johnson, whose songs include paeans to nomadism such as Drifting Blues, Hellhound on my Trail, Walking Blues, and Terraplane Blues. In fact there is a whole other work than could conceivably be addressed in regard to the often-enforced nomadism of the African-American subject, which is why of course such existential angst has figured so prominently within the idiom. This was not resigned to African- Americans only, but to other sections of the community forcibly dispersed, a sentiment expressed for instance by Woody Guthrie in IAin’tGotNoHome. 189 (Brown 1967b)

62 of this attempt to create a sense of home for a people made nomadic due to their economic position.

Remaining “down home” requires maintenance of loyalty to one’s roots, which for most of Brown’s band members could be traced to the Southern states of America.190 In Escape-ism (1971),191 for instance, Brown launches into a comic interrogation of the authenticity of his band members’ origins in the South.192 A Southern origin is seemingly synonymous here with both musical and personal credibility. The Escape- ism routine was later to be reiterated as a vital part of Brown’s live show, where a black audience conversant in its protocols would cheer in empathy.193 Sometimes the climax of the dialogue would occur when bandleader Fred Wesley would proclaim that he was from “L.A.”, rather than expose his Southern origins like the rest of the group. With further interrogation by Brown the audience subsequently learns that “L.A.” actually stands for “Lower Alabama”. We could even take this virtual territoriality as a subtext of Brown’s well-documented arrest in 1988, when the arresting officers were treated to an uncalled for rendition of “Georgia on My Mind” as they tried to corral Brown into handcuffs.194

I contend that the utility of such parochial refrains is of particular importance in the unification of a minor people of disparate backgrounds into a more tangible existential relation, and perhaps in lieu of a physical territory that has been otherwise denied them. Given the nature of the disparate circumstances of any diasporic community, they cannot fully possess a shared collective memory of the past together, but only perhaps a future. At this point the artist must intervene to bring together these

190 Brown’s playful interrogation of his band members as to their origins in the South can be heard on the 1971 single, Escape-ism (Brown 1971a). A twenty minute unexpurgated version can also be found on the re-released, remastered version of the album Hot Pants (1971) (Brown 1971/1991). 191 (Brown 1971a) 192 Whilst most of Brown’s band members of this period come from the Deep South such as Georgia (Brown and his long time saxophonist St. Clair Pinckney in fact hail from the very same section of Augusta, Georgia known as ‘The Terry’) - and Alabama, such as drummer John “Jabo” Starks. Brown makes jokes about the members of the group who are trying to “pass” and deny their Southern origins, such as trumpeter “Jasaan” who as Brown tells us “…claims he is from Ohius…ain’t no such place name as Ohius” and Fred Wesley who of course claims he is from L.A. – which the audience will find out means “Lower Alabama” (Brown 1971a). This impromptu studio jam not only provides Brown with a hit single but provides the basis of a standard routine as heard on Live at the Apollo 3 – Revolution of the Mind album (Brown 1971e). 193 (Brown 1971d) 194 (Geoff Brown 1996: 221)

63 disparate populations, a concept referred to in A Thousand Plateaus as the “problem of the people”:

…the artist opens up to the Cosmos in order to harness forces in a "work" (without which the opening onto the Cosmos would only be a reverie incapable of enlarging the limits of the earth); this work requires very simple, pure, almost childish means, but also the forces of a people, which is what is still lacking” "We still lack the ultimate force ...We seek a people.195

This is why Deleuze and Guattari contend that the artwork seeks a people,thatis,it creates its audience: “[w]hen Klee says that the people is missing, what is at stake is the mode of individuation of a people, which should be that of a becoming, a multiplicity that is irreducible to the terms of the one and the Many”.196

Post-Soul Recollection

Within the African-American community, Brown’s music would also “seek a people”. Perhaps one of the most overt examples can be found in his song Say it Loud! I'm Black and I'm Proud (1968) where Brown would attempt to gather together a collective of so-called “coloureds” and “negroes” and perhaps even enable them to “become-black” under his direction.197 Of course, this “blackness” is in reality always a becoming, a static position only in relation to the majoritarian world. For a people attempting to become in the face of majoritarian oppression there was an obvious need for a consistent form of expression. Brown’s music helped to crystallise this "minor" position and make it more tangible.

In general, the fundamental difference between major and minor aspects of populations is founded on their respective orientation to time. Of course, these orientations begin with differences as to how able they are to "recollect" a dominant

195 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 337-338) 196 (Bogue 2003: 42) 197 “ChuckD:JamesBrownhadsuchanimpactnotonlymymusicbutmylife.Say It Loud: I’m Black and I’m Proud when I was 8 years old, was such a part of the fabric of my understanding of where we was at in 1967 and 1968. Before that, we were called "colored" and before that "Negroes." If you said you was black, people thought you were crazy. Then there was the groove. James Brown’s band maintained that riff, that vamp, that loop to make you dance hard for a long time instead of just giving you that small break. Sometimes cats don’t understand that without James Brown, there would be no rap” (Chuck D in VH1 2001).

64 history, or how able they are to recollect history in another way. One way this difference gets played out is in the different constitutions of rhythmic expression, which is why I contend that funk’s “One” apprehended a minor temporality. It enabled a deterritorialisation from the intolerable circumstances of its emergence, and from the dominant history that attempted to maintain a particular set of repressive forms of expression, affects and existential conditions.

It could be argued that all truly new music can only come from those who lack access to majoritarian history. This lack leads them into a re-mining of the general past, which far exceeds narrow and official histories. This will always come back to the expression of life as difference: a people of new bodies, postures, languages, and identities. For instance, pioneering Hip-Hop DJ Afrika Bambaataa’s Planet Rock would synthesise the music of Kraftwerk with local musical forms to deliberately set a new becoming in motion. As I shall argue later in this thesis, these musicians appeal to a falsification of, and play with, set identity, and in the process will remake themselves contrary to official history. Music that speaks in a minor language instils new logics within common sense relations to history, the body and the general state of things.

For all of this talk about music’s minor function, however what might a music of a major language be? This would be a music that appeals to the reiteration of territory on behalf of the State, that supports the maintenance of the sovereignty of official history, or that type of “recollection” – that enforces a form of actuality that will dominate all other virtual possibilities. This is the purpose of uniform national anthems; they work against the promotion of deterritorialisation and the enticement of the new. At the same time, the distinction between major and minor musics is always a question of context, rather than content. It is in their specific contexts that the bastardisation described by Neal, or the falsity described by Deleuze, can set up new processes of repetition that allow new becomings to emerge.

A complex example that Neal discusses is the TV sitcom Good Times.Hearguesthat Good Times is representative of the post-soul text as it conveys the loss of the dream of prosperity after migration to the North. Neal analyses the program’s citation within a 1998 track by the hip-hop group Outkast, whose SpottieOttieDopalicious (1998)

65 presents a recurrent reference of “…the phrase "damn, damn, damn, James," which was repeated throughout the song by background vocalist Patrick Brown and group members Andre and Big Boi. This phrase, Neal tells us, is a direct quote from the second part of a two-part episode entitled “the Move" from Good Times.198 In that show, the Evans family became symbolic of so many African-Americans who were now no better off economically than when they originally fled from the South. The sitcom’s use in the Outkast track provides a glimpse of the value of the show for the collective psyche of the African-American population.199

It can be seen that both Good Times and its use in the Outkast track are directed at undoing official stories about American “progress” so that minor existences can find new expressive forms. In this thesis I contend that emergent electronic music practices often undo the “ official story” until a minor becoming transpires. In particular I will suggest that the catalyst for a particular interrogation of the musical past is the collapse of the given habits of the sensory-motor-link - the clear easy link between perceptions and actions - in the decline of soul. I will discuss this break in more detail throughout the thesis, along with its correlation to Deleuze’s account of a similar situation in the cinema.

For now we can say that these breaks emerge from the encounter with the intolerable. This situation becomes so overwhelming – a situation exemplified by the type of political inertia experienced by the post-soul generation in the wake of the optimism of the civil rights struggles - that one cannot react as one normally would through action. The result is that a neat scheme of action-reaction breaks down. Another way of looking at this is that the social immobility inherent to the any-spaces-whatever will render meaningful action impossible. For Deleuze, such circumstances and spaces would begin to open up in the immediate post-war period:

198 (Neal 2002: 62) 199 This sense of association with the Evans family continues and in 2001 for instance, Ghostface Killah released his “Good Times” where the rap was laid over a foundation of samples from the gospel flavoured title song from the series. Unreleased on the album Bulletproof Wallets (Ghostface Killah 2001) because of sample clearance issues.

66 demolished or being reconstructed, its waste grounds, its shanty towns, and even in places where the war had not penetrated, its undifferentiated urban tissue, its vast unused places, docks, warehouses, heaps of girders and scrap iron. Another, more specific to the cinema as we shall see, arose from a crisis of the action-image: the characters were found less and less in sensory-motor “motivating” situations, but rather in a state of strolling, of sauntering or of rambling which defined pure optical and sound situations.200

Whilst the effect of such “pure optical and sound situations” in the puncturing of narratological flow might have more relevance in relation to audiovisual concerns of the cinema, I am more concerned with making reference to the any-space-whatevers that Deleuze ascribes as “independent of cinema”. These are the spaces of destruction and dislocation so prevalent in the post-war situation, but also prevalent, to provide an example more relevant to this study, to the riot torn cities of the United States that would so visibly remind its citizens of the failure of civil rights action. These any- space-whatevers thus exacerbate a sensory-motor-schema slackened to the point that it cannot “naturally” extend into action, and we thus find that “[t]he sensory-motor break makes man a seer who finds himself struck by something intolerable in the world, and confronted by something unthinkable in thought…”.201

The post-war crisis of the action-image has an obvious resonance with the challenge of diasporic existence. This resonance has been discussed in Laura U. Marks” The Skin of the Film (2000), where she posits the importance of the any-space-whatever within post-colonial cinema. Any-spaces-whatever,

…are not simply the disjunctive spaces of postmodernism, but also the disruptive spaces of postcolonialism, where non-Western cultures erupt into Western metropolises, and repressed cultural memories return to destabilize national histories.202

There is every reason to consider this any-space-whatever existence as having as significant an effect on new musical aesthetics, as it had on the cinematic image. This is why I think that the emergence of Brown’s music can be considered in these terms.

200 (Deleuze 1986: 120-121) 201 (Deleuze 1989: 169-170) 202 (Laura U. Marks 2000: 27)

67 Creative Responses in Intolerable Circumstances

The territorialising of, and in, these any-space-whatevers is crucial to the development of funk, and later, electronic dance musics. It is here that Deleuze’s work on the concept of the any-space-whatevers is useful. Deleuze’s transformation of Augé’s concept of the “non-place” into the any-space-whatever allows it to become a catalyst for productivity.203 Jeffrey Bell refers to the work of Reda Bensmaia who has written on Deleuze’s transformation of this concept, which, “[i]n contrast to Augé…rather than being an homogenizing and de-singularizing force…shows that for Deleuze the “any space whatsoever” is a condition for the emergence of uniqueness and singularities”.204For Deleuze, the any-space-whatever, divorced from given contexts, is transformed into one full of potential. The any-space-whatever becomes, “…a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible”. 205 Ever the optimist, Deleuze prizes this non-place for its unique becoming-potential, from which a vibrant time-image cinema will emerge. This is a cinema that will reveal a transcendental time and restore belief in the world. As Brian Massumi, inspired by Deleuze-Guattarian theory writes: “Cherish derelict spaces. They are holes in habit, what cracks in the existing order appear to be from the molar perspective…The derelict space is a zone of indeterminacy that bodies-in-becoming may make their own”.206

So in spite of the great adversity that was beset them, the various strands of African- American artistic endeavour to evolve from the post-soul experience would perhaps unsurprisingly, flourish from the desolate spaces of any-space-whatevers. Around the very same time as the residents of devastated areas, such as the Bronx, for example, were being affronted by the erosion of community, its young residents set about a strategic reterritorialising undertaken in the name of collectivity and one that would manifest the oft-cited “elements” of Hip-hop culture - graffiti, breaking, DJing and MCing.

203 (Bell 1997) 204 (Bell, 1997). In this piece Bell is referring to an essay by Reda Bensmaia, “L’espace Quelconque Comme ‘Personnage Conceptuel’”' which appeared in a special “Gilles Deleuze, Philosopher of Cinema” issue of Iris, no. 23, Spring 1997. 205 (Deleuze, 1986:109) 206 (Massumi 1992: 104)

68 Of course, the Bronx is only one example of the many such derelict spaces that have accounted for a musically driven “belief in the world” through bodily becomings, there are many other notable examples – Kingston Jamaica, Dusseldorf Germany, Detroit and Chicago. These hotbeds of electronic dance music cultures all emerged from such “derelict” spaces, and would in their own unique ways, "falsify" history to overcome their circumstances. For example, christening themselves with new monikers, and mythologies, these minor subjects were not so much deliberately repudiating history, as letting popular culture take up the slack where the relevant points were missing from the history books. For example, Cheryl Keyes discusses the profound effect of the popular television series Roots on the hip-hop generation. She recounts how Roots opened up African history to African-Americans and, “…it would not be far-fetched to presume that among the audiences of these performances were rappers, who recognized rap’s strong link to an old African practice, a practice whose influence they may have unconsciously adopted from their families, churches, and cultures…”207

207 (Keyes 2002: 18). To quote this section more broadly, Keyes recounts in her book, Rap Music And Street Consciousness (2002), “When I occasionally mentioned to academics how rappers would locate Africa as the foundation of the rappin style, some of them immediately marvelled at this while simultaneously wondering, ‘Who told them that?’ Despite some queries by academicians about artists” knowledge of the rap music-African nexus, Bambaataa and Carson’s statements suggest, nonetheless, that rappin is similar to the West African bardic tradition. Beyond whatever traditions and history may have been passed down to African Americans through the oral traditions of their families and communities, the impact of a particular book published in the 1970s gave those who did have access to oral history a new means by which to understand their contemporary culture and practices through examining their heritage. The considerable contributions of this book may underlie the strong assertions that rhymin MCs make about the bard-rap continuum. The comparative literature scholar Thomas A. Hale notes that the West African bard’s rise in popularity in the United States can be attributed to the 1976 publication of Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family.The televised version of Roots, which was produced as a miniseries in 1977, "drew the largest audience in the history of U.S. television" (Hale 1998:2). The series retold the story of Haley’s African ancestor, Kunte Kinte, who is said to have come from the Gambia. Roots also stimulated African Americans” interest in genealogy. Roots was followed by its miniseries sequel, Roots: The Next Generations (1979). An autobiographical sketch of Haley’s life as a journalist and novelist, the sequel revealed how he embarked upon his research on Kunte Kinte. In the last episode, Haley, played by the actor James Earl Jones, travels to the Gambia where he is directed by the Ministry of Culture officials to a keeper of oral history, a griot, who would probably know the story of Kunte Kinte. Undoubtedly Roots informed viewers about the role African bards played as purveyors of the past, recorders and guardians of history, and scholars of African culture. Thomas A. Hale best summarizes the impact of Roots: ‘thanks to the continuing impact of Roots, West African griots have dramatically expanded their performance contexts. They have appeared on the stages of university auditoriums, in churches, and in television and recording studios in Paris, London, New York, and Tokyo" (1998:2). It would not be farfetched to presume that among the audiences of these performances were rappers, who recognized rap’s strong link to an old African practice, a practice whose influence they may have unconsciously adopted from their families, churches, and cultures” (Keyes 2002: 18).

69 The post-soul generation’s creative appropriation of history would indeed become a mainstay of hip-hop culture, rather famously inspiring the formation of Afrika Bambaataa’s Zulu Nation. The collective was founded in 1975 and named after the film Zulu (1964) starring Michael Caine.208 Upon its formation, one of Bambaataa’s first projects would be the “First Annual Universal Zulu Tribute to James Brown, Sly and the Family Stone and the Pioneers of Hip-Hop” based around these new art forms of the ghetto such as breakdancing.209 Bambaataa’s appropriation of “Africa” presents a classic case of the virtual image standing in for history - by which, I mean that it is an attempt to cultivate a history differently, when an official one was denied them. Such early forays into what can be described via concepts such as Afrocentricity210 would re-emerge in the hip-hop of the late 80s and early 90s, when groups such as Public Enemy, X-Clan, the Jungle Brothers and the Native Tongues collective dominated hip-hop of the day. The creative relations to history implicit in movements such as Afrocentrism and Afrofuturism211 would inspire a creative "falsity" mobilised as an alternative to official history.

208 (Toop 2000b: 57) 209 (George in Poschardt 1998: 177) As Poschardt details, ‘twenty years later, the Zulu Nation had “embassies” and “consulates” in every large city in America, and in many countries in Europe, Asia and Africa” (Poschardt 1998: 177) 210 Hip-hop’s Afrocentric years lasted from about 1986 to about 1991-92. This movement would reclaim African iconography and make prominent use of it in clothes, lyrics and album artwork as significance of historical “consciousness”. 211 Afro-Futurism might be understood in the following way, “African-American strategies to overcome racial and social classification by means of technology and futuristic mythology” (Christian Zemsauer 2002). It is believed that the term Afro-Futurism first appeared in Mark Dery’s article Flame Wars (1993). Afrofuturism is described by Dery in that article “Speculative fiction that treats African- American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th century technoculture—and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future—might, for want of a better term, be called Afrofuturism. The notion of Afrofuturism gives rise to a troubling antinomy: Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures (Dery 1993)”? Here are some examples “But African-American voices have other stories to tell about culture, technology, and things to come. If there is an Afrofuturism, it must be sought in unlikely places, constellated from far-flung points. We catch a glimpse of it in the opening pages of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, where the proto-cyberpunk protagonist—a techno-bricoleur "in the great American tradition of tinkerers"—taps illegal juice from a line owned by the rapacious Monopolated Light & Power, gloating, ‘Oh, they suspect that their power is being drained off, but they don't know where’. One day, perhaps, he'll indulge his fantasy of playing five recordings of Louis Armstrong's version of What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue at once, in a sonic Romare Bearden collage (an unwittingly prescient vision, on Ellison's part, of that 1981 masterpiece of deconstructionist deejaying, The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel). Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings such as Molasses, which features a pie-eyed, snaggletoothed robot, adequately earn the term "Afrofuturist," as do movies like John Sayles's The Brother From Another Planet and Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames. Jimi Hendrix's Electric Ladyland is Afrofuturist; so, too, is the techno-tribal global village music of Miles Davis's On the Corner and Herbie Hancock's

70 To defer once again to Brian Massumi, we might perceive such “derelict spaces” as the any-space-whatevers of the ghettos from where this art would flourish as “autonomous zones”, which:

…may be thought of in temporal terms, as shreds of futurity. Like “outside,” “future” is only an approximation: there are any number of potential futures in the cracks of the present order, but only a few will actually unfold. Think of autonomous zones in terms of time, but tenseless: time out of joint, in an immanent outside (Nietzsche’s untimely).212

I contend that such derelict spaces have directly facilitated the transformative potential that was intrinsic to the emergence of the post-soul aesthetic. Furthermore, as I will argue in detail in chapter 8, the bastardisation of the post-soul aesthetic is perhaps founded upon a “powers of the false”. These powers of the false make use a creative appropriation of the simulacrum that might be utilised in a productive falsification, in order to take things elsewhere. Of course, a rather simple example might be found in the way that DJ culture takes a piece of music and manipulates it to the point that it begins to become something else. It is all about building a territorial

Headhunters, as well as the fusion-jazz cyberfunk of Hancock's Future Shock and Bernie Worrell's Blacktronic Science, whose liner notes herald "reports and manifestoes from the nether regions of the modern Afrikan American music/speculative fiction universe." Afrofuturism manifests itself, too, in early '80s electro-boogie releases such as Planet Patrol's Play at Your Own Risk,Warp9'sNunk, George Clinton's Computer Games, and of course Afrika Bambaataa's classic Planet Rock, records steeped in "imagery drawn from computer games, video, cartoons, sci-fi and hip-hop slanguage," notes David Toop, who calls them "a soundtrack for vidkids to live out fantasies born of a science-fiction revival courtesy of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind)(Dery 1994)”. As Dery writes on his website, the term appeared in his article “Black to the Future” which “…first appeared in the November 1994 issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly, an academic journal published by Duke University and overseen, at that time, by Frank Lentricchia). Arguably, this essay, which in Flame Wars serves as an introduction to my interviews with Samuel Delany and Tricia Rose, launched the discourse of Afrofuturism at a time when Wired magazine was lambasted for featuring nothing but white guys on its covers. As Mark Rockeymoore notes in his essay on the subject, ‘Mark Dery was the first to use the term 'afrofuturism' in his edited collection Flame Wars’. Likewise, the cultural critic Kodwo Eshun, who has written extensively about race and technology, credits me as the originator of the term, although he traces the discourse back to the British journalist Mark Sinker’. (Dery 2005) See also (Eshun 1998). Dery also discusses the ongoing currency of the term, “Intellectual genealogies aside, none will debate that Afrofuturism—the buzzword and the discourse—has grown legs. At last count, a Google search for the term racked up 1900 hits. A burgeoning field of study, it has inspired a website, a members-only Yahoo discussion group, a Hypertext project, and critical anthologies such as Race in Cyberspace, Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life, and a special issue of the journal, Social Text, titled, simply, Afrofuturism (Dery 2005). Scholars that have written about the subject include Mark Dery (1993), Kodwo Eshun (1998), Paul D. Miller (1999) Alondra Nelson (2002) and Kevin Holm-Hudson (2003)). Discussion of Afro-Futurism is recounted throughout Kodwo Eshun's More Brilliant Than The Sun (1998) see (Eshun 1998). For an exhaustive Who's Who list see (afrofuturism.net) 212 (Massumi 1992: 105)

71 structure that might allow the potential of a future from the undifferentiated chaos of the past.

In general, Deleuze and Guattari propose that the disciplines of philosophy, science and art will find their own methods of confronting chaos “…in order to rediscover, to restore the infinite”. 213 Whilst each discipline goes about this in different ways, art restores this notion of the infinite to the plane of composition.214 Deleuze and Guattari will ascribe to art the ability to plunge its audience into the “chaosmos”. The philosophers borrow the concept of “chaosmos” from the writing of James Joyce.215 It is used to describe the how the work of art will effect a productive disruption in the sensibilities of its audience. We might think of the role of the artist as, “...[opening] up to the Cosmos in order to harness forces in a "work" (without which the opening onto the Cosmos would only be a reverie incapable of enlarging the limits of the earth).”216Art’s power is derived from this rediscovery of the infinite as it opens up the possibility of eternal difference. There is a constant movement from “chaos to composition”217 derived from this discovery of an infinite. This draws attention to the importance of a perpetual “falsification” of truth, at least with regard to the narrow perspectives of official history and accepted recollection.

Deleuze and Popular Music

Having staked so much on a Deleuzean inspired ontology, it is perhaps prudent to address what I perceive as the (mistaken) belief that Deleuze (and Guattari) are hostile to popular music.218 This perception derives from the musical examples they employ in texts such as A Thousand Plateaus, where they are given to discuss philosophical

213 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 197) 214 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 197) 215 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 6) 216 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 337) 217 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 203) 218 Whilst the charges against Deleuze and Guattari’s entrenched modernism were attempted to be laid to rest in Smith and Murphy’s “What I Hear is Thinking Too: Deleuze and Guattari Go Pop”(Murphy & Smith 2001), Ian Buchanan would argue once again for Deleuze’s modernist outlook see “Deleuze and Popular Music” essay in his Deleuzism: A Metacommentary (Buchanan 2000) or Greg Hainge’s “Is Pop Music?” to be found in the edited collection, Deleuze and Music (2004)(Hainge 2004).

72 concepts with reference to composers such as Debussy, Messiaen and Varèse.219 To add further weight to this contention, Guattari has been quoted as saying that popular music is mostly reterritorialisations, 220 which might be more simply understood as a territorialisation based on cliché. On the other hand, there is just as much evidence to the contrary, 221 and this very debate has been the subject of an entire essay, “What I Hear Is Thinking Too: Deleuze and Guattari Go Pop” (2001) by Timothy S. Murphy and Daniel W. Smith.222 Whilst opinion may remain forever divided, I personally subscribe to the same opinion as Murphy and Smith, who come out in favour of a pro- pop Deleuze and Guattari. As testament to their influence on popular music, I can only indicate how far the philosopher’s influence has spread in regard to reconceptualising popular music discussion. Deleuze and Guattari feature in the work of popular music scholars such as Simon Reynolds, Kodwo Eshun and Paul D. Miller, not to mention that the philosophers have been an inspiration behind German techno label, Mille Plateaux.223 My own feeling here is that Deleuze and Guattari were, like us all, products of their time and the musical examples they use - which tend not to be those of popular music - reflect their own tastes and socio-cultural background.

The burgeoning field of Deleuzean inspired popular music inquiry requires consideration of the early adopters who pointed the way. One of the first scholarly works - and still perhaps the most extended discussion - to use Deleuze and Guattari in relation to popular music was the 1994 essay, “‘Spaces of Affect’: Versions and

219 Discussion of these composers occur in several instances throughout A Thousand Plateaus, including, (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 270-271), (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 316-317) and (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 343-344) 220 As Guattari says to interviewer Charles Stivale, “I don't see why you want me to give examples of popular music which are generally reterritorializations” (Guattari & Stivale 1995). 221 Guattari tells Stivale of the popular music that is interesting to him, “However, there is one [example of popular music] that immediately occurs to me, it's break dancing and music, all these dances which are both hyper-territorialized and hyper-corporal, but that, at the same time, make us discover spectrums of possible utilization, completely unforeseen traits of corporality, and that invent a new grace of entirely unheard-of possibilities of corporality. I've also been fascinated -- but this isn't popular music either -- by Chicago blues, the Chicago school, because these monstrous, elephantine instruments like the bass, they begin to fly with unheard-of lightness and richness . . .Here's another amazing work of composition, a record by Bonzo Goes to Washington entitled "Five Minutes," a CCC Club Mix…”(Guattari & Stivale 1995). 222 (Smith and Murphy 2001) 223 As Murphy and Smith explain in their essay, “What I Hear Is Music Too: Deleuze and Guattari Go Pop”, the Mille Plateaux label, based in Frankfurt, Germany “specializes in dense techno dance/trance mixes and electronica” (Murphy & Smith 2001). They quote the founder Achim Szepanski who “…describes the work of the artists on his label as ‘Becoming, so that the music goes beyond itself; this is the search for the forces of the minoritarian that the label Mille Plateaux is part of. In a letter Gilles Deleuze welcomed the existence of such a label’” (Murphy & Smith 2001).

73 Visions of Cajun Cultural History” by Charles J. Stivale.224 Stivale has written several instructive articles on Deleuze-Guattarian inspired analysis of Cajun music, including “Of Heccéités and Ritournelles: Movement and Affect in the Cajun Dance Arena” (1997) and “Becoming Cajun” (2000) culminating in the first full length Deleuzean- Guattarian inspired music text, Disenchanting Les Bons Temps (2004). In addition to his work on Cajun culture, Stivale warrants appropriate extolment for his prising from Félix Guattari some important qualifications on the subject of popular music, as found in the interview with the philosopher, entitled “Pragmatic/Machinic”.225 The essay has not only served me well in the deflection of criticisms of Deleuze and Guattari’s perceived “high modernist” contempt of the popular, but provided me with some valuable insights in regard to Guattari’s demonstrated appreciation of dance music and breakdancing.226

Other notable Deleuzean musical studies include, Andrew Murphie’s “Sound at the End of the World as We Know it” (1996) which remains a seminal introductory text on the relationship between popular music and the refrain. More generally we might also add the musical scholarship of the prodigious Simon Reynolds, whose early adoption of Deleuze and Guattari for the analysis of popular music was discussed in a recent essay, “Becoming-Music: The Rhizomatic Moment of Improvisation” by Jeremy Gilbert (2004).227 The enthusiasm for a Deleuzean inspired musical analysis has culminated in the recently published Deleuze and Music (2005) collection in which Gilbert’s article appears.

However, it probably bears reiteration that, unlike the fields of literature, cinema and the visual arts, music was the only art form to which Deleuze did not dedicate a single volume. That is not to say that Deleuze and Guattari did not entertain an intense

224 The three-volume set, Deleuze And Guattari: Critical Assessments Of Leading Philosophers (2001) conveniently gathers together a large numbers of essays on the work of Deleuze and Guattari that had otherwise appeared across a disparate array of journals. In the first volume of the text, the editor, Gary Genosko provides a chronological table of all of the essays on Deleuze and Guattari that appear in the text (Genosko 2001: xxiii-xxxi). Included in the first volume are two separate pieces on Stivale’s work, “‘Spaces of Affect’: Versions and Visions of Cajun Cultural History” (1994) (Stivale 1994) and also “Of Heccéités and Ritournelles: Movement and Affect in the Cajun Dance Arena” (1997) (Stivale 1997). Appearing in between Stivale’s publications is Andrew Murphie’s “Sound at the End of the World as We Know it” (1996) (Murphie 1996). 225 (Guattari & Stivale 1995) 226 (Guattari & Stivale 1995) 227(Gilbert 2004a)

74 interest in music, inspiring concepts such as the refrain as well as providing the context for innumerable examples of composition. In fact it would be fair to say that music is sometimes central to the philosophical thought of Deleuze and Guattari. 228 This thesis makes use of these more decisively “musical” concepts but focuses more intently on the slightly less musical territory of Deleuze’s Cinema books, if only because they provide the most pertinent resource to aiding the philosophical task at hand. Deleuze himself makes the connection in the Cinema books, remarking that sound and music are always of the time-image as “[t]he only direct presentation of time appears in music”.229 This conclusion may be prompted by the fact that music’s territorialising properties and serial structures are never tied down to space in the same way as the visual image, and as such are less sullied by the constraints of representation.

Perhaps their most pertinent musical concept, the refrain is discussed by Deleuze and as the “crystal of time”.230 Refrains are “crystalline” because they act upon the musical in a similar manner to the way light is refracted through the crystal and re- dispersed upon its surroundings. 231As Deleuze and Guattari write in A Thousand Plateaus:

…the refrain is a prism, a crystal of space-time. It acts upon that which surrounds it, sound or light, extracting from it various vibrations, or decompositions, projections, or transformations. The refrain also has a catalytic function: not only to increase the speed of the exchanges and reactions in that which surrounds it, but also to assure indirect interactions between elements devoid of so-called natural affinity, and thereby to form organized masses. 232

228 The most obvious example would be the discussion of the refrain, in plateau 11 “1837: Of the Refrain” in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari 1988). In A Thousand Plateaus alone Deleuze & Guattari refer to the work of composers such as Ravel - in terms of the machinic assemblage - (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 304), and also Olivier Messiaen (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 304), and Gustav Mahler (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 339) - in terms of the refrain. Also very recently made available in English (and thus too late for me to be able to incorporate into this thesis) are several essays by Deleuze on music in the collection, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995 (2006). Essays in this collection include, “How Philosophy is Useful to Mathematicians or Musicians” and “Making Audible Forces Inaudible” (Deleuze, 2006). 229 (Deleuze, 1989: 271) 230 (Deleuze 1989: 92) 231 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 348) Also ‘the refrain is therefore of the crystal or protein type. The seed, or internal structure, then has two essential aspects: augmentations and diminutions, additions and withdrawals, amplifications and eliminations by unequal values…”(Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 348-349) 232 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 348)

75 For the philosophers, music itself is an instrumentation of this crystal/refrain. Although we may think of the refrain as part of the structure of music, for them it actually precedes music. As Deleuze and Guattari have advised us, then, the refrain is not music, but rather, music takes up the refrain as a territorialising strategy that draws together music with memory. Rather than being perceived as operating within time, the refrain territorialises and constitutes space/time in the process. The musical refrain in this sense is a vehicle to translate affects and percepts and to render them tangible. This is why Deleuze and Guattari say that the refrain is a priori of time, “[t]ime is not an a priori form; rather, the refrain is the a priori form of time, which in each case fabricates different times”.233 Music subsequently takes hold of the refrain as the “…block of content proper to music”. 234 Refrains pre-exist the forms of music that they are taken up by.

The usefulness of this concept of refrain is in relation to territorialisation, especially in a place where territory has been thrown into disarray (a condition which I will examine in relation to the existential flux of the minor subject throughout the thesis). For a minor culture, this form of musical territorialising is always transient an attempt to establish territory through their own particular rhythms - even if the majoritarian culture might attempt to standardise such refrains.

How does one set about finding rhythms of becoming within the constraints of a hegemonically constituted temporality? It is in setting out this idea that Deleuze and Guattari’s attention to rhythm in their philosophy is so important, and my interest in their philosophy is due to the attention they have paid to the ontological considerations of rhythm. I should add that it bears mentioning that the role of rhythm in the constitution of time and territory, beside that already discussed by myself through the work of Deleuze and Guattari, has also been discussed by theorists such as Henri Lefebvre235 and more recently, Paul Miller (2004),236 Michel S. Laguerre (2004)237 Stamatia Portanova (2006).238 Common to all of these authors is a consideration of the role of rhythms in a constitution of the social. Lefebvre’s

233 (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988:349) 234 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 299) 235 See (Lefebvre 2004) 236 See (Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid) 2004) 237 See (Laguerre 2004) 238 See (Portanova 2005)

76 Rhythmanalysis (2004)239 however, has only recently become available in English translation, and as a result of my belated acquaintance with his work, my own discussion tends to reflect a more Deleuze-Guattarian inspired theory of rhythm. However, the increasing interest in rhythmic based theories of the social allows us to look forward to an increased theoretical emphasis on the field in the future.

Perhaps there might also be further consideration given to the relationship of such rhythms in relation to compositional forms of movement-image and time-image in popular musical styles. In conceiving of these compositional orientations within a broad notion of “popular music”, an important caveat should be made. I make no claim that all popular music can now be located completely within a “time-image” regime. If anything it is quite the opposite. Deleuze writes that most Hollywood narratives still tend to push the action-image/movement-image as if life was still like that, and that “…the greatest commercial successes always take that route, but the soul of the cinema no longer does. The soul of the cinema demands increasing thought, even if thought begins by undoing the system of actions, perceptions and affections on which the cinema had fed up to that point”.240

It would perhaps be fair to say that most popular music would still follow the equivalent to a "movement-image" convention, just as Hollywood cinema does. However this should not necessarily lead us to fetishise an alternative time-image type of music over a more conventional movement-image style pop track. The point is that they offer very different approaches to thought. This is perhaps why Deleuze remarks in the introduction to Cinema 1 that the emergence of television and “the electronic image” has, “…not caused a crisis in cinema” because they have merely capitalised on the prevailing compositional “images of thought” initiated by the cinema. Here Deleuze himself uses a musical example: “…rather like Varèse in music, they lay claim to the new materials and means that the future makes possible”.241 Our task at

239 (Lefebvre 2004) 240 (Deleuze 1986: 206) 241 (Deleuze 1986: x). Ronald Bogue also examines the work of Edgard Varèse in Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts (2003) (Bogue 2003: 44-47)

77 hand, then, is to show how Brown would lay claim to his own “materials and means”, which I will discuss in chapter 3, owe much to the gospel music tradition.

78 CHAPTER THREE THE RAPTURE AND THE RUPTURE

In this chapter, I will argue that one of the under-theorised attributes of gospel music is the way it has allowed its participants to engage in new orientations to time. Some of the more inextricable links between Brown’s music and the gospel tradition will be evaluated through James A. Snead’s essay, “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture” (1981). Indeed one of the main concerns of this chapter is to show how Brown would court some of the more imminent relations to time as construed through the gospel style, which he would develop as part of the funk aesthetic.

For singing gospel was one of Brown’s most enduring passions since a young man. It was Brown’s gospel singing abilities that literally liberated him from jail. Having been incarcerated for most of his teenage years, 242 Brown’s musical talents were not lost on the Byrd family, who sought custody of the young man. 243 Whilst Brown’s future musical collaborator, Bobby Byrd, had his sights set on having the newly paroled Brown join his singing group, The Avons, the young Brown seemed to have been far more interested in singing gospel in the local community choir, The Ever Ready Gospel Singers.244 After some persuasion, Byrd would eventually encourage Brown to take up a more secular musical vocation.245 Despite this new vocation, Brown’s affections were never far from the music of the church, and its compositional devices provide the key ingredients to his musical approach, even if he were to subsequently transform them beyond recognition.

Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture - Please, Please, Please

Even from Brown’s initial release, Please, Please, Please (1956) the influence of gospel on his music was overwhelmingly apparent. Brown’s first single246was noteworthy not only for its sheer compositional audacity, but also for its gospel inspired characteristics. Furthermore, the release of Please Please Please, a record

242 (Geoff Brown 1996: 30-31) 243 (Geoff Brown 1996: 31) 244 (Geoff Brown 1996: 39) 245 (Geoff Brown 1996: 41) 246 The record was officially attributed to “James Brown and His Famous Flames” (Brown 1956).

79 that would be considered repetitious even by the standards of the then emergent rock’n’roll composition, is an early testament to Brown’s remarkable tenacity in getting a record released at all. As the story goes, Syd Nathan, then boss of King Records, thought so little of his A&R man’s latest discovery, that Ralph Bass was almost fired when the boss listened to Brown’s first disc: “I get Syd on the phone. He’s yelling: “Bass what kind of shit you on?!” I don’t know what he is talking about. ‘that’s the worst piece of shit I’ve ever heard! He’s just singing one word”247. Startling stuff considering that the King label housed other formidable gospel artists on their roster including Little Willie John, Hank Ballard, and Joe Tex. Despite the adversity that surrounded his initial release, Brown would, of course, prevail, and Please, Please, Please would go on to become Brown’s first million seller,248 and the foundation for one of the longest running popular music careers ever.

However, given the precarious circumstances surrounding its release, Please, Please, Please, could have remained a one off. The more interesting point is that it was not. For rather than succumbing to record company pressures, Brown would continue to nurture the repetition of the gospel form in future releases, eventually transforming its composition into the discernible foundations of the funk aesthetic. Whilst the emergence of funk is still a decade away, retrospect regards Brown as a figure willing to embrace radical alternatives to popular music composition.

Please Please Please was an overt reflection of Brown’s gospel roots and this reflected its predilection for incessant, repetitive incantation of often a single phrase. As Cynthia Rose writes:

Brown’s repetition and circularity - clearly transferred from sacred to secular musics and performance - are something much larger than a personal eccentricity. They denote a black culture with Afrocentric values, values distinctly separate from white European systems of thought about the physical world…The Afrocentric world view to which repetitions like James Brown’s allude, then, consciously or as received patterns, is not one of linear progression.249

247 (Bass in Geoff Brown 1996: 56) 248 (Cliff White 1989) 249 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 121)

80 The all-important conceptual development to seize upon here is the shift away from linear progression and into the more non-linear approach that guaranteed its ongoing separation from the compositional values of the “white European systems” to which Rose refers.

To further extrapolate upon this relative difference in compositional value, Cynthia Rose turns to James A. Snead’s well-regarded essay, “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture” (1981). As Snead contends in that piece, repetition has been historically undermined in European culture.250 As he argues, from the perspective of a black musical aesthetic, repetition is central to a compositional value concerned with circulation.251 Black music’s emphasis on circulation will find itself in opposition to the European compositional values of accumulation and growth252 that are more concerned with building the composition in a different way, one that might be perceived as a more closed compositional “totality”.

Snead argues that at the heart of European composition is the teleological “goal” and just as “…in European culture, the “goal” is always clear: that which is being worked towards”. 253 Furthermore, this “goal” “…is reached only when culture ‘plays out’ its history. Such a culture is never ‘immediate’ but ‘mediated’ and separated from the present tense by its own future-orientation”. 254 Snead makes assertions of the differences in value between a teleological compositional form, as a sum of movement, and a form of repetition that has other, more intricate, aesthetic developments in mind. Thus, Snead also argues that black music’s conscious celebration of repetition compels an awareness “…that repetition takes place not on a level of musical development or progression, but on the purest tonal and timbral level”.255

250 (Snead 1998: 67-69) 251 (Snead 1998: 69) 252 (Snead 1998: 69) 253 (Snead 1998: 69) 254 (Snead 1998: 69) 255 (Snead 1998: 69)

81 However, it is due perhaps to repetition’s seemingly simple reiteration of form, that it would be criticised by the European scholar, 256 who would unfairly designate it as “primitive” in nature.257 To overcome these theoretical limitations, Snead will propose a more encompassing framework to understand the relative value of repetition in relation to African/European cultures respectively:

In black culture, the thing (the ritual, the dance, the beat) is ‘there for youtopickitupwhenyoucomebacktoit.’Ifthereisagoalinsucha culture, it is always deferred; it continually “cuts” back to the start, in the musical meaning of “cut” as an abrupt, seemingly unmotivated break (an accidental da capo) with a series already in progress and a willed return to a prior series”.258

As might be understood from this passage, central to repetition is an inherent coupling with “…the prominence of the ‘cut’”, 259 where this musical device, “…overtly insists on the repetitive nature of the music”.260

Snead goes on to cite the music of James Brown as exemplary of the use of the “cut”, 261 which he will propose is a device that might be found in Brown’s trademark, punctuating grunts and groans. Such devices correlative with, “…the preacher [who] may cut himself off with phrases such as “praise God”.262 The music of the church, and as we shall see later, funk, will court such repetition in the most overt fashion. The importance of “the cut” in black music is perhaps a conscious invocation of indeterminacy promoting an uncertainty that might create a sense of anticipation. Hence much of the dramatic impact of repetition derives from the introduction of the

256 As Richard Middleton comments on Snead’s take on Hegel, “Snead fixes Hegel's critique of African society in his sights and then inverts it. Hegel, Snead points out, defines historical Europe through opposition to its Other — historyless Africa. For Hegel, 'The Negro represents the Natural Man...What we actually understand by "Africa" is that which is without history and resolution, which is still fully caught up in the natural spirit', with all its cyclical rhythms. Inevitably, then, Europe is Master, Africa condemned to be Slave, in Hegel's notorious dialectical figure. But Snead argues that Hegel's description is right, and only his valuation wrong. The awareness and acceptance of the unavoidable repetitiveness of life is a wisdom: 'everything that goes around comes around'. This enables him to describe the cultivation of repetition in black music, from Africa to James Brown, as a positive, and to welcome its influence on a twentieth-century West gradually releasing repetition from previous repression” (Middleton 1996) 257 As discussed for example in musicologist Bruno Nettl’s article, “Unifying Factors in Folk and Primitive Music” (Nettl 1956). 258 (Snead 1998: 69) 259 (Snead 1998: 69) 260 (Snead 1998: 71) 261 (Snead 1998: 71) 262 (Snead 1998: 72)

82 “cut” as a way to provoke a deliberate sense of anxiety around its destabilising effect on the certainty of repetition. This anxiety is an effect of the arbitrary deployment of “the cut” during the preacher’s ritual. The “cut” might be seen to provide an affirmation of the chance and unpredictability of the production of time, and perhaps one significant of the unpredictability of a “God” itself.

Black music’s use of repetition and cut allows for an intricate interplay between preacher and congregation. The indeterminacy of the compositional trajectory employed by black music forms will incite a more collective form of composition, an outcome much distinguished from the predetermined structure or “goal” as adhered to in the European compositional tradition. The gospel form in turn, might thus be seen to implore a deliberate tension that threatens the stability of the music’s continuity and will instead render the composition into an indeterminate state of becoming.

The palpable sense of tension milked by this arrangement inspires a suitably intensive reaction from its audience. These compositional approaches to gospel and funk share correlations with the more “irrational” approaches to time to be found, for instance, in that of a time-image cinema, a relationship that I will expand in detail in chapter 5. The irrational nature of the “cut” differs markedly from the more causal logic of the popular music composition. The teleological “goal” oriented compositional style would maintain precedence within a European tradition until such times as it was challenged by the pervasive nature of black popular music forms.

The influence of gospel, either directly, or through popular music forms such as Brown’s, has helped to effect a change in compositional values. If we look at the way the congregation might approach a gospel track, each repetition of the phrase in question will build upon an element from the previous one in the series. Such repetition will begin to introduce difference to each of its subsequent iterations, however slight this difference might appear on the surface. In fact, the difference of each repetition might also be understood as an expression of the underlying group dynamic. Each small differentiation of the repeated phrase is thus always that much closer to being subverted by the more irrational “cut”. This might, for instance, take the form of an interjection from the preacher whose “cut” will undermine the

83 familiarity of the sequential motion of time and thus destabilise the equilibrium of the compositional trajectory at any given moment.

Snead comments that Brown’s music like the gospel characteristic is demonstrative of a form deeply rooted in African culture. 263 Whilst I have harboured some previous grievances about some commentators all too simply calling Brown’s music “African”, I think it less troublesome if we discuss the important mediational role that the church will play in celebrating musical strategies based around repetition and cut. Indeed it is Brown’s adoption of such practices, gleaned from gospel tradition that connects his work back to a discernibly African lineage. Like the preacher, Brown will invoke such arbitrary cuts in his music, most demonstrably in the exhortations to the band to “hit me”, or “take me to the bridge”, driving the music into a new section at will:

The format of the Brown ”cut” and repetition is similar to that of African drumming after the band has been “cookin'” in a given key and tempo, a cue, either verbal (“Get down”…) or musical (a brief series of rapid, percussive drum and horn accents), then directs the music to a new level, where it stays with more “cookin'” or perhaps a solo-until a repetition of cues then “cuts” back to the primary tempo. The essential pattern, then, in the typical Brown sequence is recurrent: “ABA” or “ABCBA” or “ABC (B) A,” with each new pattern set off (i.e., introduced and interrupted) by the random, brief hiatus of the “cut” .264

The purpose of this “cut” then, might be seen as one of deliberate disruption, somewhat like a gearshift that will turn the intensity up a notch on Brown’s command. This process of intensification might be explained in the following way: Brown’s group will channel the uncertainty (and consequently, the latent anxiety created by this uncertainty) of the precise placement of these “cuts” into a sheer raw energy. As Snead argues: “[t]he ensuing rupture does not cause dissolution of the rhythm; quite to the contrary, it strengthens it, given that it is already incorporated into the format of the rhythm”.265 This is why Snead is prompted to attribute this complementary role of repetition and “cut” as one that “…must be placed at the center

263 (Snead 1998: 71) 264 (Snead 1998: 71) 265 (Snead 1998: 71)

84 of the manifestations of repetition in black culture, at the junction of music and language”.266

Embracing such uncertainty, rather than espousing control of the trajectory or “goal” of the composition is perhaps the reason that Snead will contend that, “[a] culture based on the idea of the “cut” will always suffer in a society whose dominant idea is material progress”.267

Difference and Repetition

Snead’s essay provides further indication as to the need for a more encompassing understanding of repetition. For repetition is, of course, a complex concept, so much so that Deleuze would make it one of his central concerns of attention. Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, for example, is dedicated to counteracting such generalised preconceptions of repetition and attempts to restore its conceptual complexity. The main point to understand here is that repetition does not produce two identical examples, but rather, that each repetition of the object in question creates its own unique time and space assemblage with each subsequent iteration. As Deleuze might remind us, “[r]epetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but does change something in the mind that contemplates it”.268 Deleuze thus attempts to set straight the misunderstandings of repetition perceived within a synonymous relationship with similitude, and hence undervaluing what repetition might introduce to thought.

To my mind, the relationship between repetition and cut that Snead discusses as characteristic of black music indicates new ways of thinking through this relationship of difference and repetition. For instance, if we were to perceive the musical composition in terms of a totality that we move through, and perhaps strictly adhere to, such as an orchestra playing a score, then we are closing off a relationship to chance and the very differences that create life itself. Hence, at the heart of Deleuze’s philosophy is the desire, “…to make chance an object of affirmation”.269

266 (Snead 1998: 72) 267 (Snead 1998: 69) 268 (Deleuze 1994: 70) 269 (Deleuze 1994: 198)

85 Deleuze will attempt to achieve this affirmation of chance through his complex “syntheses of time” proposed in his Difference and Repetition. Whilst a full examination of the “syntheses of time” is too encompassing to extrapolate in great detail here, I will, however, broadly outline this section of Difference and Repetition, to contextualise the idea that the affirmation of chance provides the means for a future. We might begin by simply thinking about the future as always being the product of difference and Deleuze will thus take up Nietzsche’s “eternal return” as providing that synthesis of time that might affirm this notion. However, it must also be said that the futural form of eternal return can only be properly understood in reference to the previous syntheses of time that govern the product of present and past.

The first synthesis of time is the passive synthesis of habit, or the time with which we tend to be most readily concerned. For it is habit that is most fundamental to the constitution of the time of the present. Whilst we might perceive habit as the product of banal repetition, habit too involves difference as “…habit draws something new from repetition”.270 That is, even habitual behaviour will produce differences in the time/space assemblages that it is connected to.

Habit also brings further difference to the present because it must account for the past as a necessary part of its own constitution. For without a concept of past we would have no indication that the present has passed on.271 Although, whilst Deleuze will tell us that there is no actual memory involved in habit272 it induces a repression of conscious recognition of that which is repeated.273 Through this operation the co- existent past allows us to know that the present passes.

This in turn, requires what Deleuze refers to as the second synthesis of time, or memory, as an active synthesis of past. To return to the notion of the forking model of time as discussed in the first chapter, the present can be seen as constantly undergoing a bifurcation between a co-existent present and past. Within the present, we are either

270 (Deleuze 1994: 73) 271 (Deleuze 1994: 81). “No present would ever pass were it not past ‘at the same time’ as it is present; no past would ever be constituted unless it were first constituted ‘at the same time as it was present” (Deleuze 1994: 81). 272 (Deleuze 1994: 70) 273 (Deleuze 1994: 93-110)

86 maintaining the actuality of the living present, or producing an idea that resides in a virtual past. Whilst the facility to create the past may be accessed either voluntarily or involuntarily, it should be noted that it is always a production of a memory that did not exist in our present.274

These syntheses of habit and memory thus work together to reaffirm a preordained notion of identity, and it is in the everyday maintenance of this identity that we usually resolve our common sense notion of time. However, as thought is always a creative act, this notion of monumental time will always inspire a retraction into similitude (rather than difference) as a way of maintaining identity over time. This is why Deleuze is opposed to the maintenance of identity, precisely because it privileges similitude over difference.

Therefore, to think the future, rather than maintain the identity contained in the past, requires the futural form of time - the “eternal return”.275 Deleuze goes on to investigate this futural form of time through Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return of the same. The importance of this futural form of time for Deleuze is that the production of a future requires alleviating time from its subordinate role as the temporal continuum that resides throughout the maintenance of identity. Discussing this notion of eternal return, Deleuze will argue that truly philosophical thought must involve a time of the future, which will effectively open up time as a way of maintaining this test of its consistency.276

Deleuze’s idiosyncratic reading of Nietzsche’s eternal return thus provides the foundation for the future. I should perhaps also add, that Deleuze’s eternal return does appear to differ somewhat from a Nietzschean view of eternal return, for whom a life of eternal recurrence would provide a foundation for ethics. A particularly brief outline of the Nietzschean eternal return might be understood as follows: if we were to live each moment in perpetuity, then we would not only have to get our personal priorities in order, but, in doing so, we would orient ourselves to maintaining a world worth living in, in the process. A Deleuzean approach, on the other hand, gives the

274 (Deleuze 1994: 81) 275 (Deleuze 1994: 88-89) 276 (Deleuze 1994: 88)

87 concept a more ontological capacity. For Deleuze, what returns is not a repetition of identical time as the consequence of individual agency.277 Deleuze is more keen on emphasising the process of affirmation itself, which returns us to that notion that only through an affirmation of chance do we get the necessary production of difference to give us a time of the future in the first place.

In this respect I will argue that the repetition displayed in both the music of the gospel tradition, and by extension, James Brown’s work is a form of composition oriented toward an affirmation of the eternal return of difference. This requires a more open concept of time rather than subordinating time to merely the sum of musical content. More simply, the repetition of gospel will simultaneously affirm and produce time through improvisation rather than maintain a preconceived musical trajectory.

I should add here that the indeterminate nature of the improvised musical work beckons an uncertain becoming, described by Jeremy Gilbert as the product of the “rhizomatic moment” of improvisation.278 Gilbert has argued that the indeterminacy of the becoming-musical results in a break with the more deterministic impetus behind the composition.

Of course, even the improvising musician will fall back on preconceived refrains.279 Whilst I am, however, sympathetic to this idea of the “rhizomatic moment” of improvisation it is the uncertain mobilisation of the refrain, that is the more pertinent point of interest to this study. The musical composition is an important vehicle to show such productive difference in flight and is demonstrative of the proposition that the production of a future is untenable if we are restricted to the reiteration of identity. The eternal return needs the encounter with that which cannot be anticipated, which is the affirmation of difference rather than similitude.280 This is why I will argue that the gospel form is more predisposed to an affirmation of imminent change, rather than

277 (Deleuze 1994: 77) 278 (Gilbert 2004a: 118-137). In my own defence, and one perhaps incognisant rather antagonistic of Gilbert’s assertion, (Gilbert 2004a: 121) I, like many Deleuzean inspired scholars have discussed “composition” and “improvisation” synonymously. 279 As Deleuze and Guattari write in A Thousand Plateaus, that the musicians uses the refrain as a springboard and “…that a musician requires a first type of refrain, a territorial or assemblage refrain, in order to transform it from within, deterritorialized, producing a refrain of the second type as the final end of music: the cosmic refrain of the sound machine”(Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 349) 280 (Deleuze 1994: 90)

88 to an active synthesis of its past, and by extension this affirmation is more involved in the emphasis of an unfolding present.

As the affirmation of repetition is primary to the gospel aesthetic, this music would thus maintain an important compositional distinction to the traditional compositional values. As we learned via Snead, earlier in this chapter, the popularity of the gospel form was yet another assault upon the long held aesthetic biases set in place by the more hegemonic refrains of the ‘fine music’ tradition that had marginalised repetition. Repetition did, of course, exist in some form in European music as well; leitmotifs and refrains were always central to its fine music tradition of course, so perhaps it was really a matter of degree. It was just a matter of pushing the possibility of repetition further, which is precisely what Brown would do. Of course, adherents of the “logical” linear conception of time would be obviously horrified by any challenge to the dominance of its structure. Hence we find Brown locking horns with a resistant record company much concerned over the seeming lack of compositional logic exhibited in a track such as Please Please Please. 281

It is worth pointing out that Brown struggled to follow up the success of Please Please Please, otherwise unable to dent the charts for another two years.282 His career was literally saved by another gospel inspired hit wrested out of the ether, Try Me (1958).283 These two seminal gospel based recordings bookend an array of otherwise undistinguished nods to the popular styles of the day. As Cliff White writes, “By Brown’s own admission, Chonnie-On-Chon was a deliberate attempt to rock’n’roll in the style of Little Richard, and Begging, Begging an attempt to emulate the slower of Hank Ballad & the Midnighters’ two basic styles”.284 For the most part, the records of

281 Whilst unrelated to this point, it is amazing that Brown made any records for King, let alone emerge as its most successful artist. King boss Syd Nathan seemed to undermine the idiosyncratic vocal style that made Brown so successful. One can listen for example to the exchange between Nathan and Brown prior to the recording of “Love Don’t Love Nobody” (Brown 1989) where Nathan criticises Brown for “singing too hard” (Brown 1989). Brown recounts the words of King boss Syd Nathan, who said that Brown couldn’t sing ballads, "…all you can do is holler"(Brown and Tucker, 1986, 138). This process of continually proving Nathan wrong perhaps further inspired Brown. 282 (Weinger & White 1991: 19) 283 Despite the writers credit that Brown gave to himself on the record, Bobby Byrd says to Geoff Brown that, “‘The lyrics James had, he got from this boy down at The Palms in Hollandale, Florida…It was something like the way we got Please, Please, an adaptation from something else. This boy was singing the song around and he gave James the lyric. But it was originally more complicated” (Geoff Brown 1996: 70). 284 (Cliff White 1989)

89 Brown’s early period (1956-1963) were fairly orthodox affairs in terms of their composition, and the most gospel inflected tunes would be hard pressed to ensure the desired crossover success. In fact, the inertia of the civil rights movement gave the gospel sounds the right existential conditions so that they could re-emerge in their next guise as soul. For it was gospel’s musical galvanising of broader existential circumstances that would prove so instructive to the latter musical movement.

The Gospel Years

The gospel genre boomed from the 1940s to the 1960s 285 and this boom was perhaps due to the style’s spiritual aspirations that would reflect those of the civil rights struggle.

Seminal to the development of the gospel genre are the compositions of Professor Thomas Dorsey, who has been credited with popularising the gospel form in Chicago in the late 1920s-30s.286 As Gerri Hirshey will explain in Nowhere to Run, that while the commercial potential of recorded gospel was evident as far back as the late 1930s when the guitar slinging Sister Rosetta Tharpe had a hit with the Dorsey -composed, Rock Me,287 the hits were isolated. The uplifting gospel sounds would have some resonance in the Depression of the 1930s, and performers such as Marion Williams, Sallie Martin, and Willie Mae Ford Smith would develop significant followings, but the success was not sustained. That was until Mahalia Jackson who emerged at the height of the civil rights turmoil and would thus give gospel its real commercial breakthrough. This rather belated acceptance of the form came about through these more encompassing existential circumstances:

"We tried the gospel songs in the twenties," [Dorsey] said, "but the time was not ripe for it. In the Depression, the time was ripe. People wanted to turn to something. The time is right for what these young fellows are trying to do. It’s the age, the Atomic Age. People are scared. They want something to turn to. They’re ready for it".288

285 (Dorsey in Hirshey 1985: 27) 286 (LeRoi Jones 1967: 192) 287 (Hirshey 1985: 27) 288 (Dorsey in Hirshey 1985: 27)

90 Dorsey’s observation was prescient, given the fact that the folk boom was also just emerging at a similar time and perhaps indicative of a general retraction into “roots” music during this period of political upheaval. The uncertainty of this particular time in the late 1950s and early 1960s was conducive of a general rekindling of “roots” music even if the genres subsequently spawned were more actively producing new futures rather than merely replicating their respective pasts. Performers such as James Brown (gospel) or Bob Dylan (folk) would affirm these pasts for their creative difference, albeit without banally repeating them.

There is always a price to pay for difference, though, and both of these performers faced much criticism from the more orthodox practitioners of their respective musical styles, 289 perhaps because their detractors were perhaps too stuck in their respective dogmas to be more embracing of a future. It was precisely their ability to embrace difference over orthodoxy that made performers such as Brown, and Dylan, revolutionary musical artists. They were figures with sights set on a future, rather than a rekindling of the past.

In the more “progressive” world of jazz, it was future at the expense of the past. The progressive forms of jazz, from the post-war to the early sixties, a period that saw the rise of styles such as bebop, “cool jazz” and “hard bop” styles would place its aesthetic ideals at odds with its apparently “primitive” musical past. For instance as Atlantic Records head and jazz aficionado, Ahmet Ertegun recalls, “…in the forties, even as far back as the thirties, black jazz musicians would twist themselves in knots to avoid using blues changes in their work. Or if they did use them, they would try to disguise them by dropping camouflage half notes here and there. “‘They were,’ he says, ‘extremely cautious to avoid what might be considered retrogression.’”.290 Whilst jazz did become more embracing of roots, its sophistication had probably already alienated the mainstream, to become increasingly detached from the vanguard

289 In chapter six of this thesis, I recount in detail the way Brown’s musicians were contemptuous of both funk and his idiosyncratic musicianship. Bob Dylan has been criticised throughout his career, from being a “poor singer”, to being “booed’ from the stage for playing electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, to a 1966 World Tour of such booing for same. This is the beginning of a career that managed to annoy large sections of his fan base at will, through gestures such as the album Self Portrait (1970), the movie Renaldo and Clara (1978), or a conversion to Christianity (c.1979-1981) to name but a very few such examples. 290 (Hirshey 1985: 76)

91 of popular music. The exceptions were few, and only the bravest of performers, Miles Davis is perhaps the best known example, were willing to embrace a future that might require transforming their music beyond recognition.

That the battle over an essential jazz aesthetic was so hotly contested may have been due to its esteemed position as the epitome of black artistic invention,291 a status conferred upon it by some select musical commentators. As I will discuss in detail in the next chapter, this was a view that was shared by many of Brown’s most prominent band members, who were only playing the populist funk style for the money.292 Jazz’s modernist spirit has been discussedindetailinGuthrieRamsay’sRace Music: Black Cultures From Bebop to Hip-Hop (2003).293 Ramsey correlates the rise of modern jazz styles such as be-bop with the sense of accompanying Afro-modernism with its aesthetic orientation predicated on the spirit coursing through the social. The free improvisation of the be-boppers equates to the freedom “that will come”:

For African Americans, the thrust of Afro-modernism has always been, in my view, defined primarily within the socio-political arena: as the quest for liberation, freedom, and literacy as well as the seeking of upward mobility and enlarged possibilities within the American capitalist system. Literary critic Houston Baker has talked about the Afro-modernist project as "renaissancism" -a "productive set of tactics" and not simply the ‘success" and influence of black literary

291 This is the neo-classical/neo-conservative vision of jazz espoused by trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and noted writer Stanley Crouch both of whom contribute commentary to Ken Burns’ Jazz (2001). Crouch has been spokesman for Marsalis since the 1980s and also writes the liner notes for his CDs (The History Makers 2005). In the Black Atlantic, Gilroy writes of the battle between the “progressive” position Miles Davis and the more retroactive, neo-classicist position held by Marsalis (Gilroy 1993: 97) Davis made plain his hostility toward the New Orleans trumpeter for his embrace of a conservative and dogmatic ideal of the genre. This feud has been the subject of much commentary, such as that made by Professor Paul Gilroy in his book The Black Atlantic. Gilroy uses Marsalis’ anachronistic and essentialist position on the genre as a point of critique (Gilroy 1993: 97). 292 This is discussed in more detail in chapter six, for example, saxophonist Alfred “Pee Wee” Ellis had previously worked with Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins but left after a lucrative proposition to join Brown. 293 Outlining some of the general tenets of the modernist impulse, Ramsey says, ““I should stress here, however, that Afro-modernism has similarities to classic (or canonical) modernism, the other experimental developments in music, literature, and art that emerged in European and American metropolitan centers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries”. These artistic expressions articulated how the culture of modernity-the transformed character of economic, social, and cultural life associated with the rise of capitalism, industrialization, and urbanization-was experienced by many. A few of the discourses that emerged from the state of modernity include an antagonistic relationship between "high art" and mass culture, rejection of the norms and values of bourgeois culture, and, in some cases, an alignment with progressive cultural politics” (Ramsey 2003: 106)

92 and black "classical" music such as those from movements like the Harlem Renaissance.294

However, this “set of tactics” had appeared to run its course, in a pragmatic sense anyway. The modernist platitudes ascribed to jazz as the high point of African- American artistry are still entrenched in African-American commentary today,295although jazz as a genre has arguably long moved on.296 Indeed if such a broad generic distinction can be conceivably used to umbrella such a sustained musical becoming, jazz was still grappled over as an indicator of the livelihood of African-American artistry.

For instance, in The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy discusses the feud that erupted between Miles Davis and the neo-classicist style of Wynton Marsalis. 297 According to this anecdote, it would appear that Davis maintained a long-term feud with Marsalis because of the latter’s adherence to an image of jazz. Davis would, for instance, mock Marsalis’ adherence to the anachronistic jazz aesthetic something that the latter would emulate right down to its dress code.298 Meanwhile jazz traditionalists greeted Davis’ experimentation with an indignant reproach as if the music had represented some sort of backward step by succumbing to electricity.299Whilst one could understand Marsalis’ pride in this most influential African-American art form and his celebration of it, it also says something about the nature of art - Davis is an “artist” because he would never live in the past at the expense of the present. Paul Gilroy will also criticise Marsalis’ essentialism as indicative of, “[t]he fragmentation and subdivision

294 (Ramsey 2003: 106)

295 For a criticism of jazz revisionism see “Repertory Jazz, Fusion, Marsalis, and Crouch” (Bowden 2001). Bowden writes about Marsalis and Crouch’s neo-conservative view of jazz, their criticism of fusion, Miles Davis’ “electronic” period and Marsalis’ general belief “…that popular music has become increasingly infantile over the years, and that this was not always the case…” (Bowden 2001). 296 See Electric Miles: A Different Kind of Blue (2004). As James Mtume says in the Electric Miles documentary, what Miles Davis was playing in his “electric period” could not be conceivably viewed as what jazz once was, "The problem was...no one wanted to accept the fact that he was no longer playing jazz...so why are you asking jazz critics about this music that they don't have a palate for...Miles never called it anything...but it was no longer jazz...they keep wanting to call it jazz...but it wasn't"(Mtume in Electric Miles: A Different Kind of Blue) 297 (Gilroy 1993: 97) 298 (Gilroy 1993: 97) 299 This is discussed for instance in the documentary Electric Miles: A Different Kind of Blue (2004) (Lerner 2004).

93 of black music into an ever increasing proliferation of styles and genres which makes a nonsense of this polar opposition between progress and dilution”.300

Like a form of musical biodiversity, generic plurality kept African-American music at the forefront of popular music innovations. Where art is concerned, appealing to a historical model is an appeal to conceptual stasis. The problem of many artistic traditions is that history can be an anathema, and it is wondering how to deal with this history that makes one an artist: “Extremists on the subject turned so far away from blues roots that they seemed closer to European conservatories. This music, cool jazz, as opposed to hot jazz, sounded very abstract to a lot of people. Factions developed around the issue of avoiding or embracing the blues".301 As we shall discuss in the next chapter, a truly representative form of music does not exist, and it never can. All great artists merely change and this can be seen in the example where a “cool jazz” man such as Davis, would embrace Brown’s music, whilst Brown’s musicians aspired to his.302 Davis obviously had no qualms about dispensing with an identity founded on past glories. There was also the point that the politics of the civil rights era were encompassing of the entire African-American population, so the music that would suit the temper of the time most adequately was the one that would provide for a collectivity more efficiently.

“The Changing Same”

Amiri Baraka (then writing as LeRoi Jones) contends in his oft-cited essay “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music)” (1966) that the rise of gospel music could be seen as the urbanised, working class alternative to the more “middle-class” jazz forms.303 As Baraka will argue, the working class African-Americans had a stronger connection to Gospel as “…[it] was the more emotional blacker churches that the blues people were members of, rather than the usually whiter, more middle-class

300 (Gilroy 1993: 96) 301 (Hirshey 1985: 76) 302 In his book on Miles Davis’ electric years, Running the Voodoo Down: The Electric Music of Miles Davis (2005), author Philip Freeman discusses the influence of James Brown’s early 1970s line-up of the JB’s and the influence of their music on Miles” band. In particular the similarities in style between Brown’s bassist Bootsy Collins, and Davis” Michael Henderson(Freeman 2005: 123-124) 303 (LeRoi Jones 1967: 192)

94 churches the jazz people went to”.304 The relationship between the two styles would often cross the sacred/secular divide as “…the gospel singers have always had a more direct connection with the blues than the other religious singers”305. On this point, Baraka informs us that gospel innovator Thomas Dorsey was himself once a blues singer and piano player who went by the stage name of "Georgia Tom," and was famed for partnerships with blues legends such as Ma Rainey and Tampa Red.306 Dorsey was working both sides of the sacred/secular divide, as Hirshey notes:

In the twenties Dorsey made a decent living as sideman, writer, and performer. Before he penned gospel classics like "Precious Lord," he wrote double entendre blues titled "It’s Tight Like That." In the beginning of his gospel career, his bluesy leanings sometimes got him thrown out of some churches.307

Containing the musical integrity of church music was a contentious issue, perhaps because of its value as an arbiter of communal agency. Indeed the reason that generations of African-Americans have always had a close relationship to the church is perhaps due to its central role in catalysing minor peoples into a collective. Before the social goals of the civil rights movement, there was little hope for many marginalised African-Americans who depended upon the church and its traditions as a means of survival. The political importance of maintaining the integrity of the institution is perhaps why there was the strict sacred/secular music divide, which seems quaint in retrospect but was very real, as recently depicted in the biographical film on Ray Charles, Ray (2004) .308 However, it was perhaps because of, rather than in spite of, these very tensions which contributed to gospel's vitality and promoted it to newfound success:

[o]utraged by the growth of classical-oriented jazz and inspired by the success of artists like Mahalia Jackson and Ray Charles, the young New York musicians began in the late Fifties to reassess the Negro folk idiom-the cries, chants, shouts, work songs and pulsating rhythmic vitality of gospel singers and shouting choirs. Then, in one of the most astounding about-faces in jazz history, the fundamentalists (most of

304 (LeRoi Jones 1967: 192) 305 (LeRoi Jones 1967: 192) 306 (LeRoi Jones 1967: 192) 307 (Hirshey 1985: 27) 308 As Ray Charles comments in documentary, Piano Blues (2004) the observance of the separation of sacred and secular was perhaps not really that separate at all.

95 them are conservatory-trained liberals) abandoned Bartok, Schoenberg, and "all that jazz" and immersed themselves in the music of Thomas A. Dorsey, Roberta Martin (gospel artists) and Howlin” Wolf. Jazz, which had been rolling along on a fugue kick, turned from the academy and faced the store front church.309

It is not then difficult to understand how Brown’s funk would have a similar egalitarian appeal for an audience of which such “roots” music was representative of an important sense of historical consciousness in the civil-rights era. This is why Baraka would situate Brown at the head of the new collective congregation that was in the process of “becoming-black”310 in the midst of the civil rights struggle:

…from G.T. (Georgia Tom), and even before that - to J.B. (James Brown), have all come that way. The meeting of the practical God (i.e., of the existent American idiom) and the mystical (abstract) God is also the meeting of the tones, of the moods, of the knowledge, the different musics and the emergence of the new music, the really new music, the all-inclusive whole. The emergence also of the new people, the Black people conscious of all their strength, in a unified portrait of strength, beauty and contemplation.311

Whilst Baraka’s comments resonate with the essentialist rhetoric of the time, such comments are of course indicative of the “conscious” ethos that we associate with the rise of what will become known as soul. The soul era itself was beginning to emerge around the time of this 1961 interview with Dorsey who will remark that the return to the gospel tradition was due to something he called “the transitions of time”.312These transitions were obviously of an encompassing existential nature, and the gospel style would project an aspiration that would become transformed into the soul aesthetic.

309 (Bennett in Hirshey 1985: 76) 310 This concept of becoming-black, which is as provocative and perhaps problematic as becoming- womanwithwhichitappearsinA Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 291-293). Deleuze refers to this concept of “becoming-black” again in Cinema 2, in regard to Powers of the False: “…up to that highest power of the false which means that a black must himself become black, through hi s white roles, Whilst the white here finds a chance of becoming black too”(Deleuze 1989: 153) 311 (LeRoi Jones 1967: 192) 312 (Hirshey 1985: 27).

96 As I have demonstrated in this chapter, gospel is not merely a style of music, but rather a pretext for becoming. Soul might have shared some discernible attributes with gospel but when it came to the lived experience James Brown took it all the way, and left his peers behind.

In this chapter I attempted to articulate how the irrational nature of the repetition used in the gospel genre created an open-ended composition, one that was not so concerned with trying to engineer a compositional “whole” but would instead emphasise a more concerted concentration on the nuances of timbre produced through repetition. These elements of repetition and irrational cuts found in gospel would in turn resurface in Brown’s funk (and beyond). We can thus begin to trace Brown’s debt to gospel, where such repetition can become a catalysing force for a more collective approach to musical composition. Furthermore, the repetition inherent to the form becomes an affirmation of difference and the music of the church, I contend, is geared toward a form of “futural time”. For African-Americans, the gospel style had long provided a belief in the world when it was needed and the form would regain commercial popularity during a time of broader existential concern. James Brown would tap into this collective power of the church during the momentous events of the late 1950s civil rights era, and subsequently extend the form at this important time. Funk as a gospel inspired music will take up this important catalysing role for a population subjected to the any-space-whatever condition that was proposed in the previous chapter. The composition of this gospel style was suitably malleable to be directed into these new musical paths.

97 CHAPTER FOUR THE “I” BECOMES WE

As I established in the last chapter, the influence of gospel on the music of James Brown can be heard in his use of devices such as repetition and “cut”. Yet Brown is cited in Snead’s article precisely because of his most emphatic use of such gospel derived musical devices, which did not translate so readily to all manifestations of the soul music genre. Whilst Brown’s music, of course, was considered the epitome of this soul style, known as he was by such monikers as Soul Brother No. 1 and The Godfather of Soul, the reality of the situation, from a compositional point of view, is that his music would stylistically diverge from that of his peers. As I contend in this chapter, the seeds of a “time-image” oriented compositional aesthetic heard in the emphatic repetition of the gospel style is subsequently seized upon by Brown and channelled into his funk.

However before I can make this distinction between a compositional “movement- image” that might be discerned from “time-image”, it should be noted that whilst gospel was soul’s spiritual predecessor, in terms of its appeal to transcendence and telos – “we shall overcome” - it would not make full use of gospel’s more radical compositional approach to the working of time. I will discuss soul’s inherent movement-image orientation in detail in the next chapter. For present purposes, however, what should be noted is the difference between such compositional inheritances as opposed to more “spiritual ones”. For the compositional means by which soul would take its messages to the marketplace, were, more often than not, relatively orthodox.

The gospel aesthetic, however, might allude to a “transcendental form” of time, or as a reflection of the Stoic notion of Aion.ForAion is the form of time that Deleuze and Guattari associate with becoming, and a concept of time central to a time-image cinema.313 For Deleuze, Aion is not lived time but time in its transcendent form, that is, a concept of time upon which we have projected our own sense of chronology. It

313 (Bell 1994)

98 is this more transcendental form of time that I will argue later in the chapter exists in alterity to the more teleologically inclined soul aesthetic.

My attempts to determine the exact derivation of the generic attribution of soul were largely fruitless. Perhaps I should take comfort in the fact that Brown himself has said, “…don’t ask me when they started calling my music soul ‘cause I don’t remember. It was always that to me”.314 However, the elevation of soul into a commercial genre has been credited to Atlantic Records and their attempts to distinguish the secularised versions of gospel songs recorded by their artist, Ray Charles, from its more churchy competitors.315 Atlantic’s Ahmet Ertegun that was sufficiently drawn to this term “soul”, to name the 1957 album by Ray Charles and Milt Jackson, Soul Brothers.316 Ertegun admits that the term had of course, been commonly circulating among, “…black jazz musicians, mainly in New York, in the late fifties and early sixties. The soul movement in jazz arose as a sort of backlash against the snobbery some musicians felt had invaded and stultified the music and, in effect, made it less black”.317 Soul’s newfound commerciality was made possible because it indicated a more commercial iteration of the nominally, “primitive”, church music.318 Operating under the aegis of soul, Ray Charles would breach the traditional separation of sacred and secular musics, even though “[m]any, particularly older people, considered the merging of sacred and secular to be in bad taste”.319 Yet this egalitarian nature of soul music also made it an appropriate candidate for a wider embrace by audiences outside the African-American community and allowed it to become the musical expression of the civil rights era.

314 (Brown in Hirshey 1985: 60). 315 Over the years this has been claimed as an invention of Charles but also of Atlantic president Ahmet Ertegun. Milt Jackson/Ray Charles Soul brothers. As Michael Haralambos explains, ‘There is general agreement that soul music began in the mid-”50s when Ray Charles, who had formerly sung blues in a style similar to Charles Brown, began to record secular versions of gospel songs. In 1954 My Jesus Is All World to Me became Ray Charles’s I Got a Woman. The following year the `Reverend Mr Ray”, the `High Priest” or the `Righteous Mr Ray” as he has variously been termed, gave a similar treatment to Clara Ward’s old gospel song This Little Light of Mine. Retitling it This Little Girl of Mine, Ray changed a few words to sing the praises of his girlfriend instead of his marker. The traditionally strict separation of blues and religious music was ended’ (Haralambos 1974: 100-101). 316 (Hirshey 1985: 78) 317 (Hirshey 1985: 76) 318 Gospel, rightly or wrongly has been referred to as a form of “American Primitive” as compiled on the following CD, American Primitive, Vol. 1 - Raw Pre-War Gospel 1926 – 1936 (1997) (Various Artists 1997). 319 (Haralambos 1974: 100-101)

99 Soul and the civil rights struggle - The “I” Becomes We

The defining events of the civil rights struggle would take place roughly between the mid 1950s and the late 1960s. As Ben Sidran remarks in his Black Talk (1971), the civil rights era would have its symbolic beginning in the 1954 Brown vs Board of Education decision.320 This famous civil-rights case would produce Afro-America’s first official victory over segregation, and as Sidran contends, “[t]he boost this decision brought to black confidence is inestimable”.321 The decision would in turn inspire a “…new black assertiveness [that] emerged about 1955 with the rise of the ‘soul’ mystique”.322 Maintaining the ongoing success of this collective struggle for social justice would obviously affect the spirit of the time on an existential level.

The newly inspired sense of assertiveness that came from such victories would positively affect Afro-Americans’ image of themselves and the past. Driven by a will to identify, African-Americans would thus begin to more readily embrace their past musical history, including “roots” music, such as gospel, thus setting up the necessary environment from which soul could emerge.

“Soul” music, then, was one origin of a cultural self-improvement program and, in insisting the Negro had “roots” that were valuable rather than shameful, it was one of the most significant changes to have occurred within black psychology. “Soul” music was important not just as a musical idiom, but also as a black-defined, black-accepted means of actively involving the mass base of Negroes”.323

It comes as little surprise, then, that some of the most famous performers, which of course included Brown, but also Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding, would unashamedly assert their relationship to the church through their own

320 The Brown v. the Board of Education was the initial 1954 lawsuit challenging school segregation, brought in Topeka, Kansas. The inertia that began to build from the case set off a more encompassing struggle and the Brown Vs Board case began to encompass an umbrella lawsuit across a series of segregation cases as plaintiffs in other states began to emerge against the state legislature. The events are comprehensively discussed on The Tavis Smiley Show, May 19, 2004 (The Tavis Smiley Show 2004) 321 (Sidran 1995: 126) 322 (Sidran 1995: 125) 323 (Sidran 1995: 126)

100 particular expressions of the soul aesthetic. For example, Michael Haralambos quotes blues man B.B. King on the differences of soul to blues in terms of audience interaction: “In James [Brown]’s and Aretha [Franklin]’s case they are more like in church, a Holiness church, where everybody’s getting the beat, getting the feeling.”324 On this point, Haralambos, in turn, extrapolates that:

Soul-singers often demand the emotional involvement of their audience in much the same way as gospel singers. James Brown exhorts his audience to “feel good” and “get the feeling” and directs its mood with songs I Feel Good and I Got the Feeling. Like the lead singer in a gospel group he sings “Hey hey I feel alright” and invites the audience to voice its response.325

Soul music would thus use this more collectively quested appeal as part of its crossover-friendly expression of affective mobilisation during the civil rights era. Through its musical reiteration, soul inferred a destiny of natural corrective justice that would apparently be delivered through the will of God. Based on such events, the emotional spirit driving the civil-rights struggle would move Sam Cooke to write, A Change is Gonna Come (1964),326 although why God should act in the 1960s, when He had not intervened several hundred years previously is a moot point.

Such transcendental narratives would also suggest that maintenance of passivity in the face of one’s political goals was a virtue, that if not rewarded in this world, would apparently be rewarded in the next. Elevating such transcendental “goals” over a more immanent political strategy, would not necessarily garner universal favour. Indeed, Malcolm X would famously malign this position and chastised the Christian African- Americans for not believing in this world as it was.327 Malcolm chastised them for dedicating their time to the rousing refrains of “We Shall Overcome”, when they should “…stop singing and start swinging”.328 There was action, of course. The images of the civil rights demonstration of the early 1960s are well known, and perhaps forever epitomised by the resounding images of the 1963 “March on

324 (Haralambos 1974: 100) 325 (Haralambos 1974: 100) 326 That Cooke’s song so supremely reflected the general spirit of the times made it a likely candidate for Craig Werner’s book on the rise of the soul movement, A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America (2000). 327 (Malcolm X 1992) 328 (Malcolm X 1992)

101 Washington” where Martin Luther King would deliver his famous “I Have a Dream” speech to a multi-racial audience.

Soul music also wore its heart on its sleeve accordingly, and would be subsequently referred to by Billboard, as “music with a philosophy,” an up-tempo “black nationalism in pop”. 329 Neal comments on the emergence of the soul aesthetic that, “…[t]hough clearly not the first aesthetic that mirrored the segregated realities of black life, the soul aesthetic was the cultural component to the most visible black nationalist ideas of the twentieth century”.330 It was the first time that this particular section of the population was able to prominently articulate their collective goals and soul’s strident narratives would often veer into manifesto, exhibited in songs such as, A Change Is Gonna Come (1964), Respect (1967), Say it Loud! I'm Black and I'm Proud (1968) to name but a few more epochal musical moments. Soul’s emphasis on narrativising in its appeal for collectivity would distinguish its lyrical content from the more politically ambiguous themes of the previous rock’n’roll generation. Not for a moment would I deny the politics of the previous generation of rock’n’rollers, but rather, that their political agenda was (necessarily) more insidious.331 Hence we witness a general trend where the risqué undercurrent that marks the work of the 1950s wave of rock’n’rollers is instead replaced by the more righteous spirit of the soul period. Unlike the music of this previous wave of African-American popular music artists, soul was very much “grand” narrative-driven, in the sense that the songs deliberately attempted to invoke a universalising and anthemic quality to aide the struggle for change. Gerri Hirshey makes this observation in reference to an empirical study undertaken by Michael Haralambos in his Right On: From Blues to Soul in Black America:

The “back door man” of the blues had been replaced by the soul man, a lover possessed of both guilt and morality. The “I’ of the bluesman had become the “we” in soul music. And having borrowed so much from gospel, soul music was bullish on hope. Activism, while still suicidal in some quarters, had gotten a booster shot of faith with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “I Have a Dream”, from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 speech, became the official slogan of radio station WCHB in

329 (Hirshey 1985: 315) 330 (Neal 2002: 5) 331 An example that is evident for in my discussion of Little Richard’s Tutti Fruitti in chapter 5.

102 Detroit. Even WDIA in Memphis adjusted its pitch to “50,000 watts of Soul Power”.332

As a general rule, all musical forms will, by nature, indiscriminately synthesise previous genres and any qualification of particular musical streams that might make up the evolution of a particular genre is a complex business. However, in this particular instance, there is a decisive existential shift to be found in the shift in focus from individuality to collectivity as ascertained by the change in lyrical expression anyway. To return to the earlier observation made by B.B. King in relation to the differences between blues and soul, it is in this appeal for collectivity that a genre such as soul bears a closer relationship to gospel than it does to the blues, although the forms are never mutually exclusive.

Maintaining these general distinctions of temporal orientation between the genres is complex and fraught with problems. For example, the observation that soul emerged spiritually from gospel, might appear to contradict the previous comments made by Amiri Baraka, who stated that gospel was closely related to blues. This is the point however, where it is important to differentiate how each of the genres would orient themselves to time. In fact from a compositional point of view the circularity of the 12-bar form does betray an assertion of repetition. Yet in both genres there is a relative sense of compositional progression, in the sense that there is a certainty to their compositional logic that makes them less “irrational” than styles such as gospel and funk, which might launch into a “cut” at any particular moment. Thus the easiest way to make these distinctions between the genres respective compositional orientations to time is to gauge their adherence to a telos and a belief in causality.

There are of course, no decisive rules to this type of qualification, and in fact Brown himself would embrace all of the genres mentioned – gospel, blues and jazz and direct them into his version of soul. However, it is his predilection toward the more irrational composition of the gospel form that would constitute the most enduring, influence on his music. For Brown’s more collective approach to composition was driven by the gospel aesthetic and would, in turn, sow the seeds for many of the characteristics of funk. Soon many of the devices gleaned from the music of the

332 (Hirshey 1985: 315)

103 church were re-deployed into the emergent funk style, confirmed here by ex- bandleader and long-time Brown band stalwart, Fred Wesley:

I think James Brown was tremendously influenced by preachers. When I hear a preacher looking for a note...And when he finds that note, then he would work on that one note for a long time. And when he wanted to take it higher he’d say, “‘take it up a little higher. ““A little higher,”“ then ““Higher!”“ And ““Higher!”“ The next thing you know he goes ““Higher!”“ and it becomes a scream.333

In fact Brown was always quick to point out the church’s formidable influence on his formative musical education,334 an association that had some pragmatic benefits that extended beyond a spiritual education: “…in order to use their piano, I started cleaning out Trinity Baptist Church before services. There was gospel singing and hand-clapping, and the preacher would really get down. I’m sure a lot of my stage show came out of the church”.335

In fact, Brown’s act may well be perceived as a secularised dramatisation of the more charismatic forms of Christianity as he actively assimilated such gospel staples as testifying and call and response, all the while maintaining the authority of the “preacher”.336 Haralambos writes that Brown’s work, “…exemplifies many of the features of gospel music that have been incorporated into soul. In Shout And Shimmy he uses falsetto screams and melisma with wild exuberance and does a parody of testifying at the beginning and during the middle of the song”.337

These characteristic features of the gospel tradition would eventually be heard, by an increasingly broader audience, via the release of his breakthrough album, Live at the Apollo (1963). Brown wanted to release a live album for the very reason that it would

333 (Wesley in James Brown: Soul Survivor 2003) 334 “My music is like a parable…When you get happy, you don’t quite get enough. An’ you just keep doin’ it and doin’ it and - it’s the way people react when they get happy in church. Really I’ve always gone for that same kind of spiritual concept. Preachers did inspire me: Brother Joe May, Daddy Grace, Rev C L Franklin, Aretha’s daddy. And Little Richard, of course” (Brown in Cynthia Rose 1990: 126). 335 (Brown in James Brown: Soul Survivor 2003) 336 By way of example, during the autobiographical section of Brown’s anti-drug rap, Public Enemy No. 1 (1972), Brown says with complete sincerity that “…I know when I was a kid they say I was gonna be a preacher …” (Brown 1972b). 337 (Haralambos 1974: 101)

104 more accurately reflect the energy of his show,338 and perhaps also because it was only via vinyl that he could ever begin to connect with the white marketplace. The enormous success of Live At the Apollo may well have been due to its role of intercessor between the cultures black and white, not only because the album emerged during a time of actual physical segregation, but also because it gave young white kids another great reason to continue overcoming it. In fact, the white audience bought the album in such quantities that it provided Brown with an unprecedented sales record for an R&B album.339 It continues to be one of the most celebrated albums in all of popular music, and as testament to its status, was recently given its own dedicated volume, Douglas Wolk’s, James Brown's Live At The Apollo (2004).340

In fact Brown has credited gospel for no less than the “the one” itself, as Brown asserts in this interview in Uncut (2004): “Gospel always had The One,” Brown says, “but it became more dominant once I clarified it”.341 The one becomes Brown’s enunciation of a more entrenched cultural approach, and one that took in influences from Africa to gospel.

Brown and Africa

In fact as much has been staked on “the one” as a diasporic expression of an African aesthetic, I should like to clarify this relationship. Brown’s work is often subject to a lazy reductionism that attempts to give the music a nominal ethnic identification which only tends to subsume commentary on the imminent conditions which would have such an effect on the funk style: “By turning rhythmic structure on its head, emphasizing the downbeat-the “one” in a four beat bar-the Godfather kick-started a

338 (Brown & Tucker 1986: 130-131). It should also be noted that Brown’s record company absolutely hated the idea, and that Brown paid the then substantial sum of $5700 to record it himself (Brown & Tucker 1986: 131). 339 (Geoff Brown 1996: 98-99). Furthermore Peter Doggett writes in a Record Collector article on the album, “King couldn’t envisage the record breaking out of the limited market for R&B albums, initially pressing just 5,000 copies. But within a month of its spring 1963 release ‘Live at the Apollo’ had crossed into the Pop charts, where it eventually rose to No. 2. For many thousands of white kids who could only dream of venturing uptown to Harlem, James Brown’s album was a worthy substitute for the real thing. In fact, only the Beach Boys “Surfin’ U.S.A.” outsold it among teen oriented albums that year”(Doggett 1997: 77) 340 For a detailed account of the impact of this album, not only on Brown’s career but on popular music in general, see Douglas Wolk’s James Brown's Live at the Apollo part of the series of the 33 1/3 series of mini-books dedicated to some of popular music’s most celebrated albums (Wolk 2004). 341 (Brown in Hoskyns & Brown 2004: 68)

105 new pop trend and made a rhythmic connection with Africa at the same time”.342 Creating this sort of automatic response between Brown and Africa denies the real complexity of identity, musical and otherwise.

Whilst I would concede to funk working within a lineage of African origin, Brown’s music is most certainly more closely connected to the hybrid Black Atlantic musical forms such as gospel. In fact, Brown has always adamantly denied any African lineage for his music, such as in this passage that appears in his 1986 autobiography:

It’s a funny thing about me and African music. I didn’t even know it existed. When I got the consciousness of Africa and decided to see what my roots were, I thought I’d find out where my thing came from. My roots may be embedded in me and I don’t know it, but when I went to Africa I didn’t recognize anything that I had gotten from there.343

Given his impoverished childhood and lack of education, one would not expect Brown to be conscious of African musical forms and Brown had formulated funk long before he even visited that continent.

Yet Brown’s reluctance to identify with Africa has become a staple of commentary, in particular attributable to a fear of ethnicity. For instance, Robert Farris Thompson discusses here this apparent dichotomy in Brown’s loyalties as one based in Brown’s fears of a compromise of his personal Southern Christianity”:344

"I know Brown thinks his Africanness could be a problem," adds Thompson. "He feels that, to admit it, he might have to give up his religion. But in the 1990s, misapprehensions like that will disappear. People are going to realize that to be a Baptist or an African Methodist Episcopalian in black America is automatically at the same time to have been practising, coded and creolized, the classical religions of the Kongo… James Brown…is already there, he was already blended. There is nothing here for him to lose. The Bakongo themselves welcomed the Catholic fathers and took on the cross of Jesus - because they saw similar, equal potency. So that is the cry of the future: the cry of the blues and the cry of James Brown and the cry of the whole Afro-

342 (Vincent 1996: 8) 343 (Brown and Tucker: 221) 344 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 126)

106 Atlantic world! To stop seeing each other as problems and realize these are equal potencies".345

Whilst it may be prudent to generally concur with such a statement, that does not mean accepting Brown’s retraction into some notional identity either, but rather, as discussed in chapter 2, that Brown is a product of “routes” rather the “roots”. 346

However, despite Brown’s reluctance to assimilate any African musical influence, ("I went over there and I heard their thing, and I felt their thing. But I honestly hadn’t heard their thing in mine"),347 it should be noted that Brown was actually keen to embrace a distant African history. Brown’s 1968 visit to the African continent was one of the first by a major African-American star.348 Of course the door to any kind of past was that of the church, the closest place that a minor people could locate cultural roots and this is why it perhaps continues to act as such a potent cultural intercessor. The power of the church music was one of territoriality and collectivity that Brown would capitalise upon for his own musical purposes. The use of the irrational cuts that would instigate the rapturous gospel style might have proven so attractive to Brown’s funk template, because of the way that it capitalised on a form of nonchronological time, that time of Aion, which I will describe in the next section as the time of becoming.

Perspectives on Time - Aion/Chronos

When Deleuze sets out to define the shift from the “stories” of the movement-image to the “becoming” of the time-image, he is intimating the shift from the chronological time to Aion or, the time of becoming. This becoming requires an openness to difference, a perspective that might differentiate it from the determination that

345 (Thompson in Cynthia Rose 1990: 128-129) 346 Although I must say that I found it interesting to read in Fred Wesley’s recent book on his time as bandleader with Brown, that Brown apparently attempted to lift some African beats. Wesley mentions that during a 1974 trip to Cameroon, Brown, “…mentioned that he had gotten some record by some African artists and that we should copy them for our own personal use” (Wesley, 2002: 176). If Brown were so actively operating out of African musical practice, as his compositional approach has been described, would it not appear strange for Brown to study and plagiarise the rhythms of a music that he is already so apparently familiar with? 347 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 126) 348 Details on James Brown’s first African visit to Abidjan, Ivory Coast on 29th March 1968, paid for by the country’s government see (Geoff Brown 1996: 155)

107 governs the common sense notions of time and space. As Jonathan Rajchman comments here, the form of time that Deleuze will refer to as Aion,allowsus,“[t]o affirm ourselves –to construct and express ourselves – as multiple, complicated beings brought together before any transcendent model or plan, in other words, we require a time not of Chronos but of Aion”.349 The eternal return thus offers this affirmation of the transcendental time of Aion, rather than a measured time of Chronos.

To understand the transcendental form of time more fully, we need to formally introduce Deleuze’s analysis of the concepts of time. The notions of Chronos and Aion are derived from the Stoics.350 Whilst Deleuze will canvass these conceptions of time in TheLogicofSense(1968/1990), they would receive further consideration in subsequent works such as A Thousand Plateaus. It is in that book that Deleuze and Guattari refer to Aion as the intangible time of becoming351as, “…the indefinite time of the pure event or becoming, which articulates relative speeds or slowness independently of the chronological or chronometric values that time assumes in other modes”.352Deleuze himself will subsequently refer to Aion as a “non-pulsed” form of time and to be distinguished from the “pulsed” form of Chronos, where the latter is perhaps best described as encompassing our common sense notion of time.353 We are more inclined to understand time as marked out by the periodicity of Chronos that gives chronological time its territorialising capacity. As such, Chronos can be understood as, “…the time of measure that situates persons and things, develops a form, and determines a subject”354. The differences between these forms of time say Deleuze and Guattari, are not just the difference “…between the ephemeral and the durable, nor even between the regular and the irregular, but between two modes of individuation, two modes of temporality”.355 In contradistinction to a concept of chronos/chronological time, Deleuze will observe Aion as the time of becoming, and

349 (Rajchman 2000: 111) 350 In TheLogicofSense(1990) the text where Deleuze explicates the Stoic concept in some detail the spelling is Aion see (Deleuze 1990) , whereas in A Thousand Plateaus (1988) it is referred to Aeon and also spelt this way (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 262). Deleuze scholars such as Ronald Bogue have continued with the “Aion” spelling see for example, (Bogue 2003), and for this reason I will also refer to it accordingly. 351 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 263) 352 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 263) 353 Deleuze will also say of Chronos that chronological time should not be judged on its regularity of pulse or meter but rather its periodicity (Deleuze 1977/1998). 354 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 262) 355 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 262)

108 that which does not belong to history.356 This latter time is more interesting to my investigation of the forms driving gospel and funk in particular, because of the way the gospel form will exploit a transcendence of time through hypnotic repetition. We could say that the gospel form relies on repetition as a means to introduce an alternative notion of time.

For gospel composition, improvisational in nature, indeterminately unfolds as it occurs. The nature of this collective approach is at the heart of a gospel aesthetic and its heart might well be found in the summoning the time of Aion. This is the form of time proposed by Deleuze and Guattari as the time of becoming. 357 As Deleuze and Guattari have elaborated in A Thousand Plateaus, Aion is, “…the indefinite time of the event, the floating line that knows only speeds and continually divides that which transpires into an already-there that is at the same time not-yet-here, a simultaneous too-late and too-early, a something that is both going to happen and has just happened”.358 In general one might say that apprehending this transcendental form of time is one of the prime attractions of a temporal medium such as music. It is in assuming a relationship to Aion that we might perhaps conceive of musical practice as a process of becoming, where the artist beckons the audience to break out of the strictures of a chronological and measured time of the everyday.

It is Aion as the type of transcendental concept of time that Deleuze will refer to when he speaks of the time-image.359 This is because the time of Aion cannot be reduced to the measurable in time and space, unlike the constructed form of Chronos that drives the movement-image. The correlation might be further clarified if we understand that such time-images are detached from a “logical” order of an action-reaction schema and the linear form of time it implies. The time-image is thus characterised by its very lack of determination within the whole and it is this very uncertainty of its identity that makes it a creative force for thought. We should perhaps think of making tangible the transcendental time of Aion as the more emphatic temporal impetus behind forms of improvised music. Musical improvisation by nature is devoid of instruction, such

356 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 96) 357 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 262) 358 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 262) 359 Using Deleuze’s example of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) as “the first great film of a cinema of time” (Deleuze 1989: 99), Jeffrey A. Bell discusses this in his essay how Citizen Kane thus exemplifies what Deleuze means by the term “Aion” (Bell 1994).

109 as the reading of musical notation and the adherence to an action-reaction schema it requires. Thinking of a time outside of Chronos requires continual orientation (or perhaps reorientation) in the face of a form of time that cannot be tangibly grasped. Finally, through the notion of the apprehension of a minor temporality we might better understand the process of musical expression as an attempt to render Aion into a tangible form, whilst the form of time will of course be subsequently rendered as Chronos, or chronological time.

This is why I am more interested in the process of capturing other forms of time in composition. As such we might think of this concept as an engine for the production of time where “becoming” can be understood as the expression of the difference of the present rather than maintaining the identity of the past. This comment follows from Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion in What is Philosophy? that becoming should not be perceived as belonging to history,360 although this statement should not be mistakenly understood as a complete disregard for history, as Deleuze and Guattari maintain that history has its part to play in becoming and, “[w]ithout history, becoming would remain indeterminate and unconditioned, but becoming is not historical”.361 That is, to fully embrace becoming means moving away from a predilection to emphasise a chronological situation of history as, “[t]he new arises from “an ambience or milieu rather than an origin, of a becoming rather than a history, of a geography rather than a historiography, of a grace rather than a nature”.362 In this respect, we can begin to understand why the gospel tradition would act as a catalyst for the African-American diaspora as it could perhaps musically reconcile the sheer diversity of pasts and collectively provide a sense of future becoming.

This broader agenda of becoming is played out in the music’s compositional form. For instance a repetitive musical aesthetic relies on emphasising the affirmation of a present rather than making sense of placing the passing moment into perspective and presenting a teleological form that relies on history to make sense of its totality. This affirmation of potential difference through each repetition (even if it doesn’t

360 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 96) 361 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 96). 362 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 96)

110 immediately transpire) nonetheless produces the effect of an ensuing excitement, which derives from our frenzied attempts to apprehend the uncertainty that might occur. It is in this sense that I perceive that the repetition of the gospel form favours this relation toward the futural form of time. The rupturing effect of ‘the cut” can perhaps be understood as an affirmation of potential difference that deliberately throws any plateau of similitude back into the chaosmos of uncertainty. In fact it is this perpetual reiteration of an uncertain temporal disjunction, which drives the excitement of a repetitive music such as Brown’s.

To apply these concepts to our previous discussion of Please Please Please, for instance, we might say that the use of repetition that Brown elicits from the song might act upon its audience as a kind of time machine which enables its audience to transcend the record’s two and a half minutes of chronological duration. Whilst all music has this capacity for temporal disorientation, the effect is more evident through the repetitive aesthetic as it undermines a more determined form of time. The music’s emphasis on the affirmation of the difference of the present, milks the tension of an uncertain trajectory as the listener is suspended in a state of uncertainty as they are met with a further repetition of the musical refrain. The constant reiteration of this musical figure both gauges as well as guides the energy level of the audience by forcing them to anticipate in the production of difference that might occur at any given moment, which is precisely how the concept of the “bridge” operates in Brown’s music. The disjunctive key change of the bridge is always threatening the comfort of habit creating the sense of anticipation.

The Irrational Cut

Again we might find similarities between the use of the “cut” found in James Brown’s music and the concept of the “irrational cut” that Deleuze cites as characteristic of the time-image cinema. The importance of the “irrational cut” is that it embraces the power of indeterminacy, whereby, “…the interval suspends the spectator in a state of uncertainty. Every interval becomes what probability physics calls a "bifurcation point" where it is impossible to know or predict in advance which direction change

111 will take. The chronological time of the movement-image fragments into an image of uncertain becoming”.363

These jarring cuts throw any preconceived teleological “goal”, narrative or otherwise, into disarray, and instead confront the audience with the uncertainty of time itself. In this sense the use of the irrational “cut” is tantamount to plunging its audience into the chaosmos, rather than being dragged along by narrative convention and clichés. As such the audience are forced to rethink preconceived relations of action and reaction. The irrational cut takes the compositional emphasis away from the expectations of a linear evolution of action-reaction to one of involution, where time will fold in on itself. This emphasis on the direct experience of difference rather than narrative or compositional convention both confounds and liberates the audience at once. This more direct experience of difference is provided in the gospel style in the following manner: the audience can dispense with an intensive relationship with melodic progression or the “accumulation and growth” of the composition and instead allow themselves to be suspended in time. In this respect we might say that the gospel form successfully dispenses with a fetishising of the author and instead implores a direct relation with a “God” as the arbiter of duration in general.

We might propose that more generally, the gospel form looks toward a more transcendental form of time. This outlook further underscores the tenacity of the gospel tradition as the means of constructing tangible space/time assemblages within an any-space-whatever existence. The gospel form is more concerned with the transgression of chronological time. This would make sense given that the any-space- whatever conditions determine the time of the minority. For this reason, there is perhaps increasing investment on behalf of the Black Atlantic diaspora to use the environment of the church to maintain a means of escape from the hegemonic time and space and to substitute for any such emancipation in the actual world.

The gospel aesthetic provides an enduring example of how, when the actual present is too intolerable, a minor population might turn to art to conjure the more virtual existential territory. This type of collective approach to existential territorialising, for

363 (Rodowick 1997: 15)

112 instance, might be demonstrated through the ensemble renditions of the slave songs of the cotton fields. The collective instigation of the musical composition provides temporal and spatial transgression from the madness of the apparent logic that imposes upon their existence.

The ensemble approach to the gospel form of song would at least allow one to transcend singular being and instead become a singing “body without organs”,364demonstrative of the Deleuze-Guattarian concept. This concept is initially proposed in their Anti-Oedipus, and in its most simple sense might be understood as “…the body without an image”, 365 or the body that precedes its social production through its organs. Through song, through rapture, the subject comes closer to being part of a collective, and the forgetting of embodied experience and becomes otherwise subsumed within a more collective “body”.

In his essay, “Becoming-Music: The Rhizomatic Moment of Improvisation”, Jeremy Gilbert argues that the becoming at the heart of “recent dance musics and improvised musics” might be perceived as such a collective “body without organs”. He writes,

In these moments when the affective morphology of sound takes shapes not easily comprehensible in terms such as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, ‘order’ or ‘chaos’, a becoming-music is enacted which draws a line of flight away from the physical-ideological constraints of the gendered body or fixed musical genres: a body without organs; a smooth, cosmic space.366

I might add to this idea that at the heart of a musically inspired becoming is a forgetting. Given the images that we may perhaps associate with the more charismatic strains of the gospel tradition, what comes to mind are scenes of audience members in rapturous exaltation, seemingly overcome by the spirit, or even perhaps, out of themselves.

364 (Deleuze & Guattari 1983b: 8) 365 (Deleuze & Guattari 1983b: 8) 366 (Gilbert 2004a: 126)

113 We might also put this phenomenon down to a type of paralysis induced through repetition, where affection can no longer depend on the certainty of logical action or agency. The music thus exploits the interplay of repetition and cut to provide the hypnotic, trance-like state. The audience is given over to concentrating on the joy of the affirmation of the moment rather than concerning themselves with projection.

A futural form of time is not one of projection, but rather, comprised of a future as a product of the affirmation of difference. This concentration on the affirmation of the present begins to dominate the predilection for such teleological projection. In its place then is an emphasis on the intensity of experience that comes from such repetition. Through a use of distinct periodicities of incantation the preacher can inspire these waves of hysteria teetering on his dynamic directives (or “cuts”).

The Splitting of Time

Such concentration on the affirmation of the present means placing one’s self in some kind of relation to the incommensurable splitting of time that occurs at each moment. Sometimes we are overcome by the direct experience of present and other times, immersed in recollection of the past. Each of these relations to actual (present) or virtual (past) segments of time are contained in the moment. As Deleuze says, “there is always a more vast present which absorbs the past and the future. Thus, the relativity of past and future with respect to the present entails a relativity of presents themselves, in relation to each other”.367 The institutional regulation of time is developed around a stabilising of these possible bifurcations, in particular our propensity to delve into the refrains of pure recollection, which may detract from a full embrace of a direct experience of present, for instance, maintaining focus on tasks at hand in the workplace. Whilst the church traditions of the African-American as well as that of the European church may both initially involve a form of habit- memory in order to kick off the proceedings, once that is done, the white church sticks to a path, whilst the black one goes off on an unpredictable course.

367 (Deleuze 1990: 162)

114 We could say that minor cultures are perhaps more inclined to seek other alternate temporal possibilities to a tightly regulated or institutionally sanctioned majoritarian temporality, if only for the reason that that this is the time which imposes itself upon their existence. Hence, in some respect the invocation of repetition provides an inadvertent resistance to the majoritarian imposition of the teleological - the maintenance of identity through memorial time and the various syntheses that assist it.368 As such the “apprehension of a minor temporality” is an attempt at a durational form of expression that serves to express such moments of becoming. Rather than subordinate time as a product of the linear narratives of lived experience, it would instead enable a potential form of apprehension - a bridge between past and present which provokes an active synthesis of memory rather than the passive synthesis of habit. In terms of the latter we could perhaps think of the highly regulated musical protocols of the European church, which attempt to contain becoming, rather than inspire it. The role of any institution is to regulate the complex series of rhythms that make up the temporality of our psychic lives.

The gospel form would propose a way to emphasise an alternative conception of time available to composition. This is why I would compare its form to that of the cinema of the time-image as it produces an image of thought that is non-totalizable and emphasises a sheer unpredictability alluded to by the irrational cut. Just as I have demonstrated within musical context, the autonomous interval of the time-image cinema infers that there is no place for thought to maintain identity’s dependence on a coherent system of signs. For instance, Deleuze will contend that the movement- image depends on securing the relation between image and thought that will produce identity and by extension, totality. In contradistinction, the time-image guarantees only the disjunctive and discontinuous, brought about through such irrational divisions and incommensurable relations. This is why we must propose that the time- image is forever combining relations to past and future, subverting both the more tenacious forms of memorial time and habit in a far more complex way than a more linearly structured music.

368 This is what Deleuze will refer to in Difference and Repetition as “memorial-imaginative reproduction” (Deleuze 1994: 138). As Deleuze writes in this passage, “The identity of the unspecified concept constitutes the form of the Same with regard to recognition. The determination of the concept implies the comparison between possible predicates and their opposites in a regressive and progressive double series, traversed on the one side by resemblance and on the other by an imagination the aim of which is to rediscover or re-create (memorial-imaginative reproduction)” (Deleuze 1994: 138-139).

115 It is for the reasons stated above that I believe that Brown’s music might be seen to apprehend a minor temporality and an alternate form of time. In terms of orientation I think it is also differentiated from other contemporary African-American musics, including jazz. Whilst jazz is a largely improvised music, the difference is that jazz tends to make use of signposting refrainstofallbackonratherthantoovertly modulate a singular refrain. I am not trying to deliberately draw up some dichotomy with jazz here, but rather that the forms of music are defined though their own particular approaches to time, which affects how the body of both performer and audience are realised in time and space. The gospel tradition instead plays on the nuances of singular refrains, and without determined musical signposts it becomes more difficult to find one’s direction in the overall trajectory. Hence this form privileges collectivity rather than the singular virtuosity of the soloist of the jazz tradition. This circular method promoted through gospel would prevail, not only in funk, but also in any music that wanted to shift the focus to time rather than movement.

Minimalism

It was through African-American popular music that some of the characteristics of black music were absorbed into twentieth century music styles. In fact one might look at the rise of “minimalism” in the 1960s through exponents such as LaMonte Young, Terry Riley, Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Despite a reticence to declare this on record, the minimalist style had obviously been affected by African-American music of the time.369 Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain composed in January 1965, made this

369 Whilst the Minimalists, a movement that includes composers La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass were “all…to some degree influenced by [John] Cage” (Morgan 1991: 423) and the “understatement rather than exaggeration” of the “oriental influences” behind Cage’s work(Morgan 1991: 422), I do think that given the time that these composers were operating in, from the late 1950s onward, which coincided with the broader attention to given African-American musical styles by the mainstream in general. It would be hard to believe that these composers were not affected. Whilst Reich, for instance, would later discuss the influence of Ghanaian music on his work, which undoubtedly it was, I find it a little strange that little is said about the music that they grew up with. For example, two of Reich’s earliest and most well known works, It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966) both make use of recordings made of African-American subjects, and repeat them. The debt to the gospel form is quite overt when the speech of a Pentecostal preacher repeated for It’s Gonna Rain or using the speech of an African-American again for Come Out. In this piece Reich uses the speech of a young man injured in the Harlem Riots of 1964 whose line “to let the bruise blood come out to show them”.

116 influence plain by making the central focus of the piece the voice of a black Pentecostal preacher recorded on the streets of San Francisco.370 The piece singled out a contraction of a broader sermon until the words “it’s gonna rain” were looped over and over in what would appear to an exaggerated monument to the repetition of the black church tradition.

John Law (1997) discusses minimalism as the form symptomatic of heterogeneity, 371 and his remarks are also just as applicable to the music of the church, or Brown’s for that matter. This heterogeneity is inspired by the fact that there is no teleological goal, “[f]or in the music of minimalism there is no terminus, no end point”, he says. Law will go on to draw parallels between this music and with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a plateau which, “…is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end”: 372

So it is with the music of minimalism. There are no great Mozartian vistas. No overviews. No resolutions. Minimalism is always in the middle. There is, except in the most straightforward sense, no beginning and no end. Instead there is tension and incompleteness…this is a music, yes, of surfaces. Of displacements. Of minimal and endless transformations. Of discomfort. Of continual movements to find some kind of stable place. That never find a stable place. Of continuing incompleteness. Of continuing. Of incompleteness. Yes, I repeat, of tensions.373

The emergence of minimalism at this particular point in time would of course be inspired by the political tensions of the time and reflected through this stylistic initiative. Given the increasing prominence of black music making inroads in white homes, I do not believe it a coincidence that the minimalist style would emerge alongside Brown’s funk. In fact in the book Experimental Pop, the authors Billy Bergman and Richard Horn write that the “endless, hypnotic funk repetitions” in Brown’s music, “…come as close as you can get to African and minimalist music”.374 However in terms of pragmatics, and contrary to the function of funk, minimalism would not necessarily ignite the same overt effect of a belief in the body. Whilst these

370 Reich discusses this in the liner notes of Early Works (1987) (Reich 1987). 371 (Law: 1997) 372 (Deleuze and Guattari quoted in Law: 1997) 373 (Law: 1997) 374 (Bergman & Horn 1985: 15)

117 two musics would not normally be directly compared, given the effect of tension and anticipation central to both musics, there are many similarities to be noted. Continuing within that tradition set out long before in gospel, the emergence of minimalism would continue to emphasise an attention to time over movement. From this point we begin to see the very first series of transitions into musics that could conceivably be labelled as time-image in nature. These diagrams of compositional practice drawn from gospel, funk and minimalism will lead into the compositional approaches that would emerge into contemporary electronic dance musics.

Yet it should be noted that the type of thought behind such discernibly time-image musics is given a more emphatic secular existence through the influence of black popular musics. This becoming music of the future would thus express the shift from the extensive spatiality characteristic of the movement-image to the intensive spatiality of the time-image.375 This notion of intensive space takes one beyond thinking of time in terms of spatial perception and allows one to maintain an immanence against the transcendent form of time that phenomenology necessarily invokes. The shift from the chronological pulsed Chronos to that of apprehending the time of Aion and becomings is precisely an invocation of an “intensive spatiality” that minor communities had partaken of as a means to counteract the extensive space that was enforced upon them.

This is of course not to deny Western music’s own relations to Aion, a relationship that is always at the heart of musical composition, but rather to foreground its relative emphasis. The imposition of the teleological as the default “image of thought” was slowly divested in Western music of the twentieth century from Debussy onwards. There was of course a time when European churches had their monks chanting and maintaining a form of repetition, but Enlightenment philosophy became laden with issues of progression that would take up philosophical precedence and as a result the music too would follow suit. Thankfully then, the Afro-American tradition would bring a reconciliation of these apparent binaries, most prominently through musical expression.

375 (Rajchman 2000: 130-131)

118 For instance by the time the myriad influences diverge into forms such as Disco, it is still clear that the legacy of the Black Atlantic and gospel connection emerges, an influence apparent in what is popularly attributed as the first disco record, a 1973 Norman Whitfield production, Girl You Need A Change Of Mind,featuring Temptations vocalist Eddie Kendricks.376 Whitfield attributes its inspiration to the church, `People always ask me about the breakdown. Well, my background is the church. It’s not unusual in a church song to have a breakdown like that”.377 Indeed the artists would reinvigorate a process that was a staple of church celebration, as Kendricks attests, “I stood in the studio with the musicians, giving instructions as we were cutting for them to break it down to nothing, then gradually come in one by one and rebuild the fervour of the song”. 378 The work of Brown and his peers would obviously bridge these forms of composition, sacred and secular that would crystallise into electronic dance music forms. As Cynthia Rose observes:

It is experience - constantly revealed, re-lived, and re-interpreted in terms of the fresh, contemporary moment. As James Brown’s adaptations of gospel music, his own brand of preaching, and the moral admonitions of his music demonstrate, these are not static but dynamic belief and performance traditions. Improvisation and innovation are expected. In I Got The Word In Me And I Can Sing It, You Know,his book on the performed art of the African-American sermon, Gerald L Davis makes the point that "however African-American performance and creativity might be observed, the organizing principle of circularity,ratherthanlinearity,isevident...itholdsacentral,core importance in African-American performance." Whether one calls this "roots" or ‘the groove", such an "organizing principle" is easily seen onstage in the acts of Brown, Clinton, Prince or a jazz ensemble. Across the diaspora, listeners may apprehend its heartbeat in recurring musical phrases or in slices of common slang which turn up again and again…Even the young rappers and hip-hop breakdancers of the “80s, whose work is founded on the Jamesian beat, sense this history behind their art - not to mention Brown’s central role as a conduit of that history.379

The gospel tradition thus informs an approach to the rendering of time through musical expression that extends across generational and generic experience. In all of this, the relation of preacher is in some respects similar to that of the conductor who

376 (Brewster & Broughton 1999: 167) 377 (Brewster & Broughton 1999: 167) 378 (Brewster & Broughton 1999: 167) 379 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 121-122)

119 presided over the musical proceedings. The major difference though, is that an orchestra has a score and thus we are denied of the same palpable sense of uncertainty. The preacher/Brown in this sense is one who is empowered with the invocation of mediating the chaos. Within the context of the gospel tradition this was formerly the role of the preacher, and in electronic dance music tradition it is the role of the DJ who speaks via the records. For this reason the records must have some kind of historical territorialising function.

Yet the more interesting point that we shall discuss in later chapters is that the DJ does not necessarily hold them to a particular time in history. To construct a milieu, figures of authority, such as Brown are brought into the music as a means of valorising its message and affirming the spirit of its composition. This is perhaps how Brown was elevated into this superlative position within these any-space-whatever practices. Brown is invoked through the DJ, like the spirit invoked through the preacher. Brown’s voice punctuates and cuts through the music as a means to strengthen repetition. So when the DJs came to use his voice it became a crystal that could catalyse disparate social and technological machines. Hence his squeals and grunts would become ubiquitous, where a grunt or a well-timed “Good God!” would be conveniently inserted into the sampled work as a deliberate reiteration of an affective intensity. The continuing popularity of the James Brown scream as a sample is perhaps because of its intensity of sensation and as such goes beyond a mere significational capacity. Instead we can understand it to be the solicitation of a space of recollection, of the hard times and horrors that cannot be articulated.

Traditional musicology is thus not well disposed to adequately accounting for these types of machinic musical relations. As this mode of analysis is more likely to recount what music might “mean”, the musicological approach tends to subsume musical forms into narrative. We only need refer to David Brackett’s discussion of Brown’s 1971 single Superbad to see such a superfluous form of musicological analysis in action. As a track such as Superbad is primarily concerned with dancing, it would make more sense to posit the music’s relationship with affect, which is a more relevant way of discussing how such music works, rather than having to resort to what it may “mean”. Dance music, whether funk or the electronic dance musics to come are about this pursuit of affect. To make meaning primary is missing the point. Indeed,

120 the call for a more suitable theoretical framework for the discussion of popular music and dance music in particular had previously been intimated in Generation Ecstasy (1999) by author Simon Reynolds:

Rave music represents a fundamental break with rock, or at least the dominant English Lit and socialist realist paradigms of rock criticism, which focuses on songs and storytelling. Where rock relates an experience (autobiographical or imaginary), rave constructs an experience. Bypassing interpretation, the listener is hurled into a vortex of heightened sensations, abstract emotions, and artificial energies.380

Reynolds’ criticism indicates the need for a general reconsideration of representation as the basis of discussing the experience promoted in practices from gospel to rave. By emphasising the relationship to existential time as the focus, it also makes us aware of the redundancy of meaning within such a compositional regime.381 Instead we should be focussing on how to enable the body to think anew through the affective relations produced as apprehensions of a minor temporality.

As Deleuze and Guattari have famously expounded in A Thousand Plateaus, affects are becomings, 382 and of specific interest here is the role of art as a catalyst for this becoming. If a temporal art form such as music apprehends a minor temporality then the form of time it is concerned with is Aion, as the time of becoming. The Deleuzean conception of art is always about introducing a becoming-world rather than attempting to represent the actual world. Just as Chronos is a representation of time, Aion is the full potential of time, and the artist is more concerned with such potential. This is the potential of a new experience of the world rather than a reiteration of an already existing concept. This is why Deleuze and Guattari will contend that the most successful forms of art will return their respective audiences to the site of affect. Furthermore, it is the pursuit of such affect that might explain the ongoing pursuit of the Brownian refrain in many forms of electronic music, for the musical composition becomes a catalysing agent that gives expression to its imminent social environment. This is also indeed why the artist is so proactive in the process of creating connections to difference through the production of percepts and affects.

380 (Reynolds 1999: 009-010) 381 This might be the attempt to giving “meaning” as Brackett attempted to do with James Brown’s Superbad as discussed back in chapter 1 382 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 256)

121 Accordingly, Deleuze’s Cinema books are not as concerned with meaning as with relations. For instance in Cinema 1, Deleuze famously targets the structuralist, psychoanalytic reading of film championed by Christian Metz. Deleuze acknowledges that whilst the cinema initially took on the human perspective as a purveyor of “meaning” via a system of action, or that which was referred to in the first volume as ‘the movement-image”, the medium eventually drops its filter of signification and “becomes” a revelation of time itself. The regimes of movement-image and time- image do always co-exist, however they can be seen to predominate at certain stages, those that reflect a particular social and collective psyche or what we will later describe as the “spiritual automaton”. What needs to be understood at this juncture is that the mobilisation of these relations is due to the a-signifying and a-syntaxic material that Deleuze ascribes to affect.383

Affect

Affect, then is perhaps the most fundamental of all concepts in the Deleuze- Guattarian philosophy. In their final collective work, What is Philosophy? (1994) Deleuze and Guattari declare that art is concerned with the creation of percepts and affects, which together, constitute “…a bloc of sensations”. 384As they argue here, these affects and percepts should be differentiated from the nominal understanding of perception or affection because they are “...independent of a state of those who undergo them”385 and affects are not simply affections or feelings but rather “…go beyond the strength of those who undergo them”.386 As Deleuze and Guattari write: "The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself".387

Indeed, the Deleuze-Guattarian conception of affect is more representative of a relation of forces that mobilises bodies and is neither merely psychological nor emotional, but all at once and besides. Indeed as Massumi offers in the translator’s

383 (Deleuze 1989: 29) 384 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 164) 385 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 164) 386 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 164) 387 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 164)

122 preface to A Thousand Plateaus, we should understand the Deleuze-Guattarian sense of affect in the following way:

Affect/Affection. Neither word denotes a personal feeling…L’affect (Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution of that body’s capacity to act.388

Whilst Deleuze’s position emerges from the philosophical concept of Spinoza centuries prior, it has also been ratified to some extent by the scientific world, in the work of contemporaries such as Francisco Varela. As with these recent scientific developments, becoming requires us to depose the notion of a human-centred universe, and instead pursue the idea of the human as merely a contraction of the world itself and harbouring its affects in turn.

Unfortunately the problem with theories of affect arises when we have to reconcile such forces within a specific representational understanding and this is where affect becomes a term used more or less synonymously and erroneously with “emotion”. Brian Massumi takes up this problem in his essay “The Autonomy of Affect” (1996), which provides an important introductory text on the issue, where he recounts this conflation: “[a]ffect is most often used loosely as a synonym for emotion. But one of the clearest lessons of this first story is that emotion and affect - if affect is intensity - follow different logics and pertain to different orders”.389 What we understand as emotion is actually what we have perceived to have felt or are feeling after the point of initial impact of the affective force. In this respect Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of percepts and affects are intended to counteract these more static interpretations. Massumi also remarks, “[t]he problem is that there is no cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect. Our entire vocabulary has derived from theories of signification that are still wedded to structure even across irreconcilable differences... In the absence of an asignifying philosophy of affect, it is all too easy for received psychological categories to slip back in, undoing the considerable deconstructive work that has been effectively carried out by poststructuralism”.390 Indeed when one

388 (Massumi in Deleuze & Guattari 1988: xvi) 389 (Massumi, 1996: 221) 390 (Massumi 1996: 221)

123 has wrested the percepts and affects from human perceptions and affections, all is becoming and thus the “…aim of art is to wrest the percept from perceptions of objects and the states of a perceiving subject”.391

There are of course competing theories of affect, all with their own specific disciplinary histories. Whilst affect’s initial derivations come from the field of psychology it has also taken on specific postmodern interpretations, such as Frederic Jameson’s famous pronouncement in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) that contemporary postmodern culture is generally characterised by a “waning of affect”.392 Jameson argues that we have bought into the capitalist machine at the expense of the intensity of our emotional experience. This apparent lack of emotion is the major casualty in contemporary culture where the marketplace will exploit it indefinitely. We therefore engage our surroundings on a merely cursory basis but without the depth of feeling about the world around us that we “once did”. Of course to make such a claim one has to make certain ontological assumptions, such as essentialising a point in time for the emergence of this apparent emotional decline.

Deleuze will of course, have none of this, and this is perhaps why his cinema studies work in contradistinction to the postmodern. Jeffrey A. Bell comments in his essay, “Phenomenology, Poststructuralism, and the Cinema of Time” that the Cinema books are “Deleuze’s postmodernism”.393 Bearing little similarity to postmodernism beyond the nominal break, Bell puts forward that the Cinema books are, “…simply a different response to the problem of difference, and not a rejection or denial of traditional philosophy”.394 This is perhaps said tongue in cheek because whilst some of the surface attributes in a historical sense are similar, the results are very different. If anything, the Cinema books stress an increased relation of affect rather than its waning. Affect in the Deleuzean sense is relations between bodies which can perhaps be more readily understood like kinetic energy, they are always there and I prefer this idea which is why I think Deleuze’s methodology is preferable to a postmodern one.

391 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 167) 392 (Jameson 1991: 10) 393 (Bell 1994) 394 (Bell 1994)

124 In common with many poststructuralist and postmodernist philosophers, Deleuze cites the aftermath of World War II as the point of a distinct change in thought. Deleuze’s position differs from the postmodern position in the sense that his nominal break doesn’t lead to a decline in the loss of the real, but instead will propose a renewed relation to the affective. For Deleuze affect is always immanent. Indeed as affects mobilize the universe, they cannot simply wane; rather it is just a matter of modulation and relativity. The evolution of any art form can be perceived as such a series of affective machinic relations, and in this respect a history of contemporary dance music quite clearly presents to us a history of such affects as the mediation between bodies. Hence we should be concerned with what the medium tells us about the context in which we are living or the mode of enunciation of that medium. This should be understood as the expression of affective relations rather than significative ones, which is where the utility of music comes into its own, as an affective mediator. In fact one could propose that all music is a use of the refrain to draw together such affective relations.

This is precisely what happens when James Brown takes up the intensity of affect of the gospel experience in his work. The repetitious, non-totalising experience of the gospel tradition makes a mockery of trying to understand music in terms of signification. If one were to maintain this pursuit then Brown would be a particularly perplexing example as his lyrics were often improvised exhortations dedicated to “feel” rather than the recitation of narrative. This is also what is so engrossing about a James Brown scream, whether live or sampled as it conjures up an abstract machine of affect in general. Brown’s vocal inflections, call to mind a concept Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the “principle of asignifying rupture” where the rhizome may be “…shattered at a given spot, but will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines”395 just as Brown wantonly cuts through the circularity of the musical form, punctuating rather than adhering to compositional movement.

Such affective devices can work quite adequately without being reduced into signification and it would be silly to take that route to analyse this music. The affectively inspired theoretical approach foregoes the perpetual debate over the

395 ( Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 9)

125 “meaning” of a musical composition, as it can only produce difference. As Gilbert rightly says, “[m]usic’s sonic-corporeal effectivity is not universal and transhistorical, a fact registered by the simple observation that what is musical for some cultural groups is merely “noise” for others”.396 Indeed what music is, is not the concern but rather the fact that its boundaries are never fixed and they are always fluid. As we will discuss in more detail in Chapter 5, the limits of discursivity are only too visible which is why we need to introduce asignifying qualities to understand the ‘transversal” relations rather than universalising forms of common sense or logic.

To merely discuss music in terms of representation or meaning ultimately limits the scope of its productivity. To judge the qualities of art as a reflection of technical aptitude is also not enough. Often the most “affecting” artists are not the most technically able. The point is that any discussion of music, or art in general in terms of anything but how it produces connections is never adequate. As Guattari will point out, “…affect is not a question of representation and discursivity, but of existence”.397 Which is why in the following quote Guattari contends that any effort to translate the affective into the discursive is ultimately an exercise in futility:

They start to exist in you, in spite of you. And not only as crude, undifferentiated affects, but as hyper-complex compositions: that’s Debussy, that’s Jazz, that’s Van Gogh.” The paradox which aesthetic experience constantly returns us to is that these affects, as a mode of existential apprehension, are given all at once, regardless, or besides the fact that indicative traits and descriptive refrains are necessary for catalysing their existence in fields of representation.398

Indeed we could also understand this example in terms of music’s resistance to its reduction into discursivity. Indeed music’s relationship with affect may be the most pronounced of all art forms mainly because of its non- linguistic status. In his essay, “Signifying Nothing: ‘Culture’, ‘Discourse’ And The Sociality Of Affect” (2004) Jeremy Gilbert argues for an affective based theory of music rather than one based around meaning. 399 Gilbert, who had previously co-authored a particularly astute commentary on contemporary dance music culture, Discographies, (with Ewan

396 (Gilbert 2004b) 397 (Guattari 1995: 93) 398 (Guattari 1995: 93) 399 (Gilbert 2004b)

126 Pearson) argues for a more progressive theory of musical reception, one that might diverge from the more significationally dependent musicological analysis:

Music has physical effects which can be identified, described and discussed but which are not the same thing as it having meanings, and any attempt to understand how music works in culture must, as many commentators over the years have acknowledged, be able to say something about those effects without trying to collapse them into meanings.400

As discussed in the previous chapter, art for Deleuze and Guattari is always the expression of that uncommunicable encounter with the “intolerable”. Dispelling the emphasis on signification and representation to emphasise the becoming of a particular image is another important lesson of the Cinema books and is why Deleuze famously targets Christian Metz’s structuralist reading of cinema: that there is no purpose to reduce such work to a universal “meaning” even if it is one that it has not previously assumed. This is why Gilbert argues that:

The problem we have is that music is by definition an organised form of experience, one whose effectivity is strictly delimited by sedimented cultural practices, but it is one whose structured effects cannot be fully understood in terms of meanings; precisely, they cannot be understood according to the structural logic of language. It is to this point that I think this set of reflections leads us – to the observation that, at least as far as music is concerned, a notion of “culture” which sees in it only ‘signifying practices” is quite simply not up to the job. Music is obviously cultural, but its “culturality” is not limited to its capacity to signify.401

Which leads Reynolds to beg the interesting question in regard to a phenomenon such as the rave culture, “…is it possible to base a culture around sensations rather than truths, fascination rather than meaning?”402 Reynolds' attraction to Deleuze and Guattari403 would perhaps have its basis in the philosophers' abilities to look at specific artistic phenomena, such as electronic dance music and to explain it in terms of a machinic rather than a significative value.

400 (Gilbert 2004b) 401 (Gilbert 2004b) 402 (Reynolds 1999: 010) 403 See Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture (Reynolds 1998). Reynolds discusses the influence of Deleuze and Guattari on his work in this online interview with Wilson Neate (Neate & Reynolds 2006).

127 Deleuze and Guattari are of the view that art should never be fixed down to notions of intent, for it can only seek an audience, or seek a people. The power of affect can never be simply reduced to signification, particularly not any structural model of language. In fact, one of the main tasks of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy is to show that the use of language to structure both our conscious and unconscious life means being limited to such signification, and foregoing the more encompassing notions of affect that are really behind desire. The vain search for apparent “meaning” continues to obstruct a rather more progressive discussion of what we might refer to as art’s affective pragmatics. The imperative of art is to communicate the intensity of feeling that one might say exists only in the gaps that language creates. The becoming of musical expression is to express those parts of existence that language cannot adequately describe. This is why I have argued for the Deleuze-Guattarian idea that the work of art is designed to plunge its audience into the chaosmos of becoming, rather than merely reiterate what could otherwise be simply expressed in language. In short, language is inadequate to the task of translating the full power of affect. This is also perhaps why the world needed a musical style such as funk to more comprehensively express the more encompassing existential concerns behind the civil rights movement.

128 CHAPTER FIVE SOUL AS MOVEMENT-IMAGE

In the previous chapter I attempted to pursue the relation of soul to generic precursors such as gospel. These styles shared some obvious characteristics, in particular their appeal to a notion of time that we might understand as Aion.ItwasBrown’sembrace of the more radical elements of gospel that differentiated him from the broader soul genre embraced by his peers. This is where Brown’s music was important in giving some of the more esoteric practices of soul a popular music outlet and also how Brown’s music would begin to diverge from soul in what might be considered in terms of an existential consideration. That is, he developed the repetition of gospel as a means to a new time rather than the more orthodox, teleological outlook of soul music.

The main objective of this chapter, then, is to show how Brown’s music may have developed the opportunities for such a belief in the world. The emergence of funk, as we shall discuss in this chapter, provided Brown’s musical alterity, which enabled him to transcend some of the constraints of soul. This is how Brown could maintain his popularity when so many of the other soul artists ‘went down with the ship’. This alterity would become a great collection of literal forces into the future. Through his music, Brown was attempting to apprehend the broader existential forces open to the full potential of time in musical form, rather than retract into the more narrative based form found in most soul music of the time. The difference between Brown and the feeling of the broader soul movement can be rather simply summed up as the living difference between A Change is Gonna Come and Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag. Both of these archetypal soul songs were released within a year of each other, in 1965, at the very apex of the soul movement.

Hence my analysis of soul music in this chapter is quite unlike previous accounts of this period, in that I am less concerned with genealogy and more concerned with the philosophical orientation that drives such notions of a “movement”. Whilst enjoying a window of opportunity lasting roughly a decade, the soul movement would ultimately suffer from a problem that besets most “movements”, the philosophical dependence

129 on a belief in a kind of teleological time that is disconnected from the present. For no matter how well intentioned the goals of the soul aesthetic and the accompanying civil rights movement, they were directed to addressing change that might occur at some unspecified time in the future. However, rather than placing one’s faith in time as a revelatory process, a minor people must not define their future through a majoritarian interpretation of time and space, but instead show how such majoritarian determinations do not hold up. This is why Deleuze developed the notion of a time- image, which is the aesthetic manifestation of a cinema that no longer adheres to the “truth” of the common senses form of time and space.

All of this may, of course, sound rather familiar to the postmodernist. Indeed, if we have learned anything from postmodernism, we have learned about the death of such “grand narratives”.404 The Deleuzean shift from movement-image to time-image shares something of the death of grand narratives with postmodern theory. However, unlike postmodernism, a time-image cinema is not predicated on the same type of loss, such as that which might be associated with a Jamesonian “waning of affect”. In fact, if anything, it is distinguished by its restoration of the very power of the body. Furthermore, instead of maligning the perceived lack of connection with the real, Deleuze embraces what he refers to as the “powers of the false” - the encounter with the virtual alterity inherent in any moment in time (and thus co-existent with any apparent truth of the present).

However, before we can address this concept, we have to assert that the concept of truth is not something that we have “lost”. The point is that we never had it in the first place. It is the time-image that helps us to realise this. Reclamation of the “truth” does not necessarily make life any easier for a body, but if anything, more restrictive. This is partly a question of creativity. If we are delivered an answer to life’s mysteries, then what need is there for investigation? Of course, without such investigation, we are left bereft of the creative processes to emerge from such an endeavour. To put this another way, without ‘truth”, it is the endeavour itself that we are concerned with, rather than the production of an answer. Hence, the very lack of truth extends the

404 In seminal postmodern manifesto, The Postmodern Condition (1979), Jean-François Lyotard argues that the “grand narratives” are stories that a culture produces to make sense of its practices and beliefs. For instance, an ideology has its own “grand narrative” where the narrative reflects a teleology and maintains these belief systems (Lyotard 1984).

130 possibilities of what a body can do.

Here, however, we need to reconsider what a body is, or is not. The Deleuzean notion of the body is different from how we might normally perceive a body. The Deleuzean notion of “a body” should not be interpreted as the human form, somehow cut off from the world, but is the world, in that it is immersed in it. In this sense the body is intrinsically connected to the myriad machines and desires that produce and flow through it. The body is a kind of open, dynamic machine. To think of the body as machine is to think connection. The full potential of connection, however, can only be achieved after casting off the limits of apriorinotions of time and space. An intolerable situation can shock thought into irrational connection, however traumatic this might be, because emerging from such an affective event can set in motion the body’s rebirth as well. For the body that is thrown into this chaosmos must emerge “somehow” and it is this process itself that forces one into new methods of responding to the world. It is on the point of such irrational connection that Brown’s contribution is perhaps the most exemplary.

In the decline of the soul aesthetic, Brown fulfils a similar creative function. Despite the fact that Brown is synonymous with soul music, I would argue for Brown’s autonomy from soul’s narratives. For Brown’s work is often genre defying, and without precedent.405 For this reason, I believe that his work stands outside the overriding image of thought of soul and instead works toward a new “minor” music in a very different sense. Through such idiosyncratic methods, Brown would produce a new belief in the world which is not so much a belief in the “…existence of the world but in its possibilities of movement and intensities, so as once again to give birth to new modes of existence, closer to animals and rocks. It may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task…”406

Any innovation, by nature, requires a belief in the world, because it requires a faith in

405 Evidence of some of these unprecedented moments can be found via some of Brown’s more extraordinarily strange tracks, including I’m Tired but I’m Clean found on the 1964 album, Pure Dynamite: Live at the Royal (Brown 1964a) Hip Bag 67, found on the 1967 album, Live at the Garden (Brown 1967) and the 1969 single, Ain’t It Funky Now (Brown 1969a). The latter which has Brown playing organ and talking to himself whilst guitarist Jimmy Nolan playing this incredibly fast, but intricate strum on a single chord for nine minutes. 406 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 74-75)

131 direct experience with a world that cannot simply appeal to a model. The artist’s wilful submission of themselves into this chaos will have them emerge with percepts and affects produced in the attempt to apprehend the chaos of life.

When compared, the two titles indicate no less than two disparate and totally opposed existential outlooks. In introducing his “new bag”, Brown’s declaration of an immediacy of immanent forces was emphatic and he was not about to place his faith in a mere chance of change up ahead. This does not mean that the future played no role in Brown’s music. Brown’s compulsion to do something “now” would virtualise a future in which funk would feature prominently. This is different to the narrativised future of soul in that an ever present now took precedence over projection. The groove’s ever present now, is an affirmation of the joy of the moment rather than one of future projection. This will be of obvious importance later on as the aesthetics of indeterminacy will be keenly embraced by the DJs and electronic dance music practitioners, who will also recreate the chaosmotic groove through a repetition of a “break beat”. An affirmation of the most suitable space of all possible worlds amid the misery of an intolerable social circumstance.

The importance of Brown’s funk is in setting up the necessary affordances of this future musical movement that would emerge before soul’s brief window of opportunity was irrevocably shut. Brown’s music would enable the means of becoming-other even after disillusionment of the decline of soul’s own image of thought. I will contend that its marshalling of forces is why Brown’s music continued to maintain a vitality for the more underground producers who would subject Brown to extensive sampling over and above most of his soul contemporaries in the wake of its decline.

Soul as Movement-image

Buoyed by the optimism of the challenge of civil rights, the soul aesthetic maintained a general faith in the proposition that a “change was gonna come”. Soul music continued to feed into the overwhelming sense of optimism that accompanied the music right up until at least the mid-1960s. In this respect, the philosophical position of the movement was one driven by a teleological notion of Truth propelling a sense

132 of social justice that would emerge in a linear, common sense, and unified time. Soul, then, has many of the characteristics Deleuze ascribes the movement-image in cinema. Both follow a mode of thought that “intuitively” organises what is presumed to be the “organic” logic of time, which derives the temporal from an accumulation of actions (movements). This time is what Deleuze would refer to as “organic” because it reiterates a “common sense” notion of meaningful, teleological, linear flow. It is a time further aligned, through actions (movements) to the natural orientation of the sensory-motor-schema, which in turn is made, by the whole schema, to comply with “common sense”. As D.N. Rodowick explains:

[t]he indirect image of time restricts itself to the sensorimotor schema. Movements are represented as actions prolonging themselves in space as reactions, thus generating chains of narrative cause and effect in the form of linear succession. Ultimately, the sensorimotor schema implies a world apprehensible in an image of Truth as totality and identity. The movements of thought are exhausted in the dialectical image of an ever-expanding spiral and in the belief of a world mastered by action.407

Time is only made visible secondarily, in the primary accumulation of movements with the sensory-motor-schema. It is this more conventional notion of time that, for Deleuze, drove early cinema up to the post-war period. It is also this conventional understanding of time that underpinned the existential perspective of the soul movement: a perspective that narrativised time and artificially connected it to a unified and actionable will-to-truth. In this sense the soul movement was entirely modernist in that it was driven by an idea of the world geared to a teleologically driven set of convictions. This is perhaps why Mark Anthony Neal ascribes to the soul aesthetic, “…the most vivid and popular expression of an African-American modernity”.408 It must be said that I am not criticising the belief in movement that drove the soul aesthetic, nor denigrating the amount of thought, work and suffering that went into these appeals for a new type of existence. The problem, however, was how to deliver the dream to those who either could not, or did not, adhere to it.

407 (Rodowick 1997: 84-85) 408 (Neal 2002: 3)

133 Hence the real power of political change, which tends to elude macro-politics, might be more readily achieved through the micropolitics of desire and what a body could do. These are glimpses that might be found in “… the frenzy of Aretha Franklin’s voice or the syncopated choreography present in any James Brown performance”. 409 My argument is that it is more productive to concentrate on the bodily reactions breaking out of historical events. The affects that these produce effect as real a transformation of the social as teleological narrative unity, if not, more so. In fact, even in the short term such glimpses were dramatic, even at the time, they demonstrated the vast virtual potential of a body. Yet whilst I contend that these gestures were indicative of a new visibility of new forces, this visibility had its price. The power of body given such new found social freedoms meant that it was often working against the narratives that mobilised it in the first place. This is why we shall see that in the aftermath of soul’s faith in the universal notions of movement that the emphasis will shift instead to the ethical power of individual bodily movement. That perhaps the ultimate lesson of music is that there is nothing to believe in but the ethics behind specific interactions with other bodies.

It is this shock to thought that I am dealing with in this chapter. I shall now discuss some of the specific examples of the potential of what a body could do, in its shock to thought. These can be seen in the overt displays of showmanship of James Brown in the 1960s. Given the fact that his stagecraft of that time is considered extraordinary even today, one wonders just what the audiences of the time might have made of it. A singular moment, such as James Brown’s performance at the T.A.M.I. Show,might have provided a glimpse of a future that was perhaps just too complex to be given any real consideration by broader society at the time.

The T.A.M.I. Show

Taped in front of a live, and more importantly for the time, a multi-racial audience, the T.A.M.I. Show broadcast,410 which took place in 1964, alternated between both

409 (Neal 2002: 4) 410 The acronym T.A.M.I. has alternately been used in reference to the titles Teenage Awards Music International and Teen Age Music International. In fact the TAMI broadcast has perhaps taken on more historical significance as time has gone by. The TAMI Show has been re-released a number of time on a number of different mediums. On VHS video and now DVD it is titled (Various Artists 1965).

134 black and white popular music’s biggest stars. This now-legendary concert event would, for instance, feature Brown’s performance, alongside acts as diverse as the Beach Boys, Ray Charles, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Chuck Berry, The Supremes and The Rolling Stones. The T.A.M.I. Show broadcast has also been retrospectively attributed the distinction of initiating one of the white world’s first encounters with Brown’s radical stage show, a point made by Peter Guralnick in his book, Sweet Soul Music:

The first that we actually saw of James Brown was in the movie, the T.A.M.I. Show, with a string of pop stars (the Beach Boys, Petula Clark, Chuck Berry, and the Miracles among them) and a performance by James that was nothing less than revelatory. He screamed, he stood stock-still, he exploded with lightning precision, he skated on one leg- and he completely stole the show from the Rolling Stones, whom my friends and I were initially almost as interested in seeing.411

Retrospective accounts given by members of both the Rolling Stones and Brown’s band have recounted that Brown’s extraordinary performance at T.A.M.I. had a more vindictive agenda, angered as he was by the fact that he was relegated from top- billing by a then comparatively unknown Rolling Stones. Brown wanted to put the fear into these English kids and teach them a lesson in stagecraft. Brown was rumoured to “make the Rolling Stones wish they’d never come to America”412 and to make sure of this, he would add an even more ferocious intensity to what was already an unprecedented spectacle. 413 Brown and his bands had been arduously making the rounds of the “chitlin’ circuit”414 for a decade, and they were operating at another level entirely. Thus Brown’s bitterness over the white musicians’ attempts at recolonising African-American musical territory was entirely justifiable. The result

411 (Guralnick 1986: 252-253) 412 (Wyman 1990: 271). However, after this initial confrontation, Brown would go on to subsequently embrace and encourage the young British group (Wyman 1990: 272). However Bobby Byrd would later comment that the Famous Flames were just as scared of the effect of the Rolling Stones as the Stones were of them. In fact Byrd says to Geoff Brown that they didn’t want to be put up against the Stones, but rather placed between the Motown acts that they already knew they could beat (Geoff Brown 1996: 114). 413 Brown and Famous Flames performed four songs OutofSight, Please Please Please, Prisoner of Love and Night Train. Night Train in particular, is one of the most noteworthy visuals in the history of visuals. It has been said that Elvis Presley used to watch it nightly, and in Gerri Hirshey’s interview with Michael Jackson, that appears in Nowhere to Run he also sings its praises(Hirshey 1985: xii) 414 “Chitlin’” is the Afro-American slang for “chitterlings/chitlings” which was the intestines of pigs prepared as food and popular among this section of the community. By extension, the “chitlin circuit” was a touring circuit of segregated clubs and cafes of black patronage that many African-American musicians would tour.

135 was extraordinary. As Marc Eliot has commented, the show helped to usher in Brown’s crossover to the white mainstream through a performance, “…in which he changed forever the face and course of popular music, and the teen culture that looked to it for its anthemic identity”.415 Many of the white teens watching became instant converts. Accounts of the performance are given pride of place by the white authors of texts on soul, such as Gerri Hirshey,416 Peter Guralnick,417 Marc Eliot418 and others as a decisive and life-changing moment that would inspire their own personal journeys into soul music fanaticism.

Brown’s performance at the T.A.M.I. Show raised the bar for popular music’s level of intensity. In particular, it made new demands of performance in popular music. The effect was almost immediate. Having to directly follow Brown at the T.A.M.I. Show, Mick Jagger would step up his level of animation quite discernibly in response to the challenge.419 To put Brown’s performance in context, one has to merely compare its intensity with the quaint respectability of the other acts on the bill. Whilst Smokey Robinson and the Miracles may have also included some extravagant choreography, they were not screaming and crying and running across the stage on one leg.

Brown’s audaciously uncompromising performance was even more radical given the fact that the whole concept of desegregated shows and audiences was only made legal a few months previously with the 1964 Civil Rights Act.420 In retrospect, package- shows such as T.A.M.I. were pioneering social experiments. These shows would be

415 (Eliot 2005: 29) 416 (Hirshey 1985: xii) 417 (Guralnick 1971: 28-30). Here Guralnick is paying tribute to the role of The Rolling Stones on his musical education, including their inadvertent introduction of James Brown to the author via the T.A.M.I. Show, which the Stones also played. “Of all their contributions to my own education, though, I would say that the one for which I was most grateful was the presence of James Brown in The Stones- headlined T.A.M.I Show film. James Brown, of course, we had heard of, we knew his music a little, and his reputation as an entertainer preceded him. Nothing that we heard could have prepared us for what we saw even in the grainy, far-away quality of the film. The dynamism, the tireless energy and unflagging zeal, the apocalyptic drama of his performance were all unprecedented in out experience, and when we emerged from the theatre we had the idea that we could skate one-legged down Washington Street, defying gravity and astonishing passers-by. The Stones after that performance had been nothing more than an anti-climax, and we watched in silent approval as the blacks trooped out one by one, leaving the field to the latecomers” (Guralnick 1971: 28-30) 418 (Eliot 2005: 29). Eliot refers to the T.A.M.I performance as “universally regarded as the most astonishing performance in the entire history of rock and roll” (Eliot 2005: 29). 419 (Geoff Brown 1996: 114) 420 President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law on the 2nd of July 1964. The act basically outlawed the segregation of public places such as libraries, swimming pools, theatres, restaurants, and hotels. (U.S. Government 1964)

136 instrumental in revealing new sections of previously marginal American cultures. Before such shows pre-civil-rights segregation forced African-American musicians into that alternate logistical network colloquially referred to as the “chitlin” circuit”. It was on this “chitlin circuit” that Brown’s act had been honed for over a decade.

Countering the British Invasion

The reason why I have dedicated the above section to Brown’s appearance on the T.A.M.I. show is because it illustrates how a singular event can catalyse the development of a broader series of new social assemblages and forces. In this respect, the performance was probably as threatening as it was entertaining. If the soul generation did indeed “overcome” then the broader, majoritarian society was ill prepared to assimilate such an alien set of performance conventions. Even Mick Jagger could barely follow him, although given time, he was willing to have a go. Such British following of artists such as Brown was a major factor in increasing the visibility of the African-American artist, although it was the groups of the recent “British Invasion”, rather than the original artists, who were the benefactors.

The “British Invasion”, spearheaded by the Beatles in 1964, was consolidated by subsequent waves of artists who began to appear from all over the UK. These acts had all relied to some extent on African-American music, and the ensuing prominence of their “covers” made the more curious seek out the original performers.

In the recent, Mike Figgis’ directed, Red, White and Blues (2003), this British repatriation of African-American music is credited with providing broader exposure to white audiences in what was in many respects an otherwise invisible part of American culture. This point of view is bolstered throughout the film through the observations of Afro-American music icons such as B.B. King. King confirms that this British re-importation of black music increased both the visibility and economic welfare of the black musicians. King makes the point that the appropriation of black music by white artists would ultimately allow for social possibilities that would have otherwise taken a great many more years to achieve.421 Indeed many of these

421 King in Red, White and Blues (2003)

137 musicians, marginalised and neglected in their home country were genuinely touched by the reverence these British musicians extended towards them. Covers of this material by white artists would enable increased exposure to the pop market, and in addition provided (for some) an unexpected windfall from the extra royalties generated. However, whilst the take up of African-American music by whites did have some positive benefits, it would be disingenuous to simply equate the emancipation of black popular culture with the enthusiasm of some white R&B enthusiasts.

In fact, a more realistic scenario is that for most black popular music artists, one marginal situation was replaced by another. As white musicians were able to approximate covers of their R & B idols, their audience was alleviated of the complications of broader interracial assimilation. Indeed the white appropriation of the black pop market conspired to destroy the momentum of black musicians gaining a foothold in a broader section of the pop market. As Ben E. King says in the “Be My Baby” episode of the BBC documentary series, Dancing in the Street (1996):

There was a bit of jealousy because we were cut off at a time when we just getting ready to be stronger ourselves [Black pop performers]…All signs were there that the music being created right here at home was going to be tremendously big and then all of a sudden these kids came along (the Beatles) and stopped all that...and it was a strong pill to swallow...and I think the only one to survive that thing was someone like James Brown who was so far to the left of what they were doing that it didn’t affect him. So James covered all of what was going on and what Blacks felt they needed musically to survive the Beatles thing.422

Brown’s music, however, was not covered by the “British Invasion” artists as readily as the music of other more orthodox soul artists had been. The covers of the bulk of the white musicians such as the aforementioned Rolling Stones gravitated toward the more orthodox types of soul songs of performers such as Solomon Burke and Marvin

422 BenE.KinginepisodeBe My Baby (1996) of the BBC documentary series, Dancing in the Street (1996)

138 Gaye.423 Brown was becoming increasingly immune to such threats as his intricate big band sound and the scale of the operation insured him somewhat against appropriation by the smaller British beat combos. The threat of the British groups, just like the appearance of the Stones at T.A.M.I, perhaps led Brown to more radical feats of musical creativity. However, via this process, Brown’s music did indeed become more “minor”, and perhaps less accessible to covers by white groups. Brown would instead retain a more underground, cult status among niche groups such as the Mods, whose propensity was to the embrace the more marginal of the soul artists. So when Brown was covered, it was by Mod favourites The Who.424 Even then, Werner duly describes these attempts as, “[t]he low point of obsession with black American music”.425

Appropriation or Becoming?

There are reservations about the way black music was “covered”, although these tend to reduce the situation to mere “appropriation”, a description that does not fully account for the complexity of what occurs during such a cultural encounter. So whilst it is tempting, and even fruitful to discuss how “white appropriation” may have diluted the “authenticity” of black music, I believe that it might be just as fruitful to put such critique of “appropriation” aside to consider alternatives and ask, to what extent were whites also becoming in such encounters?

Attempting to qualify the difference between the “becoming” of the white musician, as distinguished from straight out exploitation is an occupation fraught with difficulties, although I believe it a worthy endeavour. To demonstrate this idea, I examine in the following section a particularly thoughtful approach to such becoming as articulated by Charles Stivale in his examination of Cajun culture, Disenchanting Les Bons Temps.

423 The Rolling Stones, for example, recorded Burke’s, Everybody Needs Somebody to Love, That's How Strong My Love Is and Cry to Me found on the (UK versions) of The Rolling Stones No. 2 and Out of Our Heads (both 1965) LPs and Gaye’s Can I Get a Witness? and Hitch Hike on the (UK versions) of The Rolling Stones (1964) and Out of Our Heads (1965) LPs. 424 (Geoff Brown 1996: 136) 425 (Werner 2000: 82)

139 However before I introduce Stivale’s ideas I will first make reference to a classic example of the type of criticism that lambasts the “dilution at the hands of white appropriation” described here in Dave Headlam’s, “Appropriations of Blues and Gospel in Popular Music” (2002),426 Headlam writes that the covers of black blues and gospel music by white artists’ strip the music of its authenticity and provide their respective audiences instead with a “…watered-down form”, “…with their original meanings lost”.427 Headlam thinks such appropriation is symptomatic of the white person’s desire for the Black “grain of the voice”, a concept famously coined by Roland Barthes.428Barthes’ “grain” is a “…texture in the sound and the associated expression, is a human element interpreted as a physical and emotional effort that resonates with listeners, as they relate the emotions to their own lives”.429 Yet while symptomatic of a white desire to emulate this particular black “grain of the voice”, all the while, “…the original performers and creators of the expression and its social meanings tend to be left behind in such cultural transactions”.430 A key problem with this argument, however, is that it depends on maintaining a distinction between an authentic model, and copies regarded as somehow "lesser" to the original. There are crucial political points to be made along these lines perhaps. However, I would rather analyse such covers in a different way, not in terms of authenticity and dilution, but in terms of the becomings that emerge out of such encounters.

For example, in Disenchanting Les Bons Temps, Charles Stivale provides an example of cultural encounter that might better inform what is at stake in the qualification of appropriation or becoming. Stivale discusses his ongoing enthusiasm for Cajun culture and from the position as an “outsider” assesses how authoritatively he might claim his own “becoming-Cajun”.431 Informed by his own suspicions “…about the status of outsiders' views in relation to indigenous cultural practices”,432 nevertheless he goes through a process of attempting to differentiate himself from the more casual tourist and thus seek some level of authentication. He writes, “[f]rom a literal perspective, the concept of becoming-Cajun is ironic because it is evident that as a

426 (Headlam 2002: 180) 427 (Headlam 2002: 161) 428 (Headlam 2002: 161) 429 (Headlam 2002: 161) 430 (Headlam 2002: 161) 431 (Stivale 2003: 14) 432 (Stivale 2003: 24)

140 francophone Italian-American, I can never become Cajun, not even by choice”.433 Yet the simple fact is that Stivale cannot help but be affected by the culture he is spending so much time with, yet must accept that there is no identity to maintain his authenticity against. All is becoming, even the Cajun’s are becoming-Cajun, as he explains:

…the search for authenticity on the part of the cultural tourist is also reflective of the minority of the native Cajun's experience. That is, difficulties pertain to being Cajun because the very hybridity of Cajun identity-the socio-cultural and in-between of diverse ethnic origins, social classes, and racial groups – renders any fixed or stable Cajun identity quite impossible, despite claims to the contrary.434

The more appropriate method of engaging Cajun culture might be through the ethics of the encounter or a “speaking with and to rather than for”.435 Stivale’s becoming through his engagement with this particular culture is not one based in the saying of “I am” or attempting to pass one’s self off as. It is at this moment when becoming is rendered self-conscious, a futile qualification of an untenable claim of authenticity, rather than an engagement of productive difference with the culture at hand.

Thus to return to the “white” appropriation of “black” music, under no circumstances should the resultant series of becomings be merely limited to the idea of a performer projecting a new appropriated identity, for the reality is that the result is anything but. One of the most enticing aspects of playing “black” music was not to appropriate the music, or even the performer’s identity so much as to attempt to interact with the experience of the specific time-space of its performer. The white musicians’ attempts to play this music gave them a space to play out their own alterity, or to develop their own difference (rather than say, adopt blackness per se) in a relatively (for then) socially acceptable way. The white musician interacting with black music is like the stepping stone on a new orientation of becoming. Not that this is without its problems and I am well aware that, at least in economic terms, this would indicate cultural dominance in favour of whites.436 The resultant process of this becoming of white musicians, we might refer to as a partial dissolution of white, as much as it is a

433 (Stivale 2003: 24) 434 (Stivale 2003: 25) 435 (Stivale 2003: 35) 436 (Wallis & Malm 1990: 174)

141 becoming-black. This is to say that such becoming will never reach “blackness”, but will continually involve a departure from majoritarian “whiteness”. 437

What I mean by becoming, here, is quite different to the kind of ill-conceived emulation found in, for example, the “cooning” of minstrelsy, where the latter might otherwise demonstrate the crass result that can emerge through a generalised concept of representation. The problem is one of starting with an idea of representation rather than to look first at the affective connection, (as found, for example, in the song of the performer), as a vehicle that might enable an alterity to be divulged through its repetition. If a naïve notion of representation as identity looks to similitude rather than alterity in the repetition, then that repetition of similitude will tend towards a generalised and rather limited series of actions of representation that avoid the specific contexts of social action. This is of course precisely the sort of essentialist trap that Deleuze warns of in Difference and Repetition. Deleuze goes to great lengths to critique generalised attributes made between model and copy438 to instead argue for the more heterogeneous, specific and always unfinished nature of becoming. Furthermore, such becoming is the process of difference in effect, which can never be achieved through a “bare/covered” repetition439 such as imitation. For imitation is the opposite of becoming, a point explained here by Deleuze and Guattari:

Suppose a painter "represents" a bird; this is in fact a becoming-bird that can occur only to the extent that the bird itself is in the process of becoming something else, a pure line and pure color. Thus imitation self-destructs, since the imitator unknowingly enters into a becoming that conjugates with the unknowing becoming of that which he or she imitates…Becoming is never imitating.440

437 As Dyer comments, these cultural biases toward white are still part of popular construction of white, as majoritarian, as neutral territory, ‘The wide application of white as symbol, in non-racially specific contexts, makes it appear neutral: white as good is a universal abstraction, it just happens that it coincides with people whose skin is deemed white’ (Dyer 1997: 70). 438 (Deleuze 1994: 126-128) 439 In Difference and Repetition (1994), Deleuze distinguishes between “an uncovered or bare repetition” as the type of mechanical repetition of the Same (he gives examples of a ceremony or stereotype) (Deleuze 1994: 17-18), while a “covered” repetition is a repetition which has difference hidden within itself. As Deleuze writes, “The mask, the costume, the covered is everywhere the truth of the uncovered. The mask is the true subject of repetition. Because repetition differs in kind from representation, the repeated cannot be represented: rather, it must always be signified, masked by what signifies it, itself masking what it signifies” (Deleuze 1994: 18). 440 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 304-305)

142 Whilst there may have been attempts by white musicians to imitate, appropriate and perhaps even denigrate black music in their repetition of the form, it would be to the detriment of the understanding of black-white relations within music to just collapse the complex series of assemblages into one, for instance, of the appropriation of representation or identity. This would ignore the vast and real becomings that occur otherwise. To speak in terms of appropriation is to accept the banal estrangement of model and copy. This in turn limits a more rigorous exploration of “what a body can do”441by limiting a body’s “proper” actions to those that are able to find a general form of representation.

What Can a Body Do?

A qualification of becoming in opposition to a more banal repetition of imitation is necessary to see how the becoming of the body might productively take place. It should also be noted that the Deleuzean notion of a body should not be thought of in the way we might more commonly conceive it, as a lesser material extension of a (greater) subject. It is important to understand that this notion of the body is not of a fixed biological form, but one instead based on the ethology discussed in chapter 1. The premise of the Deleuze-Guattarian ethology is not to describe what a body is, but rather to examine the connections it can make. For example, Samira Kawash rather concisely explains Deleuze’s particular take on the body:

The question of the body turns on whether we can conceive of a desubjectified body, a mode of corporeality that escapes structures of identity and subjectivity but that is not an implicit return to the violent abstractions of philosophical idealism that relegate the body to the fleshy, contaminated world of substance. This body cannot be conceived as the human body, the biological, organismic counterpart to the human subject; nor can it be attributed to something more essential: it is not body of X (for example, body of the subject) but simply body as materiality, a corporeal something that returns as resistance, refusal, singularity, radical particularity.442

One of Deleuze’s central concerns is to provide the right philosophical conditions to allow becomings of the body to take place. For a start, some concepts, more than

441 (Deleuze 1983: 39) 442 (Kawash 1998: 133)

143 others, allow us to imagine what a body might be capable of as a productive problem, even if we may not always care for the results. The more imminent problem is to think of the potential of such bodies as extending far beyond the types of commonsense relations that we bestow upon them. Commonsense relations imply notions of time and space derived from generalised representational schema that can be perceived as being more or less disconnected from the body. These, of course, produce bodies in a generalised manner through the ‘truthful” narration of State thought, which marks and represents them accordingly.

In distinction to State thought governing the capabilities of bodies, a micropolitics of desire might require us to imagine a body as the basis of a belief in the specific, complex and fluid world as it is, rather than confined in the body to the product of an adherence to ideology or dogma. In fact, Deleuze remarks, after Spinoza, that a belief in the world is a belief in the body itself:443

What is certain is that believing is no longer believing in another world, or in a transformed world. It is only, it is simply believing in the body. It is giving discourse to the body, and, for this purpose, reaching the body before discourses, before words, before things are named…444

To recap on the point made in chapter 1, this belief in the world, is not to be found through our knowledge of the world but only through an experimentation of the body (including of course the brain) that might connect to the world. We need to remain open to the possibility that man and the world will be once again connected.445 The importance of the “minor” artist or the “minor” language is to facilitate such connections to the world as it actually is, rather than to the world’s representation by dominant thought. As Rajchman writes, “ “Minor languages” like Black English pose this problem – one must devise ways of being at home not in a territory but in this Earth, which, far from rooting them in a place, an identity, a memory, releases them from such borders…”.446 This is why Deleuze and Guattari argue that the function of the artist is to return us to the affective possibilities of the body. This is the freeing of the power of affect which causes Deleuze to remark in Cinema 2, “Not that the body

443 (Deleuze 1989: 172) 444 (Deleuze 1989: 172-173) 445 (Deleuze 1989: 172) 446 (Rajchman 2000: 95)

144 thinks, but, obstinate and stubborn, it forces us to think, and forces us to think what is concealed from thought, life”.447 As I will discuss in the next chapter the creative power of life emerges as a result of the naïve figure asking, “why can’t I do this”?

To ask one’s self such a question is the first step to connection rather than limitation, and, as I have briefly outlined above, orienting a body to an embrace of connection rather than judgemental difference is one of Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s) most fundamental concerns:

To provide for the affective connections that might ameliorate “becomings rather than stories” is the ethical challenge of the Cinema books. This ethical challenge informs the approach of this thesis to popular music.

If the search for truth produces a body it does so in an unexpected way. For instance, we might find ourselves searching for the truth about a subject (of a body) and the process will, in turn, require our assimilation of images of that subject (and body) to produce the desired result. However, the paradox that Deleuze brings up is that the more images we seek in relation to the “truth” about something, the more potential for difference actually emerges. The quest for a “truthful” image of an authenticity will only bring difference to the fore.

In the Cinema books Deleuze uses the cinema of supposed reality, the “direct cinema” and cinéma vérité styles associated with directors such as John Cassavetes, Shirley Clarke, Pierre Perrault and Jean Rouch to explain how a cinema of supposed “truth” would instead free up the dichotomy of the false and the true:449 “…if this cinema discovered new paths, it also preserved and sublimated an ideal of truth which was

447 (Deleuze 1989: 189) 448 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 257) 449 (Deleuze 1989: 150)

145 dependent on cinematographic fiction itself: there was what the camera sees, what the character sees, the possible antagonism and necessary resolution of the two”.450

In other words, cinéma-vérité should not be considered as a “truthful” medium but rather one that implores of its makers their own transformation, as they must seek out their own powers of falsification to become with their subject. As Deleuze says, this is the, “…constitution or reconstitution of a people, where the film-maker and his characters become others together and the one through the other, a collectivity which gradually wins from place to place, from person to person, from intercessor to intercessor”.451

Rather than simply ascribing the work of these filmmakers as a “truth”, Deleuze attributes the cultural encounters sought out by the directors in question as indicative of their desire to become other. As Deleuze says in relation to Godard’s discussion of Rimbaud’s formula “I is another”452 the subject becomes aware of an internally spilt subjectivity and in reference to the work of documentarian, Jean Rouch, will contend that through his films the director may find a chance to become-black.453 That is, the formula “I is another” can be understood as that moment where one apprehends the very possibility of becoming itself.

Overcoming the Limits of Representation

Music, of course, has always been at the centre of the most profound events of becoming. This is perhaps because music’s invasive territorial nature brings assemblages into relations that might not have been otherwise encountered. By the time of soul, black music was slowly creeping into the consciousness of the mainstream and forcing people to contend with it, whether they liked it or not. However, stressing the becoming that emerges from such an encounter, does not mean that I am blind to the difficulty that black musicians had to face. Whilst it may have been of enormous ontological benefit for the development of white musicians who were able to freely play this music, I realise that this was often at the expense of their

450 (Deleuze 1989: 149) 451 (Deleuze 1989: 153) 452 (Deleuze 1989: 153) 453 (Deleuze 1989: 153)

146 black counterparts. So questions of becoming are not meant to erase the often gross iniquities that continued to pervade social policy. My point is to first emphasise some of the points that tend to be marginalised. It is necessary to move the agenda away from retrospective judgement of appropriation in order to analyse some other dimensions of the politics of the time. This will enable a better analysis of the complex encounters and becomings that also took place.

For a start, the becoming in question was not only limited to an exchange of cultures split along racial lines. In fact Brown’s own creativity was perhaps fuelled by the fact that he was marginal within his own culture. If one accepts the idea of the white's becoming-black, perhaps Brown too, had a similar goal. As we have discussed in previous chapters, Brown’s work is often equated with generalised notions of “blackness”. Yet at this stage, Brown himself was still trying to “become-black”. That is to say that even a nominal “blackness” is never absolute, but always shifting and subjected to its own hierarchies and stratification. For example African-Americans still maintain a skin colour hierarchy.454 It was somewhere within this hierarchy that Brown had to find his own “black”. For example, Brown’s childhood friend and revue member, Leon Austin describes Brown as being “dark skinned”: “He made the ugly man somebody,” says Austin, albeit rather disconcertingly, to Gerri Hirshey.455 Austin’s distinction somehow inferred that this made Brown’s accomplishments all the more empowering for the many previously invisible African-Americans forced to endure a similar marginalisation at the time. 456

The notion of “dark skinned” here refers to the deep-seated skin-tone hierarchy, which unfortunately, remains a rather arcane process of differentiation used by African-Americans that has its roots in assimilation with the majoritarian culture. The white audience were of course less likely to be offended if their “negroes” were as

454 The skin colour hierarchy exists not only among African-Americans, but unfortunately remains a rather tenacious vestige of colonialism in general. It has been the subject of frequent discussion, including the following journal articles, “Shades Of Brown: The Law Of Skin Color” (Trina Jones 2000) and “Hey Girl, Am I More than My Hair?: African American Women and Their Struggles with Beauty, Body Image, and Hair” (Tracey Owens Patton 2006) 455 (Austin in Hirshey 1985: 285). In a passage discussing Brown’s appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, Hirshey writes “James Brown cut loose with a swaggering pride few men of color dared express in mixed company. Even among blacks, it ruptured the stratification of “high complexion” versus low. ‘A darker person would probably be named as ugly,’ Leon explains. And James Brown is dark. ‘So,’ says Leon, “he made the ugly man somebody” (Austin in Hirshey 1985: 285). 456 (Austin in Hirshey 1985: 285)

147 Caucasian looking as possible, such as a Lena Horne, a Johnny Mathis or a Nat “King” Cole, although of course through no fault of their own. In light of what came before it is fair to say that embracing “blackness” as an identity was a goal still yet to be mobilised into a mainstream recognition in any overt way.457 Only the “crazy” Negroes like Malcolm X dared to speak of such a future collective. Indeed, Amiri Baraka relates the concept of “becoming-black” to his piece, The Legacy of Malcolm X, where he writes that even “…the Black Man must aspire to Blackness”.458 This observation is similar to a moment in A Thousand Plateaus where Deleuze and Guattari also say that “…even the black man must become-black”.459 As Deleuze and Guattari say further in this passage that, “…if blacks must become-black, it is because only a minority is capable of serving as the active medium of becoming, but under such conditions that it ceases to be a definable aggregate in relation to the majority”.460

Whilst undoubtedly provocative, controversial and given that it is proposed by a couple of old, white French guys, a little presumptuous, the concept of becoming- black is not so much about representation as the ephemeral nature of something that has no tangible existence beyond a political position. It is really only problematic when it is thought of as a represented, “black” body or “black” people. We are of course, here dealing with becoming-minor which is much less a choice made than being thrown into a political position, even in the political economy of music.

For Deleuze and Guattari have said in A Thousand Plateaus that becoming is fluidity itself and is never representational: “Becoming is a verb with a consistency all of its own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, “appearing,” “being,” “equalling,” or

457 The discursive shift from “Negro” to “black” was an effect of 1960s activism, including the formation of the Black Panther movement in 1966 (Vincent 1996: 51). For example, in her 1967 publication “Revisiting ‘Black Power’, Race and Class”, Marxist scholar, Raya Dunayevskaya, cites the importance of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) who as chairman of the SNCC (Student Non- Violent Coordinating Committee) from May 1966 to June 1967 would popularise the slogan “Black Power” (Dunayevskaya 1967). With Charles V. Hamilton, Carmichael had written Black Power: The Politics Of Liberation In America (1967) (Dunayevskaya 1967). Brown’s usage of “black” in Say it Loud! I'm Black and I'm Proud was one of the earlier assertions of the term “black” rather than the outmoded “Negro” (Vincent 1996: 55). 458 (Baraka in Nealon 1988 :86) 459 As Deleuze and Guattari write in A Thousand Plateaus, “[o]ne reterritorializes, or allows oneself to be reterritorialized, on a minority as a state; but in a becoming, one is deterritorialized. Even blacks, as the Black Panthers said, must become black” (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 291). 460 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 291)

148 “producing”.461 In his essay, “Refraining, Becoming-Black: Repetition and Difference in Amiri Baraka’s Blues People”, Jeffrey T. Nealon makes the point that such becoming thrives on an inbuilt marginalisation that keeps a minor artistic form, such as black music, producing difference through repetition: “In fact, in a painful paradox, it is precisely the specific material history of African Americans' marginalisation— rather than some naturally contestatory African-American spirit—that makes possible the active responses and myriad sites of black culture”.462 Nealon makes these observations in light of his reading of Amiri Baraka’s seminal Blues People (1963), and the latter’s consideration of be-bop at the time. Baraka’s main argument is that the African American’s “…conditional separation from the mainstream spared him”463 and that the project of bebop was “…to make that separation meaningful…restore jazz, in some sense, to its original separateness”.464 Nealon says that for Baraka the unique contribution of the beboppers was the fact that they "reinforced alienation, but on the Negro’s terms".465 Following Deleuze, Nealon argues that the subsequent repetition of such marginalisation might re-manifest itself as a repetition of productive difference: “[s]uch an ‘alienation’ or ‘separateness’ is, then, a repetition of segregation, but with an important difference: this is a repetition that reinscribes the forced segregation of blacks to create a deterritorialization, a line of flight for African-American culture”.466

Yet an earlier comment from the same essay strikes me as worth investigating further: “Benny Goodman is not crowned the "King of Swing" by mistake; his coronation is precisely one of the many complex, site-specific bulwarks against the becoming-black of America”467. Given that Nealon fully accepts the Deleuzean notion of such complimentary modes of becoming, is this a move away from “becoming” to a single critique of “white appropriation”? The problem is similar to that found in the idea that the British Invasion represented a similar resistance to a becoming-black. It lies in the very conscious decision to market an Elvis, or even a Pat Boone over a Big Mama Thornton or Little Richard. In fact such resistance to becoming, or rather attempting

461 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 239) 462 (Nealon 1988: 85) 463 (Baraka in Nealon 1988: 85) 464 (Baraka in Nealon 1988: 85) 465 (Baraka in Nealon 1988: 85) 466 (Nealon 1988: 85) 467(Nealon 1988: 85)

149 to arrest becoming as a resistance to a virtual future will always be present in every generation of music (heavy metal, gangsta rap, death metal and so on), and the affirmation of a minor becoming is not, pragmatically at least, completely opposed to a strategic majoritarian politics. At the same time, while accepting this, it would be a pity to lose sight of the different strategies of the politics of becoming.

To return to Nealon’s comment, it could be argued that Goodman’s own career trajectory was in part due to his own “becoming-black”. The white musicians’ attempts to tackle these new cultural and musical forms, such as Goodman’s desire to play jazz, always possesses a large component that needs micropolitical consideration, about their own becoming-black. Playing the music of a minor people is an attempt to apprehend a minor temporality, although it can also be a “capture” of that, a striation of the minor within the major, it can provide a way for even those in a minority position, such as Brown, to continue to become as the music itself continues to open lines of becoming that fracture the major.

Of course Brown too would have to face the terms of his representation and perhaps become minor, become black, in response. In fact it was Brown’s own minority within a minor culture, as an “uneducated”, “dark-skinned”468 man that perhaps further led him to take a marginal position and give it not only a new sense of presence, but with that presence the belief of being able to connect with the world. This is perhaps why so many African-Americans loved him, because he was a political figure in a way that was not even known, or understood by, the white majority –this majority of course in the Deleuze- Guattarian sense, of the dominant culture rather than the numerical majority. In contrast to a performer such as Little Richard, James Brown would appeal to the minor. For instance, Richard speaks here of Brown’s distinct appeal to Black America: “James Brown was different from me. He was big to the black market. When he came to town, you would get ten thousand blacks. When I came to town, you would get ten thousand whites, and about ten blacks”.469

468 (Austin in Hirshey 1985: 285) 469 (Richard in Charles White 1985: 153)

150 Why Brown would appeal to blacks in a way denied to Richard, is not further explained in his memoirs,470although it would probably be fair to attribute some of Richard’s lack of sustained success within the general African-American community to their discomfort in Richard’s overt homosexuality.471 As black culture in general was strange enough to whites, most of his original teenage audience probably had little idea about his sexuality and embraced him for his more general reflection of otherness. Richard was perhaps helped neither by the layers of pancake-make up he has worn through his career472 which may have been read as an appeal to “whiteness” and of much contrast to Brown’s apparent “ugliness”, which as his friend Leon Austin attributed as Brown’s “common man” appeal within the African-American community. 473 For Brown maintained a sense of aspiration that betrayed the social limitations of the “darker skinned black”, and it is perhaps for this reason, that Brown, in the tradition of the Deleuze-Guattarian minor author, would inspire a greater appeal to collectivity. For Brown was able to give the most marginal of the minor a belief in the world. Brown was not only playing music but by doing so was by extension, bringing the practically invisible bodies of the marginal and all of their potential, into focus. To top it off he dared to “feel good”, regardless of the skin he was in. The melancholic laments of the blues idiom were being replaced with exuberant paeans to life in general. This was political, then, in the sense that such a blatant espousal of “feeling good” not only directly challenged the majoritarian persuasion toward the maintenance of the Protestant work ethic, but also because it claimed bodily pleasure – indeed particular bodily pleasures - as a right. On the most banal level of pure representation, Brown’s dynamic physicality on stage was a visible signal of a more audacious presence of non-white people, doing apparently non-white things. The dynamism of James Brown’s stage show was ready to make a mockery of (white imposed) Puritanical mores. Indeed if one is to express an assemblage that would directly challenge such mores, why not call it funk?

470 As told to Charles White in The Life and Times of Little Richard (Charles White 1985) 471 Richard’s breakthrough single Tutti Frutti (1956) was a thinly disguised allusion to his sexuality, where the original lyrics concerning a gay male with good behind, "Tutti Frutti, good booty/If it don’t fit don’t force it/You can grease it, make it easy…” (Richard in Charles White 1985: 55) were changed to the more ambiguous “tutti frutti…aw rooty” by co-writer Dorothy La Bostrie (Richard in Charles White 1985: 50-51). 472 (Charles White 1985: 144) 473 (Austin in Hirshey 1985: 285)

151 The Foundations of Funk

The music that would emerge from Brown’s grunts and groans would come to be known as funk, a slang term for “the smell of sex”474 and a once obscure jazz term that Brown, would of course, take into the mainstream. Frank Kofsky writes that the term, funk, in its original jazz context is to do with authenticity and “[h]ence to call a composition, a passage, or a player funky was not only to offer praise in general, but a means of lauding the object of praise for its specifically black qualities”.475

Despite this long and involved history, Brown’s appropriation of funk is anchored into the popular consciousness. Indeed the description funk would become synonymous with Brown to the point that he could almost assume its ownership. To quote hip-hop pioneer, Fab 5 Freddy from “his dictionary for homeboys”: “”funky” is used for everything to do with music, fashion, culture or ideas that comes from a black background, and in a special sense for any cultural achievement inspired by the Godfather of soul James Brown”. 476

Yet, as I have begun to note, funk has entered the parlance of popular culture as a generic musical term synonymous with Brown’s music; the term had been kicking around since the turn of the century. As Cheryl Keyes explains, “funk was a term brought to musical prominence in the title of a jazz tune called Funky Butt by a New Orleans jazz cornetist, Buddy Bolden, around the 1900s”,477 although funk probably received its greater currency through Jelly Roll Morton’s I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say (1939). Here the word funky is truly delivered into the popular lexicon a point made by Robert Palmer in Dancing In the Street (1996). 478 From here it begins to be integrated into jazz lexicon. Keyes, for instance, says that it was in the 1950s that hard bop pianist, Horace Silver, would use the term funk “…to define the return

474 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 46-47). Funk was a not a polite term at all and as Maceo Parker tells Cynthia Rose, “I do remember havin’ to get that term ‘funk’ OK’ed by my parents, and some of my peers havin’ to get it OK’d by their parents…to them, it was just not a gentleman’s word” (Cynthia Rose 1990: 47) 475 (Kofsky 1970: 44) 476 (Poschardt 1998: 417) 477 (Keyes 2002: 41) 478 (Palmer 1996: 239)

152 to the evocative feeling and expressiveness of traditional blues” as captured in his Opus de Funk. 479

Given its rather salacious etymology, there was perhaps something always “unorthodox” about a “funky” approach. The understanding of funk in the jazz culture of the 1950s was as a style to counteract,

The coldness, complexity, and intellectualism introduced into the music by Bop, Cool, West Coast, and Third Stream jazz. By the late 1960s, the term was reformulated by the soul singer James Brown to denote an earthy and gritty sonority characterised specifically by Brown’s preachy vocal style and his horn and rhythm section’s interlocking rhythmic "grooves".480

Some scholars have attempted to excavate its usage even further back. For instance, Robert Palmer cites the work of African arts scholar Robert Farris Thompson where the latter is to suggest:

…that "funky" may derive from the Ki-Kongo lu-fuki, defined as "positive sweat:" This is very close to the contemporary American usage, and Thompson notes that in present-day Africa, Ba-Kongo people use lu-fuki and the American "funky" synonymously-’to praise persons for the integrity of their art:” Thus James Brown’s celebrated admonition to "Make it funky now!" Certainly no one in rock or r&b has put more sweat into his performances than soul Brother Number One. Add to this Ki-Kongo concept of "positive sweat" the Yoruba concept of ashe, or "cool" (‘this is character," writes Thompson in Flash of the Spirit, ‘this is mystic coolness") and what have you got? "Cold Sweat"!481

It is not my intention here to further detail such etymological claims. All of this history, however speculative, does not really tell us how Brown’s particular intricate, polyrhythmic turn emerged at this particular time. The funk assemblage may well have inherited a liberal dose of African musical heritage, yet the question here is: why did this aesthetic emerge so discernibly from Brown’s music and not one of his predecessors? Attempting to answer this question presents us with the interesting question of funk’s emergence at a particular time as a musical expression of the

479 (Keyes 2002: 41) 480 (Keyes 2002: 41) 481 (Palmer 1996: 239)

153 coexistent existential circumstances of the civil rights era. For instance Brown’s emphasis of “the one” was peculiar enough to him, that it would discernibly set his music apart from his contemporaries in the first place.

Whilst there may be no actual definitive reason why Brown would be the one to pitch the foundations of funk, the closest musical reason was his love of gospel. After establishing himself with the marketplace, Brown would return to the more minimalist repetition of the gospel style that he had temporarily abandoned after Please, Please, Please. However, if one scours Brown’s back catalogue important indications of the emerging funk style can be heard. Here we can allude to examples such as 1962’s I’ve Got Money482 or 1964’s Oh Baby Don’t You Weep,483 the latter being based on an old gospel song Oh Mary Don’t You Weep. The latter track is the first of many of Brown’s elongated jams that warranted two-part singles where a single title would take up both A and B-sides. Brown’s music increasingly resisted the linearity of composition used in most Western conceptions of harmonic structure, where the composition was realised as a series of peaks and troughs through which the listener would be steered for a period lasting roughly two-and-a-half to three minutes. Brown’s compositional methods increasingly rejected a linear and easily navigable trajectory that would maintain a traditional build up to and exploitation of the hook/refrain. This was one of the bases for the compositional characteristic of funk. It could be attributed to ways of composing developed out of a keen understanding of the circumstances around Brown, especially as the navigable trajectory of time that was supposed to lead to Afro-American assimilation was looking increasingly shaky.

Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag

Perhaps Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag was the most overt expression of this minor language. It was a revolutionary assemblage of difference. First of all, it indicated a commitment to rhythmic change via The One. Second, Brown seemed to be deliberately making his music more marginal in nature by embracing increasingly liberal doses of black vernacular and slang. However, combined with his penchant for articulating the idiom in a sometimes-impenetrable Southern accent, it served to

482 (Brown 1962) 483 (Brown 1964b)

154 accentuate the difference of Brown’s world for many sections of the listening audience, in particular, many of the white teens who had begun buying Brown’s records at this time. Whilst the experience of encountering this world was one achieved through the safety of commodification, it also had the effect of unveiling some of the more invisible sections of society.

So now that this marginal part of society bathed itself in the spotlight, some critics expected the performers to make the most of this newfound visibility to say something. For example, in Black Talk (1971), Ben Sidran attacked the often deceptive political content of many soul songs, prompting his comment that the genre’s frivolous nature was its major deficiency: “For all its clamour, the ‘soul” movement was, at bottom, not a serious challenge to Western conventions at all. Although it had had serious implications in terms of a challenge to the dominant Puritan ethic, the music itself was rarely more than party music”.484 Sidran’s assessment is a good example, however, of the grand, and majoritarian, political gesture. In fact it was as party music that soul music had the ability to “[challenge] the prevailing logic of white supremacy and segregation in many ways that were discomforting to some, regardless of race or ethnicity”.485 To be fair, Sidran actually excludes Brown from this assessment, a point that I will detail in chapter 6, although it is still a common criticism that can even be heard today, and, I believe, misguided in the sense that saying something must come from a more serious occupation. Indeed, whilst Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag did not appear tosaymuch–intermsof lyrical content, it merely recounted a bunch of dance moves – the record was one of a cumulative effect of this shock of the new. Its political potency was based on this ‘rendering visible’ of previously invisible sections of America in the space of less than three minutes and this visibility was distinguished by the “groove” as indicative of a new emergence.

Thus looking at Brown’s compositional shift in terms of the concepts of Deleuze’s Cinema books, this may well have instigated the shift from the “movement-image” conventions of music, before Brown, to the types of time-image musical conventions that will come after him.

484 (Sidran 1995: 133) 485 (Neal 2002: 4)

155 Brown’s musical impact then, moves far beyond just lyrical narrative. For instance most academic discussion on Brown revolves around Say it Loud! I’m Black and I’m Proud. For example, this is why, despite Brown’s often benign, and even ill informed political pitches, he could still maintain a presence. As Rickey Vincent explains:

To a generation of frustrated blacks who understood Malcolm X when he called for freedom “by any means necessary”, Brown had touched a nerve. He inspired the poets to dream of Black Revolution, to speak of killing whitey (though not his point of view), and to prepare for redemption on this earth, not the next. Brown had entered the movement. He influenced everyone, from revolutionary poets Umar BenHassanandGilScott-HerontoballadeersMarvinGayeandStevie Wonder.486

The fact of the matter is that the track was never totally embraced by Brown. Despite the plaudits it has subsequently received, Say it Loud! I’m Black and I’m Proud was to receive only a handful of performances.487 Brown remained unsure about the consequences of the record in this time of significant social upheaval. 488 As long-time Brown band member Sweet Charles Sherrell was to comment in a recent interview with Matt Rowland in “rare groove” magazine Wax Poetics:

Well, after I heard the words to it, it kind of frightened me, because you know at that time a whole lot of stuff was going on… Martin Luther King and all the riots and stuff. We’ve been playing, performing for all races of people—I’ve seen them in the crowd, you know. So [I’m thinking], ‘this is going to hurt him.” Because you can’t go to a concert and sit there and say, ‘say it loud, I’m Black and I’m proud” if you’re not Black or if you’re not Mexican or whatever. You can’t do that so you’d feel cheated, you know. That scared me. But James realised it too. Because all of a sudden his crowds started dropping off. 489

Perhaps as testament to this decline in crossover popularity, whilst Say it Loud! was a Top 10 hit on the white pop charts, the single would be his last for nearly twenty years. With the increasing uncertainty of the times, the single’s strident message

486 (Vincent 1996: 78) 487 (Brown 1995) 488 Says Brown band member Sweet Charles Sherrell “He only did that song live maybe three or four times. Five at the most. Then he stopped doing it. For that reason” (Rowland 2002). 489 (Rowland 2002)

156 would appear to have had the effect of eroding Brown’s major “cross-over” to the white US audience which commenced only a few years earlier. Crucially, with regard to his much criticised TV appearance, this also reflected Brown’s increased visibility as surrogate black leader. As former road manager Alan Leeds states in the documentary about Brown, soul Survivor, “I remember a leading politician once told him, 'You're in trouble now…Any one who can stop a riot can start one'”.490

The fear surrounding the period was further escalated by a number of “black power” hits that would emanate from the James Brown production stable,491 which included tracks such as Hank Ballard’s solo, How You Gonna Get Respect (When You Haven’t Cut Your Process Yet) (1968) and Blackenized (1969). As Jesse Jackson has commented in relation to the song:

We always felt that because of being black, we was always put down because of it - but James Brown had the youth to know that its OK to be who you are…a lot of the kids had been wearing hair one way but when James Brown came out with “I’m Black and I’m Proud” you started to see what we call Naturals and that meant showing Black Pride.492

Say it Loud! I’m Black and I’m Proud was, to quote Rickey Vincent, “…a turning point”,493 however, not only because it affirmed present identity, but precisely because it beckoned the emergence of a new collective - a “people to come”.

In a sense, the lyrics of the song gave expression to something occurring musically throughout funk. The full power of Black and Proud was not only contained within its lyrical message, or even that there was someone prepared to go on and dare believe in a future at such a time of political disarray. Brown’s ultimate force was really contained in the broader musical assemblage, and expressed through the music of the burgeoning funk genre.

490 (Leeds in James Brown: Soul Survivor 2003) 491 Albert Goldman once titled an essay with the equation "Black Power = James Brown"(Goldman 1968/1992). 492 (Jackson in James Brown the Godfather of Soul: A Portrait 1995) 493 For instance Rickey Vincent provides a lengthy account of James Brown’s influence on Soul era politics citing Brown 1968’s single Say It Loud I’m Black and I’m Proud, which he cites as “…a turning point in black music” (Vincent 1996: 78)

157 There is also an equally compelling assemblage of forces to be found in the abstract and surreal quality of much of Brown’s funk.494 Whilst much is made of Brown’s more overt political tracks, there are many more releases that veer between the esoteric to the downright bizarre. Here I refer to titles such as, Let a Man Come in and Do the Popcorn (1969), one of the many “Popcorn” related records Brown released in the period of 1968-1969 alone, testament to a man preoccupied with cashing in on a rather obscure dance craze. For further scrutiny I Can’t Stand Myself (When You Touch Me) (1968) which is basically a riff repeated for seven minutes, let alone tracks such as I’m Tired But I’m Clean (1963), the musical content just as bizarre as the title itself. For some of us who came to Brown’s music devoid of the context of the time, the bizarre quality of such titles proved all the more alluring.

The experimentalism inherent in these tracks is just as important as the well-regarded strident narratives, of a Say it Loud! I’m Black and I’m Proud (1968) or I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing, (Open Up the Door I’ll Get it Myself) (1969). The fact is that part of funk’s power lay in its pure abstraction. It was this that would enable new thought – and new creative practices, musical and social - to emerge, although this was not preconceived. In fact, true to the sheer pragmatic function of the Idiot, Brown did not mistakenly assume presuppositions of intent or align his work to some transcendental project that would undermine its very newness. We might recall here the comment made by Brown, from chapter 1 of this thesis that funk was not the result of some preconception or even direction, “funk was not a project…the thing was ahead”.495

It should also be noted that funk was not necessarily an encompassing vision but reflected just one aspect of Brown’s music. For James Brown was also an aspirant crooner, jazzman and preacher. Yet it was funk that would emerge as the most prominent musical development, one that asserted its power as an acute expression of the existential conditions of the broader environment. Deleuze and Guattari comment that, “[t]he creation of concepts in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and

494 For example, in a Rolling Stone magazine article, “Being James Brown” they describe Brown’s “…famously atonal and abstract keyboard work [as] truly worthy of Sun Ra or Daniel Johnston” (Lethem 2006). 495 (Brown in Cynthia Rose 1990: 59)

158 people that do not yet exist”.496 Deleuze would hope this future form would be recognizable by virtue of its dislocation from the present.

The crazy lyrics are more indicative of this people to come. Radical change by nature is always a difficult thing to achieve in a popular music context, and this is perhaps why it was mainly seen as the reserve of the so-called avant-garde. Whilst the revolutionary quality of Brown’s music is often analysed from a textual point of view, such as those previous qualifications of the Say it Loud! I'm Black and I'm Proud,the literature should give equal attention to Brown’s revolutionary musical experimentation. As I will discuss in the next chapter, it was Brown’s disregard of common sense that allowed him to proceed on such a radical musical course. In this respect I am reminded of the quote from Godard, who once remarked that his objective was not "making political films, but rather making films politically".497

This is why a central argument in this thesis is that Brown’s greatest statements were always delivered musically rather than as a lyrical narrative. The emphatic delivery of “the one” in a track like Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag made the approach of the other soul artists somewhat subdued in comparison, even and especially as “party music”. Cliff White writes that the lyrics do matter:

Sketched in personal and simplistic terms as usual, the song, like many James Brown compositions, had far deeper implications than just the changes in his own career. It was a definite statement about the civil rights revolution then sweeping America, which was more tentatively alluded to by other soul hits of the period, such as Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions” People Get Ready and Sam Cooke’s A Change is Gonna Come.498

Yet to try and understand the revolutionary impact of the music in terms of narrative is only a small part of the point. The full “message” – the apprehension of a new minor temporality of becoming - is derived from the power of the music’s rhythms, in particular the shift to “the one”. In his recent “second” autobiography Brown writes, “the one” was not just a new kind of beat; it was a statement of race, of force, of stature, of stride. It was the aural equivalent of standing tall and saying Here I am,of

496 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 108) 497 (Monaco 1976) 498 (Charles White 1985)

159 marching with strength rather than tiptoeing with timidity”.499 Hence the message was not so much to be heard in what Brown was saying, but rather the way that he was saying it. One can only imagine what an emphatic refrain of “I Feel Good” may have represented when at the same time African-Americans were still the targets of indiscriminate lynch mobs.

The political power of Brown’s music was its challenge “deal with me” rather than the pleas for “respect” inherent to most soul of the time. As Brown would later sing “I don’t want nobody to give me nothin’, open up the door I’ll get it myself…don’t give me integration, give me truth, communication”.500 At the same time, to reiterate the most powerful aspect of Brown’s great funk tracks, such as I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Nothing (Open up the Door, I’ll Get It Myself) is not to be found in the lyrics, but rather in the music’s drive. I reference here in particular the live version that appears on the Sex Machine album and which provides one of the most incessant attacks on a single chord to be heard on record. Every downbeat on “the one” is signalled by a single sustained guitar chord, most likely by Alphonso “Country” Kellum, acting as the left hand jab, and with a fast Jimmy Nolen “chicken scratch” coming in from behind, providing the motion and the fancy footwork. When it comes time to deliver on the chin, Clyde or Jabo would then slam the equivalent of a vicious right on the snare on every second and fourth beat. Boom-Bap, Boom-Bap, Boom- Bap. Music that sent its audience into spontaneous bouts of air boxing. This is little wonder, as funk was an aural equivalent of a prize fight, one in which Brown would never deliver from the canvas, no matter how bad things were outside of the auditorium. Through the incessant, almost violent, musical rallies in which he took hits from the various instruments, Brown might scream, wail, fall to his knees – but just as his trademark caped performance has indicated since the late 1950s – “…he would always die on his feet rather than live on his knees”.501 Repetition was the key, to make sure that the message of “deal with me” was delivered, Brown just took a musical phrase and incessantly repeated it over and over and over again, for however long it took to express the emotion underpinning that series of repetitions. Whether consciously or not, Brown was giving his audience lessons in how such a severe

499 (Brown & Eliot 2005: 72-73). Although probably liberally interpreted by ghostwriter Marc Eliot. 500 (Brown 1970c) 501 To paraphrase the 1968 song, Say it Loud! I’m Black and I’m Proud (Brown 1969c).

160 musically driven violence might sustain an audience who were hard pressed to engage in a more corporeal one. Such calculated and precise musical attacks were delivered courtesy of “the one”.

This compositional aspect of funk would reflect gospel’s more enduring influence on Brown’s work, in particular, an exploitation of the repetition of the groove. In harnessing the power of repetition, funk would perhaps provide a sense of escape from the inhuman circumstances that its audience had to otherwise contend with on a day-to-day basis.

Through “the one”, Brown would be able to mobilise the intensity of African- American life, if only because his approach to time, with its origins in gospel, was still so very alien to whites. This musical difference increasingly reflected a preoccupation with time over compositional movement or “goal”, and this more open approach to time was driven by this emphasis on “the one”. The unrelenting drive of “the one” was itself a general expression of broader existential circumstances, although the impetus of its exactitude is a point that I will briefly speculate upon.

Funk’s “Industrial” Elements

One of these speculations, in terms of funk’s clockwork exactitude is that the rhythms of the industrial life of the everyday would very likely have had an impact. I argue that the tightness and exactitude of James Brown’s music is obviously a reflection of the broader industrial conditions which might be seen as much a reflection of the imminent industrial environment of the any-space-whatever as it was of any African cultural practice. The repetitive clank of industrial machines would make an obvious impression on the drumming of Brown’s Clyde “Funky Drummer” Stubblefield, the creator of the now ubiquitous “funky drummer” beat,502 who has attributed such industrial environmental factors as seminal musical experiences:

502 The myriad appearances of the samples of Brown’s Funky Drummer aresofrequentthatitishardto concisely document the ongoing appearances of this sample. I will list here some more recent uses of the track. A tribute track to Clyde Stubblefield entitled Good Old Clyde (2005) by “nerdcore” hip-hop artist MC Frontalot is available on his website (Frontalot 2005) (left off his debut album due to clearance issues). Furthermore, a mixtape of tracks that prominently feature the Funky Drummer beat, called, Sound of the Funky Drummer and put together by “Edan The Deejay” has also being doing the rounds (not exactly legally) (Edan 2004). A recent personal anecdote. The Funky Drummer beat has

161 Where I was raised up in Chattanooga TN…We had wind up clocks. And they go ‘tick-tock…’ all through the whole night. Pitch black dark…nothin’, you see nothin’…and you just hear that ‘tick-tock…’ through the whole night and that’s time…and I go to sleep by that. And then to wake up to a factory, that made wooden cases and they had a chimney that would go…shoot puffs of smoke out. We were…surrounded by mountains and valley and so when this thing would go ‘poof’ and would it would hit the mountains and it would come back and go ‘poof…boom’. So that had a rhythm. Washing machine… ‘slish-slosh’…that had rhythm. And the train tracks. I was raised up around all those rhythms and I used to walk in time with ‘em…that’s the way it started by me being raised around those types of rhythms.503

In this respect, funk can also be seen as a musical reflection of industrial experiences of African-American life. For Brown’s musical sensibility of clockwork efficiency and rhythmic exactitude conjure up the demanding conditions of the factories of the North, of its manual labour and piecemeal work developed around the demands of Taylorism. Brown too, knew the ardours of manual labour504 and through funk the repetition experienced by the working class African American is transformed into a musical aesthetic.

In fact, I contend that funk is yet another musical expression of the technological environment impacting upon human thought. Funk can thus be considered another chapter in a long and much considered techno-musical lineage. The incorporation of technologies that stood outside the traditional musical world and their effect on 20th century music in particular, have already attracted much scholarly attention. In general these include the work of the Futurists and their embrace of the aesthetics that emerged out of World War I,505 there is the transformation, after the Second World been prominently interpolated into the intro music for The Rolling Stones recent Bigger Bang tour of (2005-2006) and witnessed by myself at Telstra Stadium, Sydney on 11th April 2006. As stated in the James Brown entry of Wikipedia, “James Brown remains the world's most sampled recording artist, and Funky Drummer is itself the most sampled individual piece of music”(Wikipedia.com 2006). 503 (Stubblefield 2003) 504 Brown had been working since a small child. In the documentary, Soul Brother No. 1 (1978) Brown discusses looking on the streets for “clinkers”, pieces of coal which had already been burned to try and keep warm as one of his childhood preoccupations. 505 The artist and writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti founded the Futurist movement in 1909. “In a series of polemical manifestos, Marinetti asserted the necessity of throwing out all previous conceptions of art…in order to develop a new kind, suitable for an age based upon technology”(Morgan 1991: 114). However, it was the Italian painter Luigi Russolo that would actually affect the music of the Futurists rather than the more classically trained musicians in the movement

162 War, within jazz from the big band style to more insular be-bop movement. These developments were due as much to new technologically imposed conditions that went hand in hand with economic and social conditions. Funk maintains its position in the evolution of this tradition.

I believe that extrapolating the extra-machinic and industrial influences that might have impacted on the funk aesthetic has been overlooked. For understanding the industrial nature of funk might help to understand working class blacks playing working class music, and this might ultimately account for the sense of sheer uncompromising force that could be heard in funk. In this respect the bigger the band, the mightier the force, and it is for example, for this reason that I believe that Brown, however unconsciously, would retreat into a collective approach over a more virtuosic one. I therefore turn to this collective approach first.

This collective approach would lead to an extraordinary new set of approaches to the use of instrumentality within the composition. For instance, one can only marvel at the invention displayed in the guitar figures of Jimmy Nolen, Brown’s long serving guitarist. Nolen’s style of playing mostly consisted of minimal percussive patterns, the effect not being unlike a jab to the gut every offbeat. If Nolen would pick up several notes of a chord, the bass player may share another, and the horns could be left to pick up the rest. Each part was a cog in a broader machine, broken down into piecemeal functions. Brown would select from a reserve of musicians, which he kept on hand to attempt to replicate any particular sound that he might have in mind. For example, Brown would famously keep a reserve of drummers on hand506 to translate the aforementioned grunts and groans in a more accessible form of music. The musician that most successfully captured Brown’s vision would become the player for

(Morgan 1991: 115). Russolo issued his own manifesto, “The Art of Noises” in 1913, which culminated in the production of a series of new instruments called intonarumori (“noise intoners”) (Morgan 1991: 115-116). The Futurists’ “…wish ‘to conquer the infinite variety of noise-sound’ has remained a recurring interest throughout the century” (Morgan 1991: 117). 506 Live At the Apollo era Brown drummer Clayton Fillyau tells Jim Payne of Brown’s strategy of keeping several drummers in reserve, “I’ve been on shows where we had five drummers and five drum sets set up! And believe me, when you hit that stage, there would be no messing around. All five drummers would be looking at James Brown, ‘cause when he pointed his finger at you…that next beat, you better be there” (Payne 1996: 29).

163 the track. The drummers in particular, were most susceptible to this type of behaviour.507

There was almost a prefabricated approach to constructing music in this way with Brown’s grunts and groans as a sometimes undecipherable blueprint. This was contrary to the virtuosity of jazz tradition, of author-genius conventions that still inhabited the broader existence of the artist in the West, at least. It also gave a new emphasis on the invocation of a type of Heideggarian “standing reserve”508 of beats and rhythms, pre-empting the methods that we now associate with digital technology.

In the midst of this, Brown’s desire to emulate whites’ wielding of power was perhaps a source of his own tyrannical behaviour, bearing in mind the detrimental effect this had on the morale of his musicians and further indication of Brown’s complex relation with the Protestant work ethic and how it might reflect industrial practice. Although, in fairness, Brown was perhaps the hardest on himself. As the “hardest working man in showbusiness”509 led by example, the sheer intensity of Brown’s physically and mentally arduous stage show required an extraordinary stamina and the pace was so extraordinarily demanding that most musicians would find themselves having to leave eventually, due to burn out.510 Perhaps the demands Brown placed on himself and the band was his peculiar way of paying respect to his audiences who themselves had to work so hard in often low-paying jobs to make his shows. That respect was to go through the ritual of being worked to death on stage, in a way

507 This is precisely what happened with the making of the proto-funk of the single Let Yourself Go (1966). Recorded fresh after a show at the Latin Casino, the record is seminal to the burgeoning funk style, so minimalist and driven that the future is in place. As Brown sang in that track, “...it ain’t just Soul…it’s just a rhythm and blues” (Brown 1991b). From this time, each successive single would spend more time hammering away at fewer chords with more ferocity. In the process, Brown became increasingly finicky when it came to the exact rhythms to set the baby in motion. This can be heard in the re-released version of Let Yourself Go507, as the brief section where Brown is instructing the drummers was included on the Star Time box set (Brown 1991b). This newly appended prologue is particularly illuminating. We hear Brown telling drummer John "Jabo" Starks to hit the snare whenever the singer grunted "uh uh", watched from the sidelines by Stubblefield who was replaced after not being able to deliver during the first couple of run-throughs (Geoff Brown 1996: 144-145). 508 The concept of “standing reserve” is an attitude towards nature as exploitable resource and valued in terms of its utility. For Heidegger the essence of technology might be found in the way that such technology allows us to view nature as merely a passive resource to be exploited as “standing reserve”. Heidegger discusses this idea of technology as a producing in us the attitude of nature-as-resource in his famous essay “The Question Concerning Technology” (Heidegger 1977). 509 (Weinger & White 1991: 15) 510 “Everybody would get worn out in that show eventually. Nobody would last over a long period of time” (Stubblefield in Payne 1996: 62).

164 playing out the daily intolerable circumstances of their existence. Brown was acutely aware that he was singing to the average African-American person, articulating ways of feeling and of setting up a communal atmosphere that makes his live albums so enticing. Thus as times got tougher, so would Brown’s sound.

An Expedient Production of Territory

There is nothing like a drum to mobilise a people. In the midst of the dramatic events of the civil rights struggle, funk had a point to get over. The apparent “simplicity” of its melodic structure enabled it to more expediently produce territory. Dancing was a crucial part of this rhythmically driven aesthetic. As Nelson George has discussed in his Death of Rhythm and Blues, leaving space in the music for dance was intrinsic to funk’s composition.511 As dance was funk’s primary concern, the approach to its composition would necessarily have to reflect such facilitation of affective connections. Funk was so effective at the time precisely because it had successfully elevated rhythmic complexity to the level of attention once reserved for melodic and harmonic concerns. This had the effect of giving a new precedence to rhythmic complexity in popular music. Indeed Brown was dedicated to stripping the music down to rhythmic essentials. His maintenance of such simplicity is evident on the 1967 track Get It Together where Brown exhorts “don’t play so much!”512 Brown would later explain this approach to Gerri Hirshey:

I tried the heavy approach two or three times, and every time I tried, I’d get stopped. Just have to keep coming back and simplifying it. It’s a funny thing. You make a little three-finger chord on the guitar and they’ll sell a million copies, and the minute the cat spreads his hand across the neck, you can’t give the record away.513

Whilst Brown hardly neglected to showcase the abilities of his musicians - indeed his calls to long time serving saxophonist Maceo Parker often constituted a major compositional element in itself - the solos were generally contained and always subordinate to the maintenance of rhythmic unity of the ensemble. Moreover, solos were almost always under Brown’s strict command as the musicians were directed

511 (George 1988: 102) 512 (Brown 1991a) 513 (Brown in Hirshey 1984: 289)

165 into keeping the groove together. Brown’s troupes for the most part were very much treated like the hired hands that he perceived them to be and they were for the most part denied the individual notoriety enjoyed by their notable jazz counterparts. Indeed funk sent out a clear signal whereby the nature of the beat itself, encased in its hard driving and emphatic rhythms, was the most expedient way of creating a new territory via new temporalities. Brown’s unprecedented approach to rhythm in general has been often remarked upon. In the 1978 biographical film, soul Connection,the commentator remarks that “…Brown treated his band like a drum”,514 an analysis reiterated in subsequent commentaries.515

It was thus important that the Brown band were a driving ensemble that elaborated collective repetition rather than individual virtuosity. The logic here is one I have already pointed to, namely that the repetitive beat is the most expedient way to establish new territory within the immediate existence of those present. Repetition demands attention, even as we unconsciously attempt to differentiate each instance of it. This is perhaps why it can be so frustrating to try and listen to. Yet, at the same time, this is what hooks us and repetitious music can often make a more expedient claim on territory than that of a more melodically complex music. This is perhaps why we are subjected to repetitive techno being blared from cars, rather than bursts of chamber music. The impact of the beat maintains its consistency over time and space rather than breaking up as it hits the audience’s consciousness. The movement-image conventions of jazz were perhaps not as suited to the task of maintaining territorial intensity required at the crucial time when funk was being developed. This became increasingly pertinent in the aftermath of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination and the decline of the spirit driving soul. A new music would have to make up territory fast, to compensate its audiences for the lost ground that was occurring socially.

For all of these reasons, funk begins to shape up as an exemplary expression that apprehends a minor temporality. It shares attributes with a minor literature. Its

514 (Maben 1978) 515 Brackett includes this quote from Robert Palmer, “Brown would sing a semi-improvised, loosely organized melody, that wandered while, the band riffed rhythmically on a single chord, the horns tersely punctuating Brown’s declamatory phrases. With no chord changes and precious little melodic variety to sustain listener interest, rhythm became everything. Brown and his musicians and arrangers began to treat every instrument and voice in the group as if each were a drum” (Palmer in Brackett: 144).

166 egalitarian nature allowed for quick circuits of dialogic exchange. For instance Brown’s prodigious output, up to eight albums a year enabled him to maintain an intimate and ongoing dialogue with his audience, although Brown always made sure to address his core audience, which can be witnessed in the playful exchanges with the group that must have left more than a few members of the audience scratching their heads at the time. Evidence of the more minor of Brown’s work is to be found in tracks such as There Was a Time (1967). Such tracks must have appeared increasingly esoteric to white audiences, even if they were still listening. Fundamentally a one chord vamp, the song enticed the audience to think about life down south replete with call and response where the audience would chant in unison with Brown’s cajoling lyric, “…the name of the place was Augusta GA…”516 These were songs in dialogue with the diaspora from the South, migrating to the larger cities. They may have also put some of the church holiness back into the music, through the increasingly hypnotic grooves that Brown embarked on around the same period.

Funk would become the rhythmic blueprint of repetition that would provide Brown with his signature forms right up until the present day. Following Brown’s lead at King Records, other stables began their own variations on funk aesthetics through labels such as Stax and Hi Records, both based in Memphis, and even Motown began to change its tune in the late 1960s, with the more funk oriented, Norman Whitfield productions.517 Geoff Brown further comments that,

[i]n the house Brown built called funk, immediately, every soul singer and his drummer got their "unh unh" in sync and within a year, maybe two, the device was reduced to the level of genuine soul cliché, right alongside crude impersonations of Otis Redding’s "gotta-gotta" and Wilson Pickett’s scream, Brown would experience this sort of imitation to a far more damaging degree, professionally, in the seventies.518

516 (Brown 1967b) 517 These would include Whitfield’s “psychedelic” productions for The Temptations including tracks such as Psychedelic Shack and Cloud #9 (1968) and Papa was a Rolling Stone (1972). For more on the Whitfield productions at Motown see (Vincent 1996: 126) 518 (Geoff Brown 1996: 144-145)

167 Whilst it is difficult to pinpoint exactly when Brown started to call this new formulation, funk, he was in fact beaten to the use of it in a record title. That honour went to Dyke and the Blazers who put out Funky Broadway (1967), which was perhaps more famously covered by Wilson Pickett in the same year. Perhaps the confirmation of funk as a genre was to be heard within the grooves of Brown’s Cold Sweat (1967):

“"Cold Sweat," wrote Cliff White, was almost completely "divorced from other forms of popular music"; soon Brown’s lyrics, “…had reduced themselves to free association, melody had virtually disappeared, the band (now under the direction of Pee Wee Ellis) featured two, and sometimes three, drummers in live performance to match its leader’s ever-more-propulsive drive, and James’s voice was strained to the breaking point - past it, in fact, as sometime during this period he was forced to abandon his characteristic scream for a succession of shrieks, whinnies, grunts, and emphatic Good God!s, with normal speech reduced to a husky whisper that could only serve as a scarred warning to other singers”.519

By way of confirmation of this statement Jerry Wexler, the legendary Atlantic producer of Aretha Franklin and other soul stars commented, “”Cold Sweat” deeply affected the musicians I knew… It just freaked them out. For a time, no one could get ahandleonwhattodonext.”“520 Brown’s unorthodoxy meant that an untrained musician was, by sheer force of will, driving music into formerly “non-musical” places and would enable previously unforeseen affordances in the evolution of black music. To quote Fred Wesley: “Do you think you could have accepted a tune as radical as “Cold Sweat” from a less bizarre artist”? 521

519 (White in Guralnick 1986: 242-243) 520 (Wexler in White and Weinger: 31) 521 (Wesley 2002: 302). Wesley also refers to his attempts outside of the James Brown band to avoid playing Cold Sweat with his own group, as he thought that Cold Sweat was musically “ridiculous” (Wesley 2002: 302). Nevertheless, Wesley would have to bow to the pressure of his own ensemble and play it. Wesley accounts for the near mutiny of his band due to his refusal to include it in the set-list, as he thought it was musically wrong and unworthy of his attention, “A few people had requested some of these songs, such as "Cold Sweat" by James Brown. I had heard "Cold Sweat" and was very unimpressed with it. It was not on par with the material we were playing. It only had one change, the words made no sense at all, and the bridge was musically incorrect. I wasn’t about to abandon our upscale style and selection of music and sink to the level of a little honky-tonk sissy singer and sound like every other band up and down the pike” (Wesley 2002: 302). It wasn’t long after that that Wesley would join Brown as accomplice in making this “bizarre” music.

168 One of the most prominent features to characterise Cold Sweat was Brown’s increasingly deconstructive (and reconstructive) approach to the music - stripping it down and building it back up.

As I shall discuss in chapter 7, a crucial point here is that this process of stripping the music right down to its bare musical skeleton can be seen in retrospect as the production of an affordance that would allow a compositional potential for the digital technologies of the future. In the Modulations book that accompanied the Modulations documentary on the history of electronic music, Chris Sharp comments on the meaning of the break for contemporary dance music:

However you want to define it, the logic of the breakbeat is hip-hop’s gift to the world and the most crucial development in popular music since James Brown almost invented the "give the drummer some" interlude with "Cold Sweat" in 1967.522

Don’t Do No Soloing…Just Keep What You Got

There are a number of key elements to emerge from Brown’s apprehension of a minor temporality. I have already discussed such key characteristics as his emphasis on “the one” or the grunts and screams used to “cut” the repetition and to strengthen it in its reiteration. But there is another factor to highlight and that is the increased attention given to the rhythm section itself as exposed by an emphasis on the ‘break beat’. The ‘break beat’ was the part of the record where Brown would isolate particular sections of the track. Brown would transform such breakbeats into an integrated part of the internal logic of the track. For Brown, the breakbeat was not a solo showcase so much as a revelation of the mechanics within his musical machine. In particular, there was the increasing emphasis on isolating the break. Brown had hardly invented it, as the break beat was a feature of jazz musicians for years prior. However, Brown made it an inherent part of the composition rather than it simply acting as a diversion. For example, one of his most famous dialogues on record is when he is preparing drummer Clyde Stubblefield for the ‘break’ on the track Funky Drummer (1970), where Brown says to the drummer, “don’t do no soloing brother/just keep what you

522 (Sharp 2000: 153)

169 got/don’t turn it loose/cause it’s a mother”.523 In effect this translates as - a solo will only dilute the intensity of the groove.

When Brown strips the music down to its essence in the ‘engine room’ of the rhythm section, it provides the most overt demonstration of music as force and it is such wilful adherence to continuity and drive, rather than artifice that elaborates how funk might be seen as a rendering visible of a series of broader existential forces. That “rendering visible” that Deleuze attributes to the art of Paul Klee:

…the painter does "not render the visible, but renders visible"; implied here are forces that are not visible, and for a musician, it’s the same thing: the musician does not render the audible, he/she renders audible forces that are not audible, making audible the music of the earth, music in which he/she invents, exactly like the philosopher.524

Brown’s deconstructive approach to music means breaking it down to its most essential and therefore territorialising force. I have argued so far that funk was a harnessing of such forces. It is through such processes in funk’s rendering visible of forces that the minor’s approach to art becomes one of resistance525 to narrative and the reiteration of convention and instead experimenting with the forces that might create the existence of new territories. This is why it is important to note here that the political power of his work is not necessarily achieved by what it attempts to “say” – in fact lyricism might become mere rhetoric or dogma, but by using the force of the rhythm to pursue the forces that constitute new forms of expression and becoming. In this respect what took Brown beyond the strictures of the soul aesthetic was that he could give the body a new emphasis, and emphasise the body as the real deal of becomings leading into the future.

Brown’s music was positive towards the future not just through narrative, but also through activating the presence of bodily potential in the new. The rendering visible of the presence of the body, of what were previously invisible bodies and untapped bodily forces becomes a sort of directly expressed “manifesto” of the possible in itself. Such a rendering visible of these forces helps us to understand why Deleuze

523 (Brown 1986) 524 (Deleuze & Parnet 1996) 525 (Deleuze 1986: 173-4)

170 says that a belief in the world is a belief in the body. The way Brown screamed on mainstream TV, together with his frenetic dancing style challenged the dominance of a more discreet Puritan ethic. In the words of “Blackie” a member of Australian punk rockers The Hard-Ons, “[h]ow hardcore is this man, that during a racist era he would strut across the stage dripping in sweat, singing “I feel like a sex machine”?”526. Whilst I had previously discussed Sidran’s lament about soul being nothing but party music, Sidran makes an exception when discussing the music of James Brown:

It should be stressed that James Brown’s screams and the two drummers he employed to generate an enormous rhythmic dynamism were more revolutionary than were his somewhat controversial lyrics, which included “I’m Black and I’m Proud” and “Don’t want nobody to give me nothing, open the door, I’ll get it myself,” especially because they were not recognized as being revolutionary. The techniques of the oral culture thus met with little opposition and altered the perception, and so the behaviour, of young Americans in the privacy of their own homes.527

Of course, to be minor in the sense meant here is not necessarily just a divorce from the major. Rather it is to disrupt the dominance of the major from within.

Brown was of course becoming increasingly visible to the mainstream, enjoying exposure on the previously off-limits bastions of family entertainment such as the Ed Sullivan Show in 1966. In this respect Brown could claim to be the living testament to some of the gains being made by the civil rights movement. Furthermore he was able to speak to a broad cross-section of mainstream Afro-America in a language that was discernibly theirs. Many of them recognised a reflection of Black cultural backgrounds in Brown’s mediation of techniques gleaned from his background in the church. No other performer had so brazenly modulated the voice into the inimitable screams, grunts and squeals for which Brown is synonymous.528 These utterances articulate an emergent minor presence far better than the enunciation of the easily framed and common sense “see-able and the say-able” ever could.

Amiri Baraka had once hailed the “…wilfully harsh, anti-assimilationist sound of

526 (Blackie 2001) 527 (Sidran 1995: 147) 528 For instance the very same type of vocalising that was directed at me every time I mentioned the subject of this thesis.

171 bebop”,529 as the epitome of Black musical resistance. However, by the time of his 1967, book Black Music, Baraka would actually revise this in favour of what Brown was doing at the time:

James Brown’s screams…are more "radical" than most jazz musicians sound…Certainly his sound is "further out" than Ornette’s. And that sound has been a part of Black music, even out in them backwoods churches since the year one. It is just that on the white man’s instrument it is "new." So, again, it is just life need and interpretation.530

Seen perhaps from another angle, Brown asserted political power precisely because people didn’t even recognise such uses of the body as political. Here again, the reduction of language – its deconstruction – would be crucial. One can juxtapose Brown’s performances with performances of other soul stars like Marvin Gaye or Smokey Robinson to see how Brown had slowly transformed vocal technique. Brown’s style was not the smooth dulcet tones of his peers. It was the harsher tone of the autodidactic, based on something between singing and ‘screaming”. Like the distilled beat of funk, Brown’s inimitable screams could be seen to reflect all of the horror experienced by African-Americans across time within a singular utterance. At the same time, Brown also affirms the minor nature of the music. His push into the mainstream set the stage for the uncompromising gospel drenched vocals of an Otis Redding or an Aretha Franklin.

In addition to his stripped back utterances, Brown continued to pay special attention to reiterating and even manufacturing street slang, designed to galvanise the minor sections of the community. In this sense Brown is a true minor figure, constructing another path that dared to speak in a language that was not trying to assimilate into the major, and just plain could not:

How many styles or genres or literary movements, even very small ones, have only one single dream: to assume a major function in language, to offer themselves as a sort of state language, an official language (for example, psychoanalysis today, which would like to be a master of the signifier, of metaphor, of wordplay). Create the opposite

529(Baraka 1963: 181-182) 530 (LeRoi Jones 1967: 210)

172 dream: know how to create a becoming-minor. (Is there a hope for philosophy, which for a long time has been an official, referential genre? Let us profit from this moment in which antiphilosophy is tryingtobealanguageofpower).531

Brown’s musical thought without image – which as discussed earlier, involves a process perhaps reminiscent of another of 20th century music’s great Idiots, John Cage. Cage famously said, “I have nothing to say and I am saying it”. 532What we may understand by this is that the new requires an espousal of concepts without a discourse. On this point Rajchman proposes that “…one must devise new procedures to free affect from personal feeling, percept from common perception, and in a phrase Deleuze takes from Proust, to create a foreign language in our own language, to be spoken by a people that does not yet exist”. 533 It is also necessary to step “out of time” as it is given to us within common sense. A minor language must be able to articulate the becoming of a future, just as I would argue that Brown’s expression of a minor temporality necessarily intervened and provided a belief in the world when the narratives of soul fell apart. In view of the decline of soul’s appeal to majoritarian assimilation, perhaps it was the more minority oriented sections of the African- American population that were less affected as they had always realised that were not part of that society's narrative anyway.

Emphasising Brown’s focus on the groove is indicative of an investment in a micropolitics rather than the more macropolitical concerns of narrativising. This revised perspective allows us to instead give precedence to the detail of the incremental micropolitics of the music. This provides an insightful analysis into the endurance of its particular aesthetic. This aesthetic – as experienced - provides a set of conditions allowing the virtual potential of bodies to engender new connections and affects. Any limit to the body’s ability to become is always as much a product of social conditions as any inherent physical limitation. Yet becoming does not wait for either of these to “catch up” with its drive forward. Awareness of this fact marks the critical difference between soul saying “…in time” and Brown saying “now”, or the

531 (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 26-27) 532 This famous Cage quote would provide the title for a documentary on the composer made in the late 1980s (Miller 1990) 533 (Rajchman 2000: 10)

173 fundamental difference in outlook between “a change is gonna come” and Papa having “…his brand new bag” and audaciously expressing it.

In this respect, the story of Brown’s funk becomes a story about what a body could do. As we have seen, this involves the re-institution of a belief in the potential of the world – now. Having a belief in the world as it is, is fundamental to experimenting with the body. This is a belief in new relations to the world that may hopefully move beyond those imposed by a “common sense” image of thought. Hence the reason we turn to music and performing artists is because both push the boundaries of what a body can do in the world as it stands. A belief in the world is also a belief in the capacities of bodies to overcome the stories that define their actions. This is where the world of present, real potential becomes that of a “people to come” – in motion, in becoming, this can only begin with new kinds of bodies. Why would an African- American want to “integrate” into a system of so-called “humanity” that was still lynching people and denying them civil rights based on racial privilege? Again a quote of Malcolm X’s comes to mind, “…we don’t want integration, we want complete separation”,534 and why wouldn’t you? This call for complete separation provided a “line of flight” from the type of thought which had done African- Americans so much damage up to that point.

As such physical separation was unlikely to occur, we might instead attempt to find examples of people separating from universal appeals to integration with dominant culture. This is why I have been so enamoured of Brown’s music over the years, because of his sheer willpower directed towards separating himself from “common sense”, his daring to conceive of new and illogical ways of doing things. There is no better example of this than the type of unorthodox musical approach Brown pursued in the creation of funk, to which I will now turn my attention.

534 (Malcolm X 1992)

174 CHAPTER SIX FUNK AS THOUGHT WITHOUT IMAGE

Proceeding from the last chapter’s discussion of how Brown’s more temporally dominant music would diverge from the movement-image oriented forms of musical composition, in this chapter I will attempt to describe how this radical shift might be reflective of Deleuze’s notion of “thought without image” as discussed in Difference and Repetition.

It is through such “thought without image” that I will assess Brown’s creative leaps. Having established this idea, I will, ascribe to Brown the creative naivety of the character referred to by Deleuze as the “Idiot”.535 Through this idea, we might more properly account for the irrational connections made in the name of funk. As Brown’s music moved away from the neat order of the movement-image way of thinking, we could say that he facilitated a necessary plunge into abstraction that all becoming requires. For as Deleuze remarks in Difference and Repetition:“…thetheoryof thought is like painting: it needs that revolution which took art from representation to abstraction. This is the aim of a theory of thought without image”.536

We might begin to think of funk as a necessary force of abstraction within popular music composition. In her book on Brown, Cynthia Rose described him as a surrealist,537 although she does not extrapolate on that idea any further. This is a pity, because the surreal the nature of Brown’s work deserves more attention. In a June 2006 feature article in Rolling Stone entitled, “Being James Brown”, the writers describe James Brown’s approach to music as being “…like a filmmaker who gets interested in the background scenery and fires the screenwriter and actors, except that instead of ending up with experimental films nobody wanted to watch, he forged a style of music so beguilingly futuristic that it made everything else melody, lyrics,

535 (Deleuze 1994: 130) 536 (Deleuze 1994: 276) 537 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 38). To describe Brown as a “surrealist” is an enticing proposition, and despite Rose calling the proceeding chapter “The Surrealist Who Came in From the Snow” (the snow referring to his brief cameo in the mid-1960s film Ski Party), this chapter on the construction of funk actually does not take this idea further, but rather leaves the reader to draw their own conclusions.

175 verse-chorus-verse - sound antique”.538 Here we could cite the almost preposterous, unrelenting one-chord tracks such as Money Won’t Change You (1966), When You Touch Me (I Just Can’t Stand Myself) (1968) and Licking Stick-Licking Stick (1968), which sound just as audacious, even downright bizarre, forty years on.

Brown’s Departure

This pursuit of musical experimentation, which would emerge as funk, required Brown to break from accepted musical conventions. Yet, whilst Brown’s pioneering spirit continues to attract retrospective plaudits, his musicians did not share such enthusiasm. Brown’s musically “educated” band members were of the view that his funk prototype was simplistic and unsophisticated and therefore not to be taken particularly seriously. At any given time Brown’s band would harbour a core of abundantly talented jazz players, such as Fred Wesley, Alfred “Pee Wee” Ellis and Maceo Parker, to name a few of the most celebrated. These were musicians that were more comfortable playing be-bop. As ex-James Brown bandleader, Alfred "Pee Wee" Ellis would later say, “…he was some other stuff for me; I’d been studying Sonny Rollins”.539

To maintain the sense of control needed to impose his own particular form of chaosmos over his learned personnel, Brown famously retreated into a rather autocratic style of leadership. This despotism was often a demeaning and debilitating experience and, from time to time, the musicians would avenge such maltreatment, belittling their employer’s musical ability. In Fred Wesley’s recent book Hit Me Fred: Confessions of a Sideman (2003) Brown’s former bandleader provides a most enlightening insight into the trials and tribulations of working with the “Godfather of soul”. Of particular note is Wesley’s recollection of the antics of former trumpetist Waymon Reed whom the author cites as one of the most consistently confrontational members of the group:

In the dressing room, he [Reed] took out his horn and for hours and more hours played parts of Count Basie’s ‘shiny Stockings”, pausing

538 (Lethem 2006) As I used the proQuest e-journal version, page numbers were not available. 539 (Ellis in Cynthia Rose 1990: 51)

176 between licks to laugh real loud and say stuff like, ‘that’s real music”, not the honky-tonk stuff we have to play on this gig.540

The musicians’ collective frustration was compounded by the fact that playing popular music was a far more lucrative proposition than that which was generally offered in the jazz world. For example, the young Pee Wee Ellis had worked with Miles Davis541 and Sonny Rollins but left after a lucrative proposition communicated via Waymond Reed, although Ellis did in fact leave Rollins to join Brown because he was curious about the experimentation that was coming from the Brown camp.542 Whilst Ellis would leave after a four-year tenure, his imprint is perhaps the most lasting in terms of bringing to Brown’s music a more abstract jazz flavour.

This state of affairs invariably meant that the musicians would have to subject themselves to a subordinate role in a comparatively lowbrow genre. Indeed the more prominent members of the James Brown bands looked upon their tenure with Brown as a stepping-stone to a higher calling within the jazz world. For instance, the cantankerous Waymon Reed went on to play with Max Roach and the Count Basie Orchestra, and was later joined by Fred Wesley, whilst “Pee Wee” Ellis would go on to assume the directorship of Van Morrison’s band.543 With such musical ambition, the musicians’ animosity toward Brown’s restricted musical needs is perhaps less surprising. To add further insult to injury Brown would subsequently bask in the acclaim afforded his revolutionary funk style, despite the fact that he did not even understand basic music theory. As Fred Wesley explains:

Simple things like knowing the key would be a big problem for James. So, when James would mouth out some guitar part, which might or might not have had anything to do with the actual song being played, Jimmy or Country [former James Brown guitarists] would have to attempt to play it simply because James was still in charge. We all had

540 (Wesley 2002: 105) 541 In fact Pee Wee credits this experience with Miles preceding his tenure in the James Brown band as having an effect on his co-authorship of Brown’s Cold Sweat - Pee Wee: “I brought my jazz influence to James Brown, which is how things we did together came about. Like, "Cold Sweat" came from my Miles Davis experience...When you listen to his song ‘so What" closely, you hear "Cold Sweat"“(Trischler & Ellis 2005) 542 (Trischler & Ellis 2005) 543 Some would protest (reasonably) at Van Morrison being referred to as jazz, so I will add that “Pee Wee” has also “…served as musical director and arranger for the CTI label's influential fusion imprint Kudu, overseeing sessions for Esther Phillips, George Benson, and Hank Crawford”(All Music Guide 2005).

177 to pretend that we knew what James was talking about. Nobody ever said, ‘that’s ridiculous" or "You don’t know what you’re talking about".544

Maintaining the job of bandleader required the successful translation of Brown’s grunts and groans (for the uninitiated, think an early version of “beatboxing”), into releasable product. As "Pee Wee" Ellis informs the reader of Lenny Henry Hunts the Funk (1992),545 Brown would merely grunt certain “feels” and then demand the current bandleader translate this into musical notation.546 In glaring contradistinction to the musical prowess of his esteemed alumnus, the only virtuosity Brown is known to have displayed (his organ playing is a source of contention) was his ability to mouth sounds to his bandleaders:

I kept on putting together James’s hums and grunts and groans, and making music out of them, no matter how stupid I thought it was. I began to take pride in my ability to make something out of anything or something out of nothing or something out of any combination of things. I gave James no trouble when he laid out formats to songs. I simply took the orders as he gave them, never questioning, and worried about how to make it happen later. But sometimes I had trouble getting the musicians to accept such unorthodox patterns as readily as I did. I had to argue, convince, trick, and manipulate guys into doing all kinds of unusual things.547

From this perspective, one could hardly blame Fred Wesley for believing Brown’s music to be a great embarrassment, especially as he would find himself having to negotiate respected studio musicians to play this “silly music”.548 All in all, Brown’s past employees often express concern about their association with Brown’s music.

544 (Wesley 2002: 97) 545 (Know & Bragg 1992) 546 A brief snippet of Brown grunting the beat of Cold Sweat can be heard on the 1996 compilation, Foundations of Funk- A Brand New Bag 1964-1969 (1996)(James Brown 1996). 547 (Wesley 2002: 158-159) 548 Wesley provides a rather interesting feedback about Brown’s “silly music” from famous session man, Gordon Edwards, “On one of the rare occasions when James was in the studio as I did a session with the studio guys, Gordon Edwards, the great bassist, was having trouble understanding what James was trying to get him to play. Finally Gordon, totally frustrated, got up, packed his bass, and told James to his face that he was crazy. He then faced me (I had been trying to help James explain what he wanted) and told me that I was crazy too, for understanding what James was talking about, then stormed out of the studio. Another time James was trying to show Ralph McDonald, the great percussionist, a beat on his congas. McDonald had heard stories about James, including the Gordon Edwards story, and after only a few seconds simply walked out. After that, James hardly ever came to the studio when the session cats were there. He would wait until the basic tracks were done and they were gone, then would come in and terrorize me. He knew I could take it” (Wesley 2002: 158-159).

178 Fred Wesley, for instance, has professed embarrassment over the compositions with which he was involved, even though they were some of Brown’s most popular titles:

…I was getting credit for a lot of the music, as most people were looking at the music as James’s and mine together. While I admit that I did most of the implementation of the music, the concepts were practically all his. It didn’t sit right with me to be getting credit for music, especially since, frankly, I didn’t think it was all that great…I got this sick feeling when anyone told me how great “Pass The Peas” was.549

Such disillusioning accounts of Brown’s unorthodox approach to composition piqued my curiosity. How did Brown manage to maintain the level of agency required, not only to direct such talent, but also to synthesise such differences of musical opinion into the cohesive and enduring influence on popular music it has since become? The James Brown story points to an interesting inconsistency in the supposed correlation between hands-on pragmatism and its relation to actual musical agency, instead providing a tale of ruthless determination victorious over traditionally recognised “ability”. How do we think about this tremendous innovation achieved by a man, who by all accounts, could barely play an instrument?

The Idiot

In an effort to address the question of how Brown managed his inimitable compositional approach, application of Deleuze’s concept of the “Idiot” is beneficial. This is not, it should be said at the outset, to speak ill of the “Godfather of soul”. On the contrary, this section attempts to illustrate how a certain type of naiveté was necessary to realise one of music’s most creative forces. For Brown would exemplify the necessity of “illogic” in the face of a dogmatic image of thought.

The Idiot character plays a pivotal role in Deleuze’s quest for a way to conceive of a philosophy undaunted by the presuppositions of a “dogmatic” image of thought. This “dogmatic” image of thought can be rather generally perceived as any institutionally dominant form of thinking, or the propensity to reinforce already dominant modes of thought. It is in the “The Image of Thought” chapter in Difference and Repetition that

549 (Wesley 2002: 172)

179 Deleuze develops the Idiot as a type of perspectival character or, what he would later term with Guattari, a “conceptual personae”.550 The Idiot will ask, “…what would it mean to start philosophy “undogmatically”, or with an image that secretes no illusions of transcendence”.551Deleuze and Guattari have referred to dogmatic images of thought as ‘state thought” because of the attempts to institute the general in to universalised and transcendent laws of “common sense”. In this respect, our notions and practices of “common sense” are always in danger of involving dogmatic images of thought in that their propositions are those of uniform objectivity and rationality by default and thus limit our perception of difference.

Deleuze attacks the dogmatic image of thought as it harbours the presupposition in philosophy. Deleuze arrives at his critique of presuppositions via a critique of Descartes’ cogito, where “I think therefore I am” becomes a basic proposition in need of no further explanation. For Deleuze, this becomes a position that then “naturally” evolves into “common sense”. For Deleuze, the assumption of the cogito is subjective presupposition that will generally govern many common images of thought.552

Yet whilst Deleuze maintains a fundamental disagreement with Descartes over the cogito’s dogmatic image of thought, he does allow for the fact that the concept was also revolutionary for philosophy too. The cogito was revolutionary in the sense that its egalitarian nature appealed to the perspective of the untrained philosopher. Deleuze argues that Descartes' concept ascribes sense a common property, “…it has the form of ‘Everybody knows…’”.553 The cogito thus liberated “common sense” – but this would become a problem, as common sense became institutionalised and upheld for the sake of its own perpetuity. To break with the overwhelming institutional and dogmatic power of common sense requires a naïve figure. Rather than maintain an adherence to the ‘subjective presupposition” of “I think therefore I am”, the Idiot becomes a champion of an even more egalitarian philosophy.

550 ThereisawholechapterinWhat is Philosophy? dedicated to conceptual personae. The relationship of the Idiot as a conceptual personae can be found near the beginning of the chapter(Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 61-63) 551 (Rajchman 2000: 36) 552 (Deleuze 1994: 129-130) 553 (Deleuze 1994: 130)

180 It then opposes the “idiot” to the pedant, Eudoxus to Epistemon, good will to the overfull understanding, the individual man endowed only with his natural capacity for thought to the man perverted by the generalities of his time. The philosopher takes the side of the idiot as though of a man without presuppositions.554

The Idiot exemplifies how a departure from subjective presuppositions can overcome the apparent objectivity of “public” thought, just as Brown would challenge what “music” should be. I emphasise the word should here because it is precisely that general moral character that informs public forms of common sense. Primary to this moral imperative is the maintenance of the identity of the concept, conceptual propositions that become the overarching figures of public opinion, and also by nature the antithesis of becoming. This is why Deleuze, despite his reservations about the orthodoxy it would become, praises Descartes’ Idiot for espousing a form of “private” thought to the more “public” and uncontested institutional thought of Descartes’ time. As John Rajchman comments in his excellent overview of the philosopher’s project, The Deleuze Connections:

With such Idiots, the pragmatic presuppositions of philosophy shift, revealing new relations between “private” and “public”. One example (not mentioned by Deleuze) might be Wittgenstein, always ill at ease with his public professorship and with the emergence of a new analytic ‘scholasticism”, who declared ‘the philosopher is a citizen of no circle of ideas; that is just what makes him a philosopher.555

It is important to realise that there are two sides to Deleuze’s engagement with the cogito here. On the one hand, Descartes’ cogito is responsible for the presupposition that Deleuze is critical of. On the other hand it is in this “private” and subjective thought that Descartes assumes a private kind of thought, available to all, which can take the form of “outside thought”.556 “Outside thought” can be perceived as the antithesis of a “state philosophy” and is fundamental to any becoming. Hence what we are interested in is not the creation of a new common sense, but a continuation of the Idiot’s power of naïvety to cultivate such “private thought” as “outside thought”. This is a thought that can in fact counteract State thought’s priority towards a homogenous and universalising “common sense”. As Brian Massumi remarks in the

554 (Deleuze 1994: 130) 555 (Rajchman 2000: 38) 556 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 376-377)

181 translator’s foreword to A Thousand Plateaus, this “state thought” or “public thought” is characterised as a form of “...representational thinking that has characterised Western metaphysics since Plato” and which “…reposes on a double identity: of the thinking subject, and of the concepts it creates and to which it lends its own presumed attributes of sameness and constancy”.557 In praise of such “private” thought, Deleuze has famously championed those figures that dare to be naïve in the face of conventional “common sense”. This “private” thought is the domain of the Idiot who has not the sufficient knowledge to uphold the dominant image of thought.

All artists must be Idiots in this sense. If the “artist” harbours under the illusion of what it is, say, to be a musician and abides by such a dogmatic image, then it is not creative thought at work. Deleuze prizes naïveté, as, for him, the work of the artist is not to represent, but to create new connections. Thus Brown’s appeal to the private thought of the “common man”, would be the key factor in instituting a necessary and egalitarian musical outlook that was able to create such connections. This would help to endear his work to a new generation of other musical non-literates who would sample him into the future, in turn creating new connections.

The Idiot appears in different guises throughout Deleuze’s work. For instance, the Cartesian Idiot that is found in Difference and Repetition will be subsequently transformed into a Dostoyevskian Russian Idiot by the time we get to Cinema 2.558 John Rajchman says that Deleuze’s series of naïve characters show us, “…that the only way to “start without presuppositions” in philosophy is to become some sort of Russian Idiot, giving up the presumptions of common sense, throwing away one’s “hermeneutic compass” and instead trying to turn one’s “idiocy” into the “idiosyncrasies” of a style of thinking “in other ways”.559

These “other ways” of approaching thought, exemplified by the Idiot, might be perceived in terms of what Deleuze and Guattari referred to as the diagram or map.

557 (Massumi 1988: xi) 558 As Deleuze writes in Cinema 2, ‘Sensory-motor situations have given way to pure optical and sound situations to which characters, who have become seers, cannot or will not react, so great is the Dostoevskian condition as taken up by Kurosawa: in the most pressing situations, The Idiot feels the need to see the terms of a problem which is more profound than the situation, and even more pressing” (Deleuze 1989: 128). 559 (Rajchman 2000: 38)

182 This dynamic idea of the map is one that allows new aspects of territories to come into play. Guattari proposed the diagram, “as an autopoietic machine” which not only gives “…a functional and material consistency, but [also] requires it to deploy its diverse registers of alterity, freeing it from an identity locked into simple structural relations.560 The aim of the diagram is that “[t]he machine’s proto-subjectivity installs itself in Universes of virtuality which extend far beyond its existential territoriality”.561 Quite simply, the function of these diagrammatic machines is to generate flows of relations rather than a fixed spatial representation. This allows a more flexible means of interpretation of what can happen next. Deleuze and Guattari argue that the map, “…is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification”.562 In other words, when freed from the strictures of the maintenance of identity we can begin to think within the realm of virtual relations. Working with virtual relations, before they are actualised, maintains an orientation towards becoming rather than the maintenance of an identity of concepts.

If thought cannot appeal to the identity of “forms” it must entail a more intuitive process. This involves a faith in difference in the potential of virtual relations. This faith in difference is the reason Deleuze attributes the Idiot an instinct for orientation. This is in fact a reorientation of perception that allows the Idiot to perceive new connections that have not otherwise been able to surface. This naïve faith in difference obviously requires a particular audacity and James Brown most certainly had such a quality, as Fred Wesley duly testifies,

Mr. Brown would sometimes come to the gig early and have what we call a “jam”, where we would have to join in with his fooling around on the organ. This was painful for anyone who had ever thought of playing jazz. James Brown’s organ playing was just good enough to fool the untrained ear, and so bad that it made real musicians sick on the stomach.563

Brown fans are rather less likely to so harshly judge the man’s apparent lack of instrumental proficiency, and his idiosyncratic musicianship is of course acceptable to

560 (Guattari 1995: 44) 561 (Guattari 1995: 44) 562 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 12) 563 (Wesley 2002: 110-111)

183 many ears. In fact Brown’s musical talent was of a multi-instrumental capability: the aforementioned penchant for organ, but other notable instrumental contributions to his records include the more than passable drums on several early recordings, including the well known 1962 hit version of Night Train (1962). The judgement of Brown’s peers may thus appear overly harsh as it is posited within the context of the domain of the “real” musician. In spite of such criticism, Brown’s organ or piano accompaniment can be inspirational precisely because of this very incongruity. Instead of trying to maintain a distinction between “good” and “bad” musicianship, the point that I hope to elaborate in this chapter is to show that this concept of the “real” musician is itself a constricting presupposition. In this respect, perhaps part of Brown’s ultimate legacy was his forthright ambivalence toward such a distinction.

In terms of philosophical thought, Deleuze himself attempted to assume the unorthodoxy of the Idiot. Deleuze found it of fundamental importance to challenge a history of philosophy in which thought has a “natural” orientation towards truth, and where notions of common logic and reason will necessarily elaborate this truth. Deleuze is sceptical about the validity of any will-to-truth that implies an apriori nature of thought, with an assumed teleology, meaning and logic.

This is why using Deleuze to approach the music of James Brown is not so strange. My initial attraction to Brown’s music was because of its flagrantly unconventional nature. In fact, some of it is just downright bizarre (even today), especially if viewed in comparison to contemporary musical work of the time. As I have argued in this chapter, such unorthodoxy only further valorised Brown’s unique position within black music, a demonstration perhaps, of his ability to stand somewhat “out of joint” with regard to accepted lineage of the soul aesthetic.

Brown’s unorthodoxy gave him the ability to tap into broader existential forces and catalyse them into a musical aesthetic such as funk. Brown’s musical break moved away from the modernist, virtuosic tendencies expressed in the virtuosic soloing of the modern jazz beloved by his musicians, perhaps because its mode of performance

184 was too individuated and too virtuosic to continue to produce the grounds for a minor becoming where, “…everything takes on a collective value”.564

However, I should add that this is the overriding compositional trend rather than being absolute. In fact, there are more than occasional glimpses of cross-pollination between the two genres to be heard in Brown’s music. For instance, Philip Freeman rather astutely comments in Running the Voodoo Down (2005) that there are moments when Brown’s music veered into the realm of the more avant-garde jazz styles:

One of the most shocking things, though, is the tenor saxophone playing of Robert "Chopper" McCullough. This is what takes James Brown into the realm of the secretly avant-garde. McCullough’s saxophone solos are nothing like those of Maceo Parker, the man he replaced. They’re screaming tirades, nearly on the level of the harshest blowouts ever mustered by players like Pharaoh Sanders or Peter Brötzmann. In fact, on “Super Bad" Brown can be heard exhorting McCullough to greater heights, barking, “Play me some Trane, Robert! Play me some Trane!" That it seems weird, somehow, to think of James Brown being aware of John Coltrane says a lot: about how separate jazz has been kept, as history is written, from other music - particularly other black music.565

Whilst Freeman rightly reminds us of the dangers of such false generic distinctions, the difference perhaps is that Brown limited this type of unbridled soloing, and that he made a particular provision for this new youthful set of recruits besides. 566 Whilst McCollough’s playing does give Superbad an extraordinary urgency, the soloing is more a garnish than a fully-fledged display of virtuosity. In fact one gets the feeling that it is more a showcase to show off the versatility of his musicians, rather than as part of the broader undercurrent of his music. 567 Indeed as Freeman says of the opening segue of two rather distinctly rhythmically different tracks, Brother Rapp/Ain’t It funky Now unbelievably fused into a seamless whole, “It’s that switch,

564 (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 17) 565 (Freeman 2005: 123-124) 566 As can be heard on the Live at the Olympia Paris album, Brown not only lets McCollough solo (as he does on the studio version) but gives Catfish Collins room for a guitar solo and Bootsy room for a bass showcase. It has been said that Brown was less autocratic with these young recruits, mainly because the vast majority of his last band walked out on him and even Brown couldn’t afford to have this happen again after whipping the new blood into shape. 567 Besides the McCollough "‘Trane” impersonation in Superbad (1970), St. Clair Pinckney will do his own impersonation of that one in Escape-ism (1971) and guitarist Bobby Roach will become “B.B. King” for a few bars near the end of Make it Funky (1971).

185 like a high-performance racecar taking a hard left turn…it’s a prime example of, and a tribute to, the glory of collective music-making”. 568

Hence it is fair to maintain that Brown’s collective approach to composition, that of treating his band as rhythm machine, was more reflective of the image of thought behind minor becoming than that of the individual agency that drove the ideal of the virtuoso still prevalent in, say, the accompanying be-bop jazz movement of the time.

However, whether Brown or be-bop, instigating such minor works requires a philosophical leap and one that can only result from the unregimented perspective of the naïve, those who have yet to master and majorise a language. As Deleuze and Guattari have written in regard to minor literature:

…talent isn’t abundant…there are no possibilities for an individuated enunciation that would belong to this or that "master" and that could be separated from a collective enunciation. Indeed, scarcity of talent is in fact beneficial and allows the conception of something other than a literature of masters; what each author says individually already constitutes a common action, and what he or she says or does is necessarily political, even if others aren’t in agreement.569

Whilst Brown was often the nominal “author” of his work, it was funk’s collective approach of interlocking grooves that was so appealing. This approach, in turn, would begin to influence the move away from virtuoso performances into the more abstract forms of composition. An abstraction that might be heard in some of Brown’s most nebulous arrangements, as recounted in the following anecdote by Mike D of the Beastie Boys:

Adam was talking to this guy about the song The Payback by James Brown. And the guy was trying to say that the guitar was playing nothing. But see, I figure, well, if the guitar is playing nothing, then that means the entire band is playing nothing. But, then, that's the best playing ever on, like, any song. And they're all playing nothing.570

568 (Freeman 2005: 123) 569 (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 17) 570 (Mike D in Beastie Boys & Heatley 1999: 50)

186 This is perhaps why other artists were watching Brown’s abstraction with interest and taking notes. Perhaps the ultimate test of the artist was a willingness to put their previous identities on the line, to become by a willingness to forget. The Miles Davis of the late 1960s, who was listening to Brown with interest, would do just that.

In 1968, Miles Davis would publicly declare that “[m]y favorite music is Stockhausen, Tosca and James Brown”571and funk would implore in Davis a redefinition of his own approach to composition, as Bob Belden writes in the liner notes of Davis’ On the Corner (1972):

Davis had moved closer and closer to the funk based sound of James Brown and Sly Stone, and the musicians he hired began to reflect this direction in his tastes. The first musician Davis would hire was Michael Henderson, an accomplished funk bass player. Henderson’s “locked in” bass grooves simplified the ground that Davis wanted to walk on. Davis’ sound headed to the bottom of the band.572

As documented on albums such as Bitches’ Brew (1971) and On the Corner (1972) Davis’ “radical” turn in the early 1970s marked by this stylistic shift to an emphasis on groove rather than solos:573

Miles followed his interest in Brown’s experimental funk "down into a deep African- thing, a deep African-American groove, with a lot of emphasis on drums and rhythm, and not on individual solos." When Miles added Brown’s funk, Sly Stone’s rhythmically innovative soul, and Hendrix’s rock to his musical mix, the results were spectacular.574

Given Miles attention to Brown’s work at this time, there is an acute irony in the fact that a man who was maligned among his own band for his apparent musical ineptitude would end up influencing the very musicians they looked up to. Whilst Brown’s personnel were occupied with dreams of being recognised as “proper” musicians, Brown’s innovations were to have direct aesthetic implications on the evolution of

571 (Davis in Werner 2000: 139) 572 (Belden 2000: 6) see also (Werner 2000: 139) 573 There were of course many different influences that had inspired Davis’ “electric period” and whilst for the interests of my own argument I emphasise Davis’ new found interest in groove, I also take note of other essays written on the albums including Jeremy Gilbert’s “Becoming-Music: The Rhizomatic Moment of Improvisation” (2001) which for the sake of his own argument emphasises instead the raga, drone and Indian instrumentation on an album such as On the Corner (Gilbert 2004a: 132-133). 574 (Werner 2000: 139)

187 jazz itself and in the process helping to render any dogmatic image of the genre as anachronistic.

In fact I would contend that Brown gave musicians such as Davis a way out of their own musical habits, imploring in them a similar “idiocy”. As witnessed in regard to his contestation of Wynton Marsalis over the jazz “image of thought” in chapter 3, Davis is similarly renowed for his propensity to become, and his reputation is perhaps forged upon his more wilful plunges into the chaosmos. However to make this plunge, requires that one must be able to operate without presupposition, and it is in this respect, that Brown’s success was similarly predicated on such naïvety, a reiteration perhaps of Deleuze’s rationale that it is only the truly naïve that can ignore convention so as to envisage the new world.

Brown as “Seer”

Deleuze similarly wanted to be seen as a naïve philosopher, to make new connections through the appropriation of given concepts. Yet the maintenance of an environment conducive to such “illogic” in human thought should not be perceived as a given. Alternatively, if present, it is all too easily appropriated by the major (as in James Brown’s TV appearance to quell the riots). We could, therefore, say, that it is especially important to carve a niche of becoming so radical that it cannot be easily or simply appropriated by macropolitics. This involves a belief in the world in its purest sense, not a belief in the world as dogma, but a submission to the world for better or worse. Such a submission to the world is here for those seeking an alternative to a majoritarian political solution. The naïvety involved is a characteristic of the seer, who will emerge from the shadow of the movement-image’s agency, to otherwise affirm the potential of imminence by submitting to it. The seer is therefore a type of “spiritual automaton”, in that seers are totally immersed in the present moment of the world’s becoming:

The spiritual automaton is in the psychic situation of the seer, who sees better and further than he can react, that is, think. Which, then, is the subtle way out? To believe, not in a different world, but in a link between man and the world, in love or life, to believe in this as in the impossible, the unthinkable, which none the less cannot but be thought: “something possible, otherwise I will suffocate”. It is this belief that

188 makes the unthought the specific power of thought, through the absurd, by virtue of the absurd.575

This precisely describes Brown’s qualities as “seer”. He works towards bringing previously unthought concepts such as funk, or “the one” for example into the world. Wilful submission to the chaos of the becoming of the world allows his music to emerge with the new percepts and affects produced in the attempt to apprehend the chaos of life. Ultimately, as with Brown and funk, art deliberately invokes the “chaosmos” in order to shake up the reiteration of the habit of the everyday.

Brown’s apparent ineptitude was therefore beneficial to music. His resolve to do things “his way” – combined with a lack of standard musical mastery - ironically requires a type of collective production. Looking at the production of art from the perspective of minor art may be what ultimately distinguishes the great artist from those who are simply technically proficient. In this respect the Idiot will show us,

…not only that philosophical thought is unlearned, but also that it is free in its creations not when everyone agrees or plays by the rules, but on the contrary, when what the rules and who the players are is not given in advance, but instead emerges along with the new concepts created and the new problems posed.576

In presenting my case for Brown’s autodidactic musical pursuits, I should add that I am not necessarily celebrating “poor” musicianship nor preferring a lack of training to working within a tradition. At the same time, the point is that it is difficult, perhaps more difficult, to work outside a tradition than it is to work within one, and maintain the sort of acceptance that Brown had. In fact this is the factor that sets Brown apart from his peers - his courage to affirm difference in the face of ridicule. This is the leap one takes in order to apprehend a “minor temporality”, assisted only by a resolve to believe in the world, but without maintaining an adherence to common sense. Such a deliberate embrace of minority requires the removal of an overarching rule of judgement that mediates a dogmatic image of thought. In doing so, however, possibilities necessarily begin to open up.

575 (Deleuze 1989: 169-170) 576 (Rajchman 2000: 38)

189 Perhaps what makes an artist “cutting edge” is an ability to apprehend a minor temporality and develop it accordingly. The affirmation of creative thought requires a faith in being able to dispense with a self-consciousness based upon dogged introspection. It also requires not succumbing to the illusion of what we should be – perhaps understood more generally as the problem of identity. Perhaps we can say that this is how stars become parodies - they lose that innocent sense of invention or as Deleuze would say, thought without an image. Instead it becomes thought based on habit of capitulating to dogma. In such circumstances, we require the disruptive force of an Idiot.

In the case of soul and James Brown, if the dogma underscoring soul’s movement image was on the decline then the best way to confront this was to challenge dogma in general. If nothing else, this is the role of the artist. As the old narratives and the music that reflected them were having less impact, a new music to represent a new people for a new era would have to be made. At the same time, this implies that many genuinely new artists cannot be understood in the context of their present and are (somewhat monotonously) declared to be “ahead of their time”. A more accurate description might be Deleuze’s concept of the “untimely”, of one who diverges from a linear perspective on time and therefore is “neither temporary or eternal”.577 This untimely nature implies not only an ongoing re-invention of “sense”, but also of a work that is never finished. So, in spite of my fervent praise of Brown’s uncanny ability, this is not tantamount to an affirmation of a teleological vision of the way music should now always be made. Instead, the Idiot poses us a question, and the answer can only be derived from a new musical discourse, or a new work of art that will respond to the intolerable circumstances of any oppressive, dogmatic “logic”.

In turn, we could say that the great artist is one who is willing to undermine the notion of the “common sense” of his or her own position. We have also learnt that the movements – social or individual – best enabled by what we broadly categorise as music, can sometimes be made by those who would be rather indifferent to accepting

577 (Deleuze 1994: 130)

190 the role of “musician”. As hip-hop producer Hank Shocklee, once said, “Who says youhavetobeamusiciantomakemusic”?578

This is against everything that is often expected as expert practice. Instead, here art derives its power, through its ability to plunge its audience into a “chaosmos”579 necessary for becoming. To emerge from a wilful plunge into the chaosmos is liked by Deleuze and Guattari as a “…return from the land of the dead”.580

One such "land of the dead" might be identified as the riot torn ghettos of the 1960s. I have suggested in this chapter that it was down to music to express the intolerable involved and to bring out what Deleuze has described as the uniqueness and singularities that can be found in the any-space-whatever of these ghettos. Brown’s music did this simply through feel rather than narrative; in the process, his appeal to increasingly abstract compositional methods that would require a “people to come”.581 As Deleuze comments in Cinema 2, art “…must take part in this task: not that of addressing a people, which is presupposed already there, but of contributing to the invention of a people”.582

It’s the greatest artists (rather than populist artists) who invoke a people, and find they "lack a people"… Artists can only invoke a people, their need for one goes to the very heart of what they’re doing, it’s not their job to create one, and they can’t. Art is resistance: it resists death, slavery, infamy, shame. But a people can’t worry about art. How is a people created, through what terrible suffering? When a people’s created, it’s through its own resources, but in a way that links up with something in art…or links up art to what it lacked.583

578 This quote was attributed to Bomb Squad producer, Hank Shocklee, and witnessed by myself on a trip to the EMP (Experience Music Project) museum in Seattle, Washington, U.S.A in late December 2001. 579 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 313) “The milieus are open to chaos, which threatens them with exhaustion or intrusion. Rhythm is the milieus' answer to chaos. What chaos and rhythm have in common is the in-between – between two milieus, rhythm chaos or the chaosmos” (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 313). 580 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 202) 581 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 345) 582 (Deleuze 1989: 217) 583 (Deleuze 1995: 174)

191 In response to Shocklee I would contend, one does not need a musician to make music, but requires only a missing people. One that might implore the artistic plunge into the “chaosmos”.

As Deleuze and Guattari contend in What is Philosophy?, the fields of philosophy, science and the arts invoke their own particular methods to plunge their audience into the chaosmos. 584 In this respect, the role of the artist is to: “…[bring] back from the chaos varieties that no longer constitute a reproduction of the sensory in the organ but set up a being of the sensory, a being of sensation, on an anorganic plane of composition that is able to restore the infinite”.585 Thus the artwork does not seek to represent a coherent vision, but rather gives access to the diverse connections of affect behind it. In fact it is impossible to represent the experience of the chaosmos because the experience will always be too overwhelming. The artists will always necessarily find themselves incapable of relating the full power of its intensity. It was this that forced the “break” in the sensory-motor-link in the cinema. A new cinematic image was occasioned by a return from the “land of the dead”.

For if the music of James Brown was tantamount to a series of scientific experiments into what made people move, the act of movement itself, might be perceived a series of relative connections with the chaosmos. In setting up the possibility for, and drive within, this new experience of movement-connection, Brown would return to the essence of the nature of being minor and providing an art, “… positively charged with the role and function of collective, and even revolutionary, enunciation”.586 A different kind of collectivity was the ultimate “message” of Brown’s music. Yet, as we discussed in the previous chapter, Brown will quite openly testify that the dawn of funk was stumbled upon rather than dreamed in advance. In short, Brown catalysed the funk assemblage – even if somewhat accidentally and experimentally – rather than invent it via some grand vision.

As for funk itself, we can perhaps see the rise of the funk assemblage as the birth of a new “spiritual automata” that involved seeing better and further than one can

584 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 202) 585 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 202-203) 586 (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 17)

192 immediately think.587 Funk emerges as a necessary shift that would reflect a decline in the sensory-motor automata – of a world assembled so that it seemed one could perceive and act decisively within it. If soul music expressed a being in the world in exactly this latter sense, then the post-soul aesthetic will render any definitive notion of time and space “indiscernible” by its wilful transformation of the soul narratives that will necessarily obscure their relation to past and future in turn. Of course, whilst funk may have introduced this new “spiritual automata”, then it must be said that Brown himself was not averse to falling back on the older action-reaction automata, even as he inadvertently brought in the new.

Perhaps it was the complex political position that Brown had to negotiate that revealed him as a character of notorious contradiction. For all of the cutting edge innovation of the funk years, Brown also maintained a sustained effort to model himself as a crooner and as a serious interpreter of “standards” in the style of a Nat King Cole or Frank Sinatra.588 It is important that Brown’s eclectic musical tastes are taken into account, because it is the very schizophrenic nature of his albums, (in particular those of the 1960s and 1970s), which are indicative of the disparate, audiences to which Brown was attempting to appeal. Brown did make some successful inroads into the “white” pop charts where his coverage of “standards” such as Prisoner of Love (1963)589 would provide Brown with some vital “crossover” success at a crucial stage in his career. However despite such attempts throughout the years to model himself in the guise of the mainstream friendly crooner, Brown would never have any kind of sustained success with the white audience in the sense of sustaining the “crossover” visibility of a Ray Charles, or even a Motown, despite his superstar status among African-Americans. It is Brown’s comparatively marginal, and as I have argued, “minor” status that was perhaps so enticing to those other minor musicians of electronic dance music and sampling cultures today. This of course leads to my point that for all of his innovation, I cannot fully endorse the idea of

587 The concept of “spiritual automata” comes from Spinoza (Deleuze 1998), and as Deleuze discusses in Cinema 2, each new type of image produces new psychological automata in turn (Deleuze 1989). 588 Brown teamed up with arranger and composer for the Erskine Hawkins Orchestra, Sammy Lowe in the mid 1960s, “…to record several well-known ballads: “These Foolish Things”, “Again”, “So Long” and “Prisoner of Love”. It was Brown’s first multi-track session, and his first recording with strings and a full chorus” (Weinger & White 1991: 21). Brown would subsequently team up with the Louis Bellson Trio (Bellson an ex-Duke Ellington alumnus) for 1969’s Soul on Top (re-released on CD in 2004)(Brown, Orchestra, & Nelson 1969/2004 (reissue)). 589 (Brown 1963)

193 Brown’s musical sensibility as reflecting of a “time-image” form of music. For whilst Brown may have provided the refrains, it would require the existential condition of the post-soul generation to make these refrains become in the way that they would.

Furthermore, Brown was too generically compromised in a musical sense to make that his mode of operation. For example, take any James Brown album of the 1970s and you can go from genius to kitsch in the space of two songs, which is perhaps one of the many downsides to the disregard of conventional sense. For the plunge into the chaosmos that comes with the innovative must necessarily eschew an orthodoxy based upon opinion and judgement. As Deleuze and Guattari write: “…the struggle with chaos is only the instrument of a more profound struggle against opinion, for the misfortune of people comes from opinion”.590 As we have learnt, Brown was not the type to give in to opinion, but rather he had the Idiot’s instinct for new orientations. As Wesley would recount in an earlier interview with Brown biographer Cynthia Rose:

He has no real musical skills…yet he could hold his own onstage with any jazz virtuoso - because of his guts. Can you understand that? James Brown cannot play drums at all. But he would sit down on drums and get that look on his face like he’s playin"em and you would just play along with him. Organ - he cannot play organ at all. A guitar’s not an instrument you can bullshit on, you got to really know how to play a guitar. And I’ve seen him pick up a guitar and go #"£#”%”! and look at you just like he’s playin' it, you dig?591

Brown, as “Idiot”, could not, or rather, would not, uphold the “common sense” image of thought. Nothing new can come from the appeal to a common sense predicated on the fact that “everybody knows” - “everybody knows you don’t play a guitar like that”! Brown’s music offers a pragmatic response embodying a resounding ‘says who”? Such pragmatism demonstrates the embrace of difference-in-itself, one that is necessary for any form of becoming to transpire.

590 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 206) 591 (Wesley in Cynthia Rose 1990: 86)

194 Musical Thought without Image

Deleuze makes plain his preference for the naïve thinker, citing the fact that it is only the truly naïve that can forget the constructed truths of the past and allow the forces of creation to emerge. We have also seen that this requires dispensing with the dogmatic image of thought, as the presuppositions of common sense that restrict creative thought or difference-for-itself. In pursuit of such difference, the overturning of the intuitive or “common sense” image of thought, that Deleuze dedicates his work.

Deleuze prescribes the notion of “thought without image”592 in the place of the dogmatic image of thought. Deleuze further describes this “thought without image” as the pursuit of dangerous thought, because its object is no less than the vast chaosmos of difference-in-itself. This is becoming-thought rather than inherited logic:

The thought which is born in thought, the act of thinking which is neither given by innateness nor presupposed by reminiscence but engendered in its genitality, is a thought without image. But what is such a thought, and how does it operate in the world?593

Again, Brown’s music allows us to begin to answer this question of the production of a thought without image. It is a very good example of the fact that the proper way is not always one conducive to progress.

In fact, it is unfeasibility that often becomes innovation in retrospect. On the point of Brown’s musical deficiencies, Cynthia Rose posits,

During the 1960s and early 70s, Brown’s touch seemed so certain it dazzled new recruits as much as his towering ego bruised them. How did he - a man who relied on "real" musicians completely to implement his ideas - pick and choose his accomplices with such unwavering success? [Former bandleader] Pee Wee Ellis says he had "an inner ear". Ellis drums a beringed finger on the desk before him and savours the very words. “James has this instant ability, this basic mother-wit, which allowed him to apprehend a certain combination of things. And

592 (Deleuze 1994: 167) 593 (Deleuze 1994: 167)

195 he could get close enough to accomplishing the spirit of it himself to figure “if I can get this close, I can PUSH it the rest of the way”.594

The beauty of the Deleuzean concept of the Idiot is that it enables naïveté and innovation to productively coexist. The Idiot brings new things together, as in Brown’s idiosyncratic musical talent for the “…apprehending of a certain combination of things”. For all Brown brought in terms of his enormous influence on contemporary popular music, James Brown had to confront the prejudices of his own musicians first and foremost. If he could make these guys believe then that was indeed half the battle. Such a feat requires further elaboration of Brown’s uncanny ability to take musicians from disparate musical fields and synthesise their talents into a cohesive ensemble; no mean feat for a man considered a near musical illiterate.

The bottom line is that, if there really are no essential truths, life often boils down to being just a matter of belief in the power of production in the present. Instantiating such a belief requires pure force. As Fred Wesley remarks about Brown’s sheer determination, “I never saw anybody play so bad with so much confidence and determination”.595 This serves to emphasise the tenuous nature of “proper” musicianship. Wesley’s maintenance of such a distinction attests to his incredulity concerning Brown’s unorthodox musical ability.

Wesley’s surprising admission serves to illustrate how thought is reflected against a “public” presupposition, in this case one of “proper” music. Our dogged faith in the illusion of the transcendental categories merely obscures what we have actually “become” in the case of Fred Wesley. This is why Deleuze calls our attention to the immediate immanence of a belief in the world. Under the logic of “proper” music, Wesley is subjected to the discomfort of being pigeonholed as Brown’s bandleader and not recognised as a musician in his own right. In fact, most accounts from Brown’s more notable ex-employees similarly offer such confessions of incredulity at Brown’s compositional process mainly because such unorthodoxy was not actually supposed to work. However, the fact that it did work is a point not lost on Wesley.

594 (Ellis in Cynthia Rose 1990: 60) 595 (Wesley 2002: 111)

196 “I’ve got to give James credit," says Wesley, "because he allowed me to be creative - he made it possible for me to be ultra-creative. Take a tune like "Doin” It To Death" (in 1973). I would never, ever, in my wildest imagination have thought of doin' something like that. But him givin' me a basic idea caused me to create that. It’s my creation, but it’s what he gave me to create with. He would give you these little, unrelated elements, sometimes not even musical, and say “make something out of it”.596

Despite the criticisms I have noted in the Wesley article, it must be pointed out that Wesley is not one given to sour grapes and retains a balanced and ultimately sanguine perspective throughout his memoirs. Despite an often rocky period of tenure, Wesley is conciliatory when he describes James Brown’s inimitable depth of passion, which he says brought the music a new level of energy and enabled it to “[take] on a new power”.597

Brown’s challenge to Wesley illustrates that judgement about proper musicianship can ultimately hinder conceptual progress. We have seen Deleuze’s championing of the Idiot’s naivety as a vital force for the creation of the new. However there is perhaps a darker side to the Idiot in all of this. The Idiot’s naivety in regard to the “proper” way to think will also necessarily bring about confrontation over the proper way to think. For this reason Deleuze has offered that the Idiot’s instincts for ruthless survival can be perceived as cruel and callous, and by all accounts Brown reflected such attribution in the dealings with his peers.

It is a question of someone – if only one –with the necessary modesty not managing to know what everybody knows, and modestly denying what everybody is supposed to recognise. Someone who neither allows himself to be represented nor wishes to represent anything. Not an individual endowed with good will and a natural capacity for thought, but an individual full of ill will that does not manage to think, either naturally or conceptually. Only such an individual is without presuppositions.598

The championing of such “immoral” characters as the Idiot has meant that Deleuze’s critics have accused him of appearing as an apologist for this coldness and proceeding

596 (Wesley in Cynthia Rose 1990: 92-93) 597 (Wesley 2002: 107) 598 (Deleuze 1994: 130)

197 with some “indifference”.599 Yet the main point for Deleuze is that the concept of judgement itself is the problem, if only because judgement is based on presuppositions and this not good for becoming. What is good for becoming is a necessary indifference to dogma that offers liberation from oppressive regimes of thought. This is the sort of naïve thought which we have attributed to Brown. Although not completely excusing callous behaviour, the “ill will” attributed to the Idiot is often inextricable from conceptual innovation.

So whilst it is lamentable that Brown treated his musicians so poorly, this “ill will” was also part and parcel of the sheer force he wielded that transformed musical concepts into a belief and a series of events. Having experienced the worst of the African-American experience, Brown foisted this alternative musical reality upon the shoulders of his peers, as his life literally depended on it. Brown’s musicians remain incredulous about why he had to be so despotic. In accordance perhaps with Deleuze's attribution of "Idiocy" “…in the most pressing situations, The Idiot feels the need to see the terms of a problem which is more profound than the situation, and even more pressing”.600

The Idiot is beyond common sense, which is good for new ideas and practices, but less so in terms of maintaining the logic of normal social relations. Arguably, the Idiot is not even an agent in this situation, but rather a seer, a portal for becoming. Brown’s context was the failure of the civil-rights movement and the decline of soul, in general. The seer’s ‘thought without image” perhaps develops out of the disillusionment with narratives that promised an agency that was never to materialise.

In the next chapter, then I will describe how Brown’s music gave the generation of African-Americans attempting to endure life in the aftermath of civil-rights, a necessary belief in the world. For whilst the narratives driving soul may well have

599 “For we seem to have, at least in Deleuze’s more overtly political writings, a Nietzscheanism without reserve: Nietzsche’s ‘yes’ is raised to the ‘nth’ degree, and ‘no’ is erased. In the rush to avoid repression and the negative in the interest of unfettered creativity, it is important to ask whether, as some psychoanalysts have suggested, the result of this creativity might be a decrease in war (organised vertically) but with an increase in the potential for violence. The very importance of Deleuze’s philosophy demands that such as issue be fully investigated”(Lechte 1994: 104) 600 (Deleuze 1989: 128)

198 declined, in the darkest hour, Brown’s music would return to produce affective relations in the spiritual void.

199 CHAPTER SEVEN FROM COLD SWEAT TO NO SWEAT

This chapter will contend with the decline of soul and the emergence of the post-soul aesthetic. In this chapter I will pursue the idea that a type of “time-image” music would correspond with the emergence of the “post-soul” period. If soul’s movement- image was generally based on the more orthodox, sequential narrative forms of composition then the post-soul era will produce a music based instead around a more serially constituted groove. Unlike the sequential forms of composition that courted soul’s narratives, this groove based music of the post-soul era will be significant for the fact that it will be characterised by an “indeterminacy” that ruptures a linear causality of action-reaction.

Exemplary of this non-linear approach to compositional time is the way DJ and sampling cultures would strip the “breakbeats” from old soul records and reassemble them in a new and ambiguous fashion. The styles to emerge from this post-soul era that would become manifest in genres from hip-hop to disco, techno and house, will all, in some way eschew sequential composition to instead take up a musical montage based on irrational cuts and the non-chronological assembly of pre-recorded material.

The historical genealogy of these electronic dance music genres have already been dealt with in great detail, in particular in texts such as Ulf Poschardt’s DJ Culture (1998), Brewster and Broughton’s, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life (1999) and Jeremy Gilbert and Ewan Pearson’s Discographies: Dance Music, Culture, And The Politics Of Sound (1999), all of which are exemplary and provide no reason to recount this evolution once again. Within these final two chapters I am more concerned with theorising how the aesthetic practices behind electronic dance music genres might reflect a more intensive relationship to time rather than to sequentially based compositional movement. In this way, I will show how these styles of music make the transition from movement-image to time-image, where the latter will instead attempt to build on the indeterminate repetition of the groove for a more immersive dance experience. For such electronic dance musics work on the premise that their audience will become “lost” in such repetitive grooves rather than concern themselves with following the more linear trajectory of the more orthodox pop tune.

200 The basis of this aesthetic change might be initially exacerbated as a creative reaction to the any-space-whatever conditions, similar to that type of post-War reflexivity that Deleuze contends drove the shift into a time-image cinema. I contend that the apparent break in soul’s action-image is particularly important in driving the electronic dance musics that would emerge out of the African-American musical communities. This aesthetic shift is, of course, hardly limited to this population, and to this end, I will also qualify how a similar existential malaise might have been responsible for the more time-image based forms of music that would link the music of Afro-America to sites such as Germany, the Caribbean and beyond later in the chapter. The point of this chapter then, is to show how the forms of composition that will be manifest in practices such as DJing and sampling, will enact a reversal of movement and time similar to that which Deleuze defines as the shift from movement-image to time-image. Within this reversal, “…time is no longer the measure of movement but movement is the perspective of time”.601

The Decline of Soul’s “Action-Image” - The Post-Soul Aesthetic

The electronic dance musics that will emerge from the post-soul period are an aesthetic reflection of the break in soul’s “action-image”, or that teleologically driven idea that things would improve with time. The death of this “action-image” driving the optimism of the civil-rights era might be symbolically traced to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968. For it is not long after King’s untimely demise that the broader political impetus that drove the civil rights agenda would begin to unravel.

The breakdown in soul’s teleological impetus would translate into the rapid decline of its commercial musical expression. As Atlantic Records’ Jerry Wexler comments in the documentary, TheSoulofStax(1994), “What had been the soul era, on the high road, suddenly, seemed to grind to a shuddering halt. There was frustration, there was rage - but worst of all - the sprit seemed to have gone out of this particular movement

601 (Deleuze 1989: 22)

201 of rhythm and blues music”.602 Evidence of this expedient decline of soul is remarked upon by Gerri Hershey in Nowhere to Run, where the market for soul music “…seemed to have reached its peak in 1968, when Billboard reported, R&B DISKS SWING TO “BLACK HOPE”. Within a year it would declare, BACKLASH CUTS SOUL ON TOP 40”.603 This backlash would perhaps reflect an irrevocable rupture in the belief in the sense-making efficacy of the sensory-motor-schema that drove soul.

It is this post-1968 period that signals the beginning of what will become known as the “post-soul” era. This concept of “post-soul” as noted in chapter 1, was first proposed by Nelson George, and further elaborated by cultural theorists such as Mark Anthony Neal to “…describe the political, social and cultural experiences of the African-American community since the end of the civil rights and Black Power movements”.604 Whilst the term “post-soul” was initially coined by George as a general description of “…black popular culture after the blaxploitation era”,605 Neal will instead place more emphasis on locating a “post-soul generation” around a more refined set of events, namely:

…folks born between the 1963 March on Washington and the [Regents of the University of California v. Bakke challenge to affirmative action in 1978], children of soul, if you will, who came to maturity in the age of Reaganomics and experienced the change from urban industrialism to deindustrialism, from segregation to desegregation, from essential notions of blackness to metanarratives on blackness, without any nostalgic allegiance to the past (back in the days of Harlem, or the thirteenth-century motherland, for that matter), but firmly in grasp of the existential concerns of this brave new world.606

In Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), Neal outlines the emergence of this post-soul sensibility through specific examples to be found in the music, film and television of this post-civil-rights generation. Neal’s analysis of the 1970s sitcom, Good Times, is but one example he discusses of this type of post-soul text, an example already canvassed in chapter 1.607 Good Times

602 (Wexler in Priestley 1994) 603 (Hirshey 1985: 315) 604 (Neal 2002: 63) 605 (Neal 2002: 63) 606 (Neal 2002: 3) 607 Some of the other examples of post-soul texts and contexts canvassed by Neal, include the work of R&B singer - R. Kelly, Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, African-American

202 attains its status as post-soul text because of the acute existential disarray that underscored the program and one that would have particular resonance with this defeated civil-rights generation. The discontent of living in the wake of the civil rights era is dramatised through the Evans family of Good Times, who were left to ponder an uncertain social stasis in its aftermath. The Evans family reflected the increasingly uncertain political trajectory that would mark the outlook of many African-Americans in the 1970s.

For a working-class family struggling to make ends meet, the events of the soul period of the previous decade would seem to have amounted to little real change in living standards. Perhaps, even worse, they were denied the promise of political change as well. For political options were all but extinguished as the soul era had left a string of casualties in its wake, including a series of leaders systematically subjected to either subordination or in the most extreme cases, assassination. This was the fate of African-American leaders, including Medger Evers, Malcolm X, and of course, Dr. Martin Luther King. Furthermore, the civil rights agenda had lost steam, increasingly obscured by the political turmoil that surrounded the escalation of the Vietnam War.

The culmination of these events would conspire to bring about the decline of soul’s narrative view of the world, or that presupposition of change through action. These events are also uncannily reminiscent of the crisis of the action-image proposed by Deleuze within the context of the Cinema books, as occurring at the end of World War II:

Nevertheless, the crisis which has shaken the action-image has depended on many factors which only had their full effect after the war, some of which were social, economic, political, moral and others more internal to art, to literature and to the cinema in particular. We might mention, in no particular order, the war and its consequences, the unsteadiness of the “American Dream” in all its aspects, the new consciousness of minorities, the rise and inflation of images both in the external world and in people’s minds, the influence on the cinema of

centred sitcoms and TV shows of the 1960s-1980s, and the “post-soul intelligentsia” of the 1980s – a group of artists and writers such as Greg Tate, Vernon Reid, the Black Rock Coalition, Jean-Michel Basquiat, George C. Wolfe, Darius James, Cassandra Wilson and Geri Allen – to name but a few examples(Neal 2002).

203 the new modes of narrative with which literature had experimented, the crisis of Hollywood and its old genres…608

Within the context of the Cinema books, the existential conditions of the post-War period would result in a new type of cinema, one that would no longer depend on the logic of action-reaction causality. If the movement-image cinema was founded upon the neat order of action through the expectation of a perception-image naturally leading to an action-image, the time-image of the post-War period would instead reflect the breakdown of this order.609 The narrative driven cinema of the movement- image will instead give way to the time-image form, where rational movement is instead replaced by an emergence of ruptures in the sensory-motor-schema created by situations such as the “trip/ballad”610 and the proliferation of any-space-whatevers:

The sensory-motor link was thus the unity of movement and its interval, the specification of the movement-image or the action-image par excellence. There is no reason to talk of a narrative cinema which would correspond to this first moment, for narration results from the sensory-motor-schema, and not the other way around. But precisely what brings this cinema of action into question after the war is the very break-up of the sensory-motor-schema: the rise of situations to which one can no longer react, of environments with which there are now only chance relations, of empty and disconnected any-space-whatevers replacing qualified extended space. It is here that situations no longer extend into action or reaction in accordance with the requirements of the movement-image. These are pure optical and sound situations, in which the character does not know how to respond, abandoned spaces in which he ceases to experience and to act so that he enters into flight, goes on a trip, comes and goes, vaguely indifferent to what happens to him, undecided as to what must be done.611

The resultant lack of coherent and determined time/space results instead in a new type of image: “[t]his is the first aspect of the new cinema: the break in the sensory-motor link (action-image), and more profoundly in the link between man and the world (great organic composition)”.612 Deleuze contends that such spaces are characterised by the disengagement of affective response from action.613 The populations living amid the aftermath of the “goals” of World War II would not only contend with the

608 (Deleuze 1986: 206) 609 (Deleuze 1989: 45-46) 610 (Deleuze 1989: 3) 611 (Deleuze 1989: 272) 612 (Deleuze 1989: 173) 613 (Laura U. Marks 2000: 28)

204 decline in the presupposition of action, but this lack of causality is indicative of a more dramatic break with the continuity of “organic” coordinates of time and space as well.614 When action is no longer a given, the characters of this new cinema would be rather more concerned with introspection based on the collapse of the “intuitive” idea of the logical sensory-motor-link between perception and action:615

We hardly believe any longer that a global situation can give rise to an action which is capable of modifying [space]- no more than we believe that an action can force a situation to disclose itself, even partially. The most “healthy” illusions fall. The first things to be compromised everywhere are the linkages of situation-action, action-reaction, excitation-response, in short, the sensory-motor links which produced the action image.616

These any-space-whatevers are thus responsible for the ruptures to the normal sequential logic of the movement-image’s action-image and constitute the more disjointed relationship to time/space of the time-image aesthetic. Furthermore, such dislocated spaces will constitute the foundation of the production of this type of cinema based around the more anonymous, transitional spaces of the any-space- whatevers. I argue then that this relationship of the any-space-whatevers is one shared by both post-War cinema as defined by Deleuze but also the time-image music established in the ghettos (hip-hop) and the “disused warehouses” (house and “rave” cultures) and provide a significant correspondence between the art forms:

This is in fact the clearest aspect of the modern voyage. It happens in any-space-whatever-marshalling yard, disused warehouse, and the undifferentiated fabric of the city – in opposition to action, which most often unfolded in the qualified space-time of the old realism…it is a question of undoing space, as well as the story, the plot or action.617

The Post-Soul Any-Space-Whatever

For in the examples of both post-War cinema and post-soul music, the disenfranchised urban populations would have to live amongst the any-space-

614 (Deleuze 1989: 126-127) 615 (Deleuze 1989: 45-46) 616 (Deleuze 1986: 206) 617 (Deleuze, 1986: 208)

205 whatevers that arose as visible, everyday reminders of the failure of the political goals of their respective periods. In terms of the soul era these any-space-whatevers arose as the result of the riots that took place after the assassination of King:

US News & World Report noted on November 13, 1967, 101 major riots had occurred in US cities, killing 130 people and injuring 3,673. The damage would total $714.8 million…King’s assassination quickly upped the ante: more cities were paralysed, more people hurt, more homes and businesses and communities destroyed. Meanwhile, the body count from Vietnam was increasing.618

Another pertinent example of the any-space-whatever of the post-soul period is the decimation of the South Bronx, which as Tricia Rose writes is “frequently dubbed the ‘home of hip hop culture’” .619 As Rose recounts in Black Noise (1994), under the direction of “legendary planner Robert Moses…”, “[I]n 1959, city, state, and federal authorities began the implementation of his planned Cross-Bronx Expressway that cut directly through the center of the most heavily populated working-class areas in the Bronx”. As once stable neighbourhoods were depopulated, property values plummeted and the community economically and socially depleted.620 As the conditions worsened in the late 1960s to mid-1970s landlords turned their properties wholesale over to professional slumlords that only continued to exacerbate the erosion of any kind of stable community. 621 Given that such “urban renewal” projects as the Cross-Bronx Expressway could have been modified as to minimise the destruction, it was otherwise designed to maximise the destruction of the ‘slums’ of the working class community who occupied the area.622

Whilst the spaces would proliferate as a result of the perceived failure of promises in the work of civil rights legislation, it must also be noted that I am not asserting that the political activism of the civil-rights/soul era was in any way erroneous. The point is that it was simply the culmination of a political teleology. What makes this condition intolerable was that there was no other way of attempting another form of politics unless the most obvious course had been taken (even if it was to fail). This is

618 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 67) 619 (Tricia Rose 1994: 30) 620 (Tricia Rose 1994: 30) 621 (Tricia Rose 1994: 33) 622 (Tricia Rose 1994: 31)

206 the very nature of political movements, but also significant of how such political gestures often do fail. This is why Deleuze and Guattari talk about the micropolitics of desire rather than a macropolitical organisation. The micropolitical derives from a liberation of desire that assists the process of becoming and transformation, 623 rather than the more traditional form of State based macropolitics. Perhaps the ultimate lesson of music is that there is nothing to believe in but the ethics behind specific interactions with other bodies. So too in the aftermath of the decline of the universal notions of movement does the emphasis shift instead to the ethical power of individual bodily movement.

The post-soul generation is left to ponder the future because their political options (in the traditional sense) are exhausted. The decline of the natural presumption of affective response and political action has been denied them and now they must live with the result of such action. With the activism of the soul period having taken its toll, once vibrant communities would fall into ruin and furthermore be left that way, based on the lack of any coherent policy to redress the destruction of infrastructure. This situation would only worsen in the 1970s and in fact, by the 1980s things were critical, as Reagan’s regressive social policies seemed to have been designed to deliberately punish those who had dared rise up during the soul movement. Given this situation, Nelson George would comment that the generation characterised here as post-soul, grew up “…seeing negative change”.624 The post-soul malaise would only be reinforced by these most visible reminders of their apparent failure and continue the proliferation of disconnected spaces that would exacerbate this decline in action motivation, again correlative with the example given by Deleuze:

…after the war, a proliferation of such spaces could be seen both in film sets and in exteriors, under various influences. The first, independent of cinema, was the post-war situation with its towns demolished or being reconstructed, its waste grounds, its shanty towns, and even in places where the war had not penetrated, its undifferentiated urban tissue, its vast unused places, docks, warehouses, heaps of girders and scrap iron. Another, more specific to the cinema as we shall see, arose from a crisis of the action-image: the characters were found less and less in sensory-motor “motivating” situations, but rather in a state of strolling, of sauntering or of rambling

623 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 213 ) 624 (George in Barrett, Thomson, & Corporation 1996)

207 which defined pure optical and sound situations. The action-image then tended to shatter, whilst the determinate locations were blurred, letting any-spaces-whatever rise up where the modern affects of fear, detachment, but also freshness, extreme speed and interminable waiting were developing.625

In Mark Anthony Neal’s, Soul Babies, many of the texts he refers to, for instance, will encompass a similar spiritually disconnected state characteristic of the post-soul experience. To understand such disconnection, I shall briefly return to the example of the Evans family of Good Times. Rather than being involved in action – think for example of the very presupposition of action that drove the narratives of a 1950s Leave It to Beaver scenario – the Evans were always immersed in pondering how they were going to survive, or why life has treated them so cruelly, a different type of existential condition than that which would characterise your average sitcom. This is perhaps why Good Times resonated with audiences in the post-soul period, as the TV family represented the reality of many African-American families that were once spiritually bolstered by the dreams of the civil-rights generation: for instance, that all that one needed to achieve social justice was belief and perseverance. The reality of course was that the African-American population were particularly prone to the logistics of a prejudicial economics. Far from being able to ever enjoy a vision of life as agents, many were playing a game of mere survival. This was a condition common to many families that migrated to the cities of the North in search of a better way of life, but were left to ponder the decimation of both their individual and collective toil.

The discussion of Good Times as a post-soul text is just one of the many examples that Neal uses to argue that African-American audiences would attribute their own particular significance to texts. This would in turn affect contemporary aesthetic practices for the post-soul generation as they attempted, “…a radical reimagining of the contemporary African-American experience, attempting to liberate contemporary interpretations of that experience from sensibilities that were formalized and institutionalized during earlier social paradigms”.626 There is no doubt that this change in sensibility can be found in the musical expression of the time, although as I contend, this is not to be found so much in the meanings of the music, but rather,

625 (Deleuze, 1986: 120-121) 626 (Neal 2002: 3)

208 indicated in the way they would express time. A legacy of DJing and sampling, with new aesthetic forms, seems to take on time in a new way, one extricated from the linear historical logic that one could associate with Deleuze’s movement-image or the common sense understanding of the sensory-motor-schema as uncomplicated agency with a linear history.

Whilst Neal provides a set of illuminating examples of changes in sensibility of the post-soul experience, one example conspicuous by its absence was the music of James Brown. Given that Brown is considered the most famous exponent of soul, and that he maintained his stature as Afro-America’s most celebrated performer both throughout the soul movement and also in the early stages of the post-soul period, evaluating the impact of his music on the existential circumstances of the time surely warrants further discussion. Brown is important because aesthetically his music would emerge to catalyse the spirit of the situation and perhaps mastered the apprehension of a minor temporality, for not only the soul generation, but would maintain a distinct presence into the post-soul era as well.

Whilst it is true that Brown’s career faltered at around the same time as the post-1963 generation were in their adolescence, one might have reason to believe that the post- soul generation escaped the clutches of the Godfather’s influence. Yet this was not the case and this will become evident through the sampling of Brown’s work in the late- 1980s to early 1990s, much of it at the hands of artists born into the post-soul period. These were the kids who came into their teens after the decline in Brown’s popularity in the mid-1970s who were obviously still intimately acquainted with his catalogue if the sampling of his work is anything to go by. In this chapter, I will discuss Brown’s enduring influence within the post-soul generation and provide some reasons as to why Brown’s music would be able to maintain its relevance to this new generation.

Tougher Grooves For Tougher Times

For at the beginning of the 1970s, Brown was still riding high on a wave of commercial success and was thus crowned The Godfather of Soul around this time.627

627 So named after the movie The Godfather (1972).

209 Perhaps part of this continued success was due to his special relationship to these affected populations, predicated on the fact that his emphatic style was an affirmative force amid the general existential malaise, a force for becoming, where few continued to exist. The power of Brown’s music, as we have discussed in previous chapters was its ability to catalyse broader existential circumstances. Indeed, it is probably little coincidence that Brown’s funk became tougher and more unrelenting in the late 1960s and early 1970s and that the rhythms became harder as times for this post-soul generation became increasingly tougher. Brown’s music articulated a sense of force needed to bolster one through this almost perpetual malaise. His ability to apprehend a minor temporality and reproduce it into musical expression was a skill that he managed to hone at least until the mid-1970s. In fact, Brown’s work would continue to live on in the hearts of the DJs of the block parties long after his commercial cache had waned, a point made here by Afrika Bambaataa:

[Record companies] were just shoving disco down our throats. For the first two years, we were playing it, and that was cool. But the dancers in the black and Latino community change every three months. Then after the third and fourth year, they were trying to get rid of the funk. You weren’t hearing James [Brown] and Sly [and the Family Stone] on the radio much, so to keep the -audiences kicking with the funk, we started adding all their stuff, and other funky beats, to our musical repertoire.628

This continued pursuit of Brown’s music is testament to how “untimely” Brown’s rhythms were –they could maintain their longevity and potency with a self- acknowledged fickle audience. Brown’s rhythms would continue to connect with a population living in a time of relative immobility629 as it might be understood in the political sense. The importance of rhythms is that they promote a belief in the body, and by extension, offer the potential of a becoming-world during the most stagnant of political environments. Deleuze himself ascribes a similar capability to the time- image cinema, as it attempts to re-conceive the body as a product of a revised relation with time and space.

628 (Afrika Bambaataa in Reighley 2001: 45) 629 Or to cite a relevant malapropism by rapper Raekwon, Immobilarity. (Raekwon 1999)

210 Part of Brown’s perennial popularity was because of the untimely nature of his compositions. Funk’s groove had established its own break with the more sequential forms that had characterised popular music composition – such as faith in melodic progression and its teleological progress. The radicality of Brown’s own approach to the production of musical time was an affront to the more hegemonic constitutions of temporal logic. Not only would this distinguish funk from the compositional methods that had characterised soul, which were relatively orthodox from a compositional point of view, but it would make Brown a political figure, and thus enticing to later generations. In fact, Brown’s music seemed to have anticipated the decline in simple sensory-motor driven songs long before. For Brown’s funk, even in its early stages, had already begun to show signs of this shift in existential conditions reflected for instance in Brown’s rather ambivalent relationship to the orthodox verse/chorus/verse forms of composition. As such, funk indicated an attempt to apprehend an alternate sense of time and space that might be seen to exist outside the narratives of a more orthodox idea of temporal succession to give way to his extended grooves and minimalist polyrhythmic approach.

Furthermore, Brown was able to maintain his stature within minor communities, due to his ability to apprehend a minor temporality and to articulate the existential conditions of the minor through the musical. Thus, as times got tougher it would appear that his funk became progressively sparser and more aggressive. This is something that one can find in making a comparison of the musical progression of Brown’s music that might be heard through the course of three of his best-known albums. One need only to listen to the original 1962 Live At the Apollo, to 1968’s Live At the Apollo 2, and finally 1971’s Revolution of the Mind: Live At the Apollo 3 to hear how Brown had completely redefined the approach to black music in the space of less than a decade. If the original Live At the Apollo had Brown generally pleading over lost love, the style of composition that contained such paeans were still relatively orthodox (although a taste of things to come can be witnessed in the extended vamping of Lost Someone). Live At the Apollo 2, however, marked the beginning of extraordinary one chord jam workouts more characteristic of Brown’s funk style, witnessed for example in the twenty-plus minute tour de force medley of There Was a Time/I Feel All Right/Cold Sweat. By 1971’s Live at the Apollo 3, the funk groove was the rule with only the odd, brief flashback to his late 1950s-early 1960s soul

211 canon. Furthermore this third record of the Apollo series had Brown deliberately conversing with his musicians on “black consciousness”, Brown particularly pleased with Fred Wesley’s black trombone. The Live at the Apollo 3 album was completely removed from its original predecessors not only in terms of composition but also in general existential outlook, there was no chance that Brown could have launched into jokes about the Ku Klux Klan back in 1962 as he does on the latter album.

Each instalment of the Live at the Apollo series presents a radical stylistic development reflecting the very evolution of the groove that the post-soul, electronic dance musics would court and subsequently build upon. The groove oriented funk style, pioneered by Brown in the late 1960s and early 1970s, would take precedence over soul’s predilection for projection and become the pre-eminent music genre of that decade, expressed not only through funk but through disco and beyond. One must only compare the stylistic development that Brown made between these albums to see how the new musical regime would instead reflect a new expression/experience of time, “…rather than motion”.630

This emergence of a rhythmically driven groove might also be constitutive of an alternate form of temporality, that notion of Aion concerned with becoming, and thus substituting for the sequential “motion” of chronos. This becoming is no longer to be found through political movement but is instead a utopia promised through the groove. Whilst it is fair to argue that all music is an apprehension of a minor temporality, to my mind Brown’s music presents a persistent and superlative example of this pioneering of long, unrelenting and intricate grooves that would court becoming based on the ecstasy of dance and bodily movement. The importance of the funk groove is that it sets out to create an aesthetic that would enable the renegotiation of bodily relations, but a set of relations to be accessed only when a more sequential chronological composition of action-reaction was thrown into disarray. It is fair to credit Brown with this pioneering style, for it was only later in the 1960s that funk would become a genre of its own, a subject already covered in some detail in Rickey Vincent’s Funk, for example.631

630 (Deleuze 1995: 59) 631 (Vincent 1996)

212 The groove is anything but deterministic - that’s how one gets lost in it. The longer the duration of the groove, the better chance its audience had of finding this utopia within the duration of the composition. Which is perhaps why the long and increasingly incessant nature of Brown’s grooves really took flight around the very time that soul narratives were in decline. In fact, it was post-1968 that Brown’s tracks took on an increasingly minimalist aesthetic, as indicated by tracks such as Ain’t It Funky Now (1969)632 or Give It Up or Turnit a Loose (1969). 633These tracks were increasingly stripped down, even compared to the titles that had appeared no more than a few years prior. Melodic structure was dispensed with, and the tracks would increasingly rely on a single chord sustained ad infinitum, with perhaps only the briefest of bridges to “cut” the groove and strengthen the anticipation within the track.

The new prominence afforded repetition through funk reflected the shift away from the linear progression inherent in the verse/chorus/bridge structure of popular music.634 Brown’smusicmightbeseentohavebeenmoreopentoanengagementof a more “probabilistic” rather than “deterministic” 635 universe, whether this was in the areas of music or social change. For funk would become a converging of both these things at once, as Brown’s groove might be seen to provide an alternative to the decline of narrative that was the overriding existential condition of the social. When Brown put his faith in the groove, he put his faith in the specific and immediate interaction of bodies and the becoming that would transpire. Brown’s music was

632 (Brown 1969a) 633 (Brown 1969b) 634 James Brown did of course attack his fair share of the more conventional “standards” and they have always been a staple of both albums and live shows. Although it is Brown’s penchant for syrupy ballads and straight out kitsch, that often gets the best of his audiences. For example, in his autobiography, Brown talks about his preparation for a series of shows at the International in Las Vegas where Elvis had recently had such success (Brown and Tucker 1986:215). Brown assumed that as the “Vegas audiences were a lot older and mostly white” that he would expand the band “…adding some strings and other things, and put in more ballads and songs like If I Ruled the World and some traditional show songs” (Brown and Tucker 1986:215). The booker responded that “If I’d wanted Frank Sinatra…I would’ve hired Frank Sinatra”, yet Brown proceeded with a set list that included It’s Magic, September Song and his late 60s/early 70s staple, If I Ruled the World (Brown and Tucker 1986:215). It was bombing. “They thought I was crazy to sing those songs. They didn’t want that from me: They wanted the gutbucket thing” (Brown and Tucker 1986:215). Brown continues to sing oldies such as Prisoner of Love and Georgia on My Mind to this day. 635 This is based on the following quote on the shift from movement-image to time-image as discussed by D.N. Rodowick: “…change in the order of sense implies change in the nature of belief. The organic regime believes in identity, unity, and totality. It describes a deterministic universe where events are linked in a chronological continuum: one believes retroactively in a past that leads inevitably to the present; one has faith in a future that emerges rather predictably out of the present… Alternatively, the regime of the time-image replaces this deterministic universe with a probabilistic one.(Rodowick 1997: 15)

213 pragmatic in the sense that it brought bodies together in new ways, and an affirmation of the possibility of a belief in probabilistic futures that begin now - despite what was otherwise occurring in the macropolitical world.

The Proxy Politician

Of course whilst I make lots of claims for Brown’s ability to inspire belief in the world, Brown’s strange orientation to traditional politics has always clouded his legacy. For Brown had maintained a fairly apolitical stance before and after that fateful year of 1968, much to the chagrin of political activists, such as the Black Panthers. In the immediate aftermath of Dr. Martin Luther King’s death, Brown was willing to go on TV to play concerts, most notably the famous Boston Garden performance, to keep the people at home and to quell any further riots. Brown was subject to much criticism636 for this assistance in the “cooling off” of the ghetto uprisings.

This criticism was compounded by the fact that Brown subsequently made a trip to Vietnam, a few months later, to play for the troops. For political activists this was tantamount to complicity with the government and Brown was increasingly labeled an Uncle Tom.637 However, Brown would comment, “I knew that black soldiers were complaining that the USO didn’t send enough acts they could identify with, and I wanted to change that”.638 They were doing their bit for their country and then rewarded with “entertainers” such as Bob Hope.639

As provocative as it may sound, I do not believe that Brown’s TV appearances, nor Vietnam tours do anything to discount Brown’s minor status. As regards the Vietnam

636 Not only was Brown challenged for being a “sell out”, but also it has been said that the Panthers leaned on him to make Say it Loud! I’m Black and I’m Proud. For example, Brown’s friend and fellow King recording artist, Hank Ballard, claimed that the song was written as a direct result of Brown being threatened by sub-machine gun toting Black Panthers (Vincent 1996: 78). However in his recent second “autobiography”, I Feel Good (2005), Brown has also said he found a hand grenade with his name on it outside his hotel room on the night of this recording. In this case, however, the parties involved were unknown to Brown (Brown & Eliot 2005). Whether or not these cases forced Brown to reconsider his political stance, the main point of these stories is the ambiguity of James Brown’s politics at the time. In fact during the preparation of this thesis I have been questioned about Brown’s apparent complicity with the State and how this might undermine my argument 637 (Maycock 2003: 68) 638 (Maycock 2003: 70) 639 (Maycock 2003: 68)

214 tours, if anything, one can think that Brown’s performance at Vietnam, would not only have connected the troops to thoughts of home, but in doing so, presented an alternative to the agenda of death and destruction that the troops were forced to follow. As Ronald Bogue has commented, minor writers must attempt to articulate the voice of a collectivity that does not yet exist, and yet this task of the invention of a “people to come” is not achieved through the promotion of, “… specific political action or by protesting oppression (although such actions do have their own value), but by inducing processes of becoming-other, by undermining stable power relations and thereby activating lines of continuous variation in ways that have previously been restricted and blocked.640

As regards the quelling of the riots, the fact of the matter is that riots had ravaged black communities such as Watts (1965), Newark and Detroit (1967). Brown perhaps knew that the black community were only cutting off their nose to spite their face, seeing as they were up against overwhelming odds. In fact Nelson George has subsequently written, in The Death of Rhythm and Blues (1988), the quality of life for African-Americans after the riots of the 1960s only worsened. 641 Many main streets in black capitals never recuperated and fell into a state of permanent disrepair,642 and, as the 1970s pressed on, the situation was not rectified.

Acknowledging that economics was the ultimate language of majoritarian culture, Brown also decided, somewhat controversially, to become an advocate of “black capitalism”, and it was on the promise of such economic development that Brown supported Nixon. Whilst Brown’s commitment to “black capitalism” might be seen to conflict with many of the more socially progressive attributes that I have credited to Brown, if anything capitalism requires a disengagement from, rather than a belief in the world at hand. In addition, there is the problem that not everyone can possess the sense of conviction that Brown was gifted with, and this dogged sense of self- sufficiency was flaunted conspicuously via his mini-empire of Lear Jets, restaurants

640 (Bogue 2005: 114) 641 (George 1988: 98) 642 (George 1988: 98)

215 and radio stations.643 Brown himself hoped that such achievements against the overwhelming odds would demonstrate to African-Americans what could be attained. In fact, as he sang in the song funky President (1975), he thought African-Americans, should stick together “…and do like the mob”.644

Yet if one listens more closely to Brown’s calls to mobilise economic power in the black community, these calls always very much came from a knowingly minor point of view. For instance, when Brown was to sing, You Can Have Watergate, But Gimme Some Bucks and I’ll be Straight (1975), during one of his bands, the JBs’ solo outings, this does not sound like someone who actually believed in integrating with the dominant culture. The fact is that Brown knew he was marginal and events such as Watergate were of little or no consequence to a people that were often engaged in a more pressing agenda of everyday survival. Hence, the attitude of such tracks to traditional politics was one of general nonchalance “what does it matter as we are not part of your system anyway”.

As I have discussed in previous chapters, much is made about Brown’s more political narratives such as Say it Loud! I’m Black and I’m Proud (1968) or I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing, (Open Up the Door I’ll Get it Myself) (1969). However, to merely perceive the political message of Brown’s music through his lyrics would hardly do the man’s political legacy adequate justice. For Brown’s real political legacy is that his music would provide a belief in the world as an exploration of affective possibility. It was the politics of bodily action found in the tightly integrated music and choreography that made Brown such a presence on stage, such as was discussed in relation to the T.A.M.I show in chapter 5. It is as this arbiter of bodily affect that kept Brown in stead with later generations.

Give It Up or Turnit a Loose

Given the malaise felt through the disconnected sensibility of the post-soul generation, any force that might strengthen affective relations would obviously be

643 Brown discusses his business activities including the James Brown Golden Platter Restaurants and his own version of Soul Train called Future Shock in his autobiography (Brown & Tucker 1986). Footage of Brown’s enterprises can be seen in (Barrett, Thomson, & Corporation 1996). 644 (Brown 1975)

216 enthusiastically embraced. Hence art forms that promoted such affectivity in these any-space-whatever situations, such as dance in particular, would provide the affective basis for the compositional expression of the electronic dance music genres to follow. It is no coincidence then, that all of the pioneering DJs for instance, Francis Grasso in disco,645 and Kool Herc,646 Afrika Bambaataa647 and Grandmaster Flash648 - the last three, hip-hop’s pioneering triumvirate - were all initially dancers.649

Brown’s stature in the area of dance is merely another reason that he would remain at the forefront of post-soul consciousness and also why the DJs would feature Brown’s music so prominently in their sets:

In manifold ways, hip-hop is his child. No 1, Brown’s beats provide much of the whole art’s foundation. Before sampling made it possible to repossess Maceo’s soulful squeal, Jabo’s different strokes or JB’s personal shrieks, when the whole hiphop experience was still live on club turntables or hot-wired out of lamps in the parks and streets (early, free electric sources) b-boys would scour New York in search of old Brown 45s. Stuck onto larger vinyl - for better mixing grip - these copies of “Sex Machine”, “Funky Drummer” or “Get Up, Get Into It and Get Involved” would be mixed with sounds as diverse as The Incredible Bongo Band’s version of "Apache" or Grand Central Station’s ‘the Jam".650

Via this pre-recorded material, the ghetto DJs devised their own methods to emulate in their own way a groove that once kept a whole group employed. The more skeletal grooves and breakdowns, in records such as Brown’s, provided them with a foundation for their own irrational approach to composing or remixing, mainly because there was no melody to get in the way of maintaining the intensity of the groove - a groove that would become vital to such pursuits as breakdancing. It is of

645 (Brewster & Broughton 2000: 145) 646 To attribute my sources - As KRS-One has commented: “Herc was a graffiti artist. He was part of that community that was freestyle dancing to James Brown, doing Capoiera martial arts, developing this thing called breaking”(KRS-One in Batey 2002: 59). 647 “Bam declared his party-minded friends to be Zulu Kings and Queens, and formed the Zulu Nation, a group of b-boys and b-girls” (Brewster & Broughton 2000: 239). “No one is entirely sure of the identity of the first New York breakdancer, but it was certainly popularised by members of the Zulu Nation”(Ogg & Upshal 1999: 15) 648 (Ogg & Upshal 1999: 37) 649 “That new generation of DJs, most of whom were ex-breakdancers, and all of whom were Herc fans, took up the mantle. Herc, for his part, was impressed by the vitality that they brought to the scene, especially Afrika Bambaataa” (Ogg & Upshal 1999: 37). 650 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 147)

217 course in the legacy of dance that Brown was also instructive, as many of his famed dance moves were often shown on TV on shows such as Shindig and The Ed Sullivan Show in the 1960s and Soul Train in the 1970s.651 If Brown was on top of the latest dance trends, it was because he spent a lot of time engineering them, such as his own “James Brown”.652 Brown’s dance moves required an intense athleticism, which itself was not unprecedented (the Nicholas Brothers had been there long before), but Brown’s dance became less choreographed and more indeterminate bouts with exhaustion. His goal was to maintain the twirls, splits and the lightning fast combinations all undertaken whilst directing the music of the band at the same time and instantly this interaction back into his stage work. This is where Brown differed from the athletic dancers that had preceded him. His fragmented approach to choreography, at once musician, then turning the beat on a dime, Brown suddenly emulating a robot, or becoming-indeterminate, all the while feeding this intensity back into the music, would significantly impress the new generation of hip-hoppers. As Kool Herc attests: “Breakdancing started with James Brown. He was the king, A- 1, B-boy, way back in ‘69! People started going off, dancing like that to particular records because they had a hype to them. I tagged the name of B-boy to the dancers. I used to call them ‘break boys’”.653

Whilst Brown’s trendsetting dance styles had been impressing the kids of the soul generation, the level of his enduring success would provide him contact also with those kids who would grow up to become part of the later post-soul generation. For Brown’s latest dance steps were something that many African-Americans kids in particular, had been engaged with since the schoolyard. For instance, Public Enemy’s Chuck D reminisces about dancing on ice in the school grounds “During the slippin’ and slidin’ a few of us had to turn it into the customary challenge, ‘try this move and swing like JAMES BROWN.’ To do the JAMES BROWN you had to start off with ‘I Feel Good, Duh-DUH-dah dah dudda dat’”.654 Brown’s music was a means of becoming for many black children, of a certain age. A generation of kids grew up

651 James Brown’s Internet Movie Database Page lists these appearances and more, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0113768 652 Footage of Brown going through a whole slew of these dances can be seen in the rare 1978 documentary, James Brown: Soul Brother No.1. 653 (Herc in Batey 2002: 59) 654 (Chuck D 1995)

218 with James Brown in the schoolyard and it is a gauge of Brown’s iconic status that his name was invoked in everyday activities such as adolescent skipping games:

I went downtown To see James Brown. Hegavemeanickel To buy a pickle. Thepicklewassour. Hegavemeaflower. The flower was dead, So this is what he said: Hopping on one foot, one foot, one foot. Hopping on two foot, two foot, two foot. Hopping on three foot … Hopping on four foot…655

This early adoption further indicates how Brown would maintain his influence over the hearts of the post-soul generation.

Brown was synonymous with pioneering dance moves that were so tightly integrated in his routines that he had always engineered his records to provide the necessary stops, starts and gaps of anticipation, which he would duly fill in with his carefully choreographed moves. It was this more “irrational” negotiation of time and space that energised his dance routines, that would be reflected compositionally. For many of Brown’s peers were singers who may have also danced, whereas Brown did not differentiate these activities and they were part of an integrated whole and reflected back into the intensity of the rhythm of the composition. This is probably why Brown’s work would have such an impact on the new aesthetics such as hip-hop. For the rise of hip-hop placed significant emphasis on the then contemporary Brown singles such as Give it Up or Turnit A Loose were seminal influences on earlier break beat culture. 656 The practice of responding to these isolated breaks with the intensity they deserved would culminate in what would eventually come to be known as “breakdancing”. It was called “breaking” or “breakdancing” because the dances were based around the record’s “break”. The “break” - short for breakbeat - refers to a short

655 (Riddell cited in Gaunt 2004: 255) As Gaunt explains, “Although this game-song does not literally quote James Brown’s music, the lyrics are clearly playing ideas about the “Godfather of Soul” with his emphatic dance and stage persona – “Dance on the good foot!” Brown is the epitome of coordinating movement with a range of vocal expression, rhymes and speech about movement” (Gaunt 2004: 256). 656 (Fernando Jr 1999: 15)

219 section of a record where the other instruments are stripped from the sonic picture, leaving the rhythm section to maintain the groove unaccompanied.

DJing and sampling culture in turn have been built on fragmenting of the records that carried the former narratives of soul, electing to rearrange them serially into new non- linear relations with the purpose of making a musical piece a newer, longer music experience. This practice came about as a means of isolating the most danceable sections of the record, allowing the DJs to dispense with the artifice and hone in on the most affective part of the record. As Jamaican-born hip-hop pioneer, Kool Herc explains:

I used to hear the gripes from the audience on the dance floor. Even myself, “cause I used to be a breaker (breakdancer). Why didn’t the guy let the record play out? Or why cut it off there? So with that, me gathering all this information around me, I say: "I think I could do that". So I started playing from a dance floor perspective. I always kept up the attitude that I’m not playing it for myself, I’m playing for the people out there.657

Another Brown track that is directly implicated in the genesis of breakdancing is Brown’s 1972 recording, Get On the Good Foot (1972).658This has been reiterated on numerous occasions by Old schoolers such as breakdancer Crazy Legs from the Rock Steady Crew, who replies in response to the question “What would you say marks the birth of breaking?”:

It’s like Bambaataa says, it’s an extension of ‘the Good Foot.’ When James Brown put that record out, brothers would dance to it and add other moves to it. People would say, “Oh, he’s goin' off!” So, they would call it “goin' off.” Or they would call it ‘the boi-oi-oing.' Eventually Kool Herc labeled it “B-Boying.” He would say, “B-Boys, are you ready?” And that would signify that the break beat was coming on, so break boys and break girls, everybody knew to tie up your laces.659

The breakdance movement spread rapidly as part of the global Hip-Hop movement, as mentioned here by U.K. DJ Tim Westwood, “We were playing Brown for the

657(Herc in Ogg & Upshal 1999: 13) 658 (Brown 1972a) 659 (Legs in Lascaibar 1998: 27)

220 dancers, the breakers and the bodypoppers-from the very earliest, streetstyle British jams. Stuff like “Get on the Good Foot”; breakdancing used to be called ‘goodfoot’, after that record”.660

The Breaks

Hip-hop has been cited as the great marriage of Afro-Caribbean and African- American cultures,661 yet it is not often pointed out that Brown played a key role in bringing the cultures together. For example, with reggae failing to catch the attention of Bronx youth, hip-hop pioneer DJ Kool Herc turned to playing Brown’s records instead.662 This included now seminal Hip-Hop tracks such as the album version of Give it Up or Turnit a Loose (1970).663 Herc was a long-time James Brown fan. Prior to his emigration to the US in 1967, “… his mom, who was living in New York, regularly sent him the latest James Brown and Motown 45s”.664 Whilstithasnot received much attention, Brown’s influence on the music of the Caribbean also deserves credit, a situation that was brought to my own attention when legendary producer, Lee “Scratch” Perry cited Brown as his major influence in the March 2002 edition of music magazine, Mojo. 665 This makes sense, as the rhythms of funk are prominent in the shift from ska and reggae to the more indeterminately constructed forms such as the relatively avant-garde sounding “dub”. 666 It should also be pointed out that the evolution of hip-hop is perhaps not as clear as it is usually described. In

660 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 149) 661 (Szwed 1999: 8-9) 662 (Brewster & Broughton 2000: 229) “In his early parties Herc even played Reggae and dub, although, he says, “I never had the audience for it. People wasn’t feelin' reggae at the time. I played a few but it wasn’t catching”. New York’s West Indians have remained surprisingly separate from the city’s main currents of black culture (possibly because they can distinguish themselves as voluntary immigrants). Certainly, as hip-hop was being formed in the Bronx, reggae was either disliked or seldom heard. So instead, Herc moved to the funk and Latin music his Bronx audiences were used to: “I’m in Rome, I got to do what the Romans do. I’m here. I got to get with the groove that’s here” (Brewster & Broughton 2000: 229) 663 (Brewster & Broughton 2000: 229) 664 (George 1999: 16) 665 (Perry & Bradley 2002: 61). Perry says, “From when I started in the music business in Kingston…it was James Brown that inspire me…James Brown was the best showman. Everything that man did was to put on a show for the people…He take trouble to make sure everything perfect every time…Everything going into that show. It what the people want, and I wanted to put on a show like that” (Perry & Bradley 2002: 61). 666 The influence of James Brown’s music on Jamaican music can be heard through many of the reggae “knockoffs” of his tunes such as Make It Reggae (a straight lift of Brown’s Make It Funky)byShark Wilson & The Basement Heaters, and available on the album, 300% Dynamite: Ska Soul Rocksteady Funk & Dub in Jamaica (Various Artists 1999).

221 fact Kool Herc himself has denied the connection between the Jamaican sound system culture and his own contribution to hip-hop.667

Perhaps Herc’s denial is based on the fact that break beat culture did not exist in the Caribbean sound system. This aspect of hip-hop was definitely something new. Herc does indeed deserve the respect for initiating the practice of this re-engineering of breaks. The break was the most “affective” part of the track and hip-hop was founded around this turning of the affective “break” into structure. By eliminating the conventional song structure, DJs can capitalise on this most “affective” part of the track. As David Toop has explained: “[t]his appropriated music was then edited on record turntables in real time, in order to eliminate the verse, chorus, verse, bridge structure of popular song, leaving only repetitions of an internally complex percussive cell, a fragment and memory trace of the history of a track known as the break”.668

Herc would famously take the re-recorded version of Give it Up or Turnit A Loose found on Brown’s 1970 album Sex Machine (1970) and break it up and “reassemble it” according to his own logic.669 The album version of Give it Up or Turnit A Loose featured the more predominant Clyde Stubblefield break and “…Herc noticed that when he played, for example, James Brown’s ‘Give It Up or Turnit A Loose,’ people went especially wild during the ‘break’ segment of the song, when just the drums or percussion took over “.670 Herc decided to extend this break section in order to embrace ‘the moment” extended as long as possible through repetition. The practice had emerged from the days when the DJs took a 45rpm record that they would stick onto LPs for better manipulation of the break:671

667“Early influential hip hop DJs such as Jamaican-born Kool Herc have sometimes denied direct Jamaican influence on rap, but their audiences must have least been indirectly prepared for rap before it appeared here full-blown” (Szwed 1999: 9). Although Szwed writes that this influence may well have come from performers such as Brown, “Toasts sometimes turned up completely intact in raps, as on James Brown's "King Heroin" in 1972, or in Schoolly D's first recordings. But more often they went through transformations before they returned in pop form, as in Jalal Nuriddin's influential 1973 recording of Hustler's Convention. Nuriddin was a member of the Last Poets, a group that joined the poetry of the prison to black militant rhetoric and processed it through beatnik and jazz sensibilities, against the crack of conga drums. Nuriddin's own solo efforts had even more direct influences on modern rap” (Szwed 1999: 8). 668 (Toop 2000a: 92) 669 (Fernando Jr 1999: 15) 670 (Fernando Jr 1999: 15) 671 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 147)

222 Herc wondered what would happen if he got two copies of the same record and cut back and forth between them in order to prolong the break or sonic climax. Unwittingly, Herc had stumbled upon the breakbeat, the starting point for much hip hop, dance, techno, and jungle (drum ‘n’ bass) today.672

This form of “irrational” composition was at the heart of break culture, but also concurrently in Disco world where a similar effect was achieved through tape edits. Common to both of these examples, is the attempt to capitalise on a form of composition that would assemble privileged instants into new non-sequential forms of composition. Brown was not the only one responsible for this. Brown’s songs were only part of a broader canon that is now well recognised, including other more obscure examples such as It’s Just Begun by The Jimmy Castor Bunch, Apache by the Incredible Bongo Band, Shack Up by Banbarra and Babe Ruth’s The Mexican.673 However, unlike the more isolated tracks of other artists, Brown’s entire catalogue would be pilfered. It is testament to how it would stand up over time that he would provide one of the most enduring influences, on this style of artistic production, from the late 1960s to the present day.

Perhaps the hip-hoppers just thought to remove the parts of the song rendered redundant by their dancing needs: “Why do we have to put up with the artifice of structure and melodic ornamentation when we are really looking forward to the most affective part of the song - breakbeat?” or as Method Man, member of Hip-Hop collective Wu-Tang Clan once asked in the track Method Man (1993), “How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll centre of a break”?674 This is an important chapter in the shift from movement-image to time-image composition, as it suggests a concentration on the present through the break rather than playing the record in its entirety. Furthermore this irrational cutting of the records to extricate the break emphasised the relationship with Aion, described as the time of becoming, rather than one of chronological time.

It was perhaps the “irrational” nature of extending the break that inspired a form of dancing just as irrational to accompany it. I say irrational because by extracting the

672 (Fernando Jr 1999: 15) 673 (Brewster & Broughton 2001) 674 (Wu-Tang Clan 1994)

223 break and leaving its reiteration to the whim of the DJ, the breakers had no idea when that particular section of the record would stop, and the inherent uncertainty of this situation had the effect of cranking up the intensity level. This uncertainty of the irrational cut takes precedence over the certainty of the straight playback of a record that proposes a more navigable linear trajectory. Again, Brown had already anticipated this by making uncertainty and anticipation part of his musical oeuvre – “When will he take the band to the bridge”?675

The main point to be made here is that the courting of the irrational cut had the effect of throwing the “common sense” linkages associated with the more traditional forms of composition into disarray. The process of extracting breaks would also have the added effect of symbolically dislocating the narratives of the records in which they were contained, along with the “rational” movements that were now so overtly given over to a series of irrational connections.

The irrational composition of this musical style reflects the propositions of Deleuze’s cinematic time-image in the sense that this post-soul derived musical form was dedicated to a more open form of composition in comparison to the more closed form of the traditional pop song that might be understood as a “whole” (verse/chorus/bridge etc). When we say the irrational cut opens up time, this means opening up to the chaos of the “outside”, this outside might be perceived as the virtual pool of time in all of its potential juxtapositions of past, present and future. This openness to the virtual possibility of time might be compared against the more sequential and logical linear unification of chronological time, where the open, serial relationship is promoted through these irrational cuts and indeterminate relationships. For the open composition is full of virtual temporal alterity, a process that might be seen in the cut- up technique of William S. Burroughs’ 676 who says: “Perhaps events are pre-written and pre-recorded and when you cut word lines the future leaks out”.677

675 This is a reference to Brown’s famous exhortation for the band to take him to the bridge in his 1970 hit, Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine Pts 1&2 (Brown 1970b) 676 Burroughs’s cut-up technique refers to the aleatory process of cutting up articles and re-assembling them into new texts, a Dadaist technique inherited by Brion Gysin who passed it onto Burroughs himself. 677 (Burroughs in Odier & Burroughs 1974: 28)

224 The irrational cut beckons this opening up of virtual temporalities that might exist outside of the “totality” of sequential, privileged instants. The reason why this new irrational relationship to time will become so central to electronic dance music practices, rather than the more individual, subjective forms of duration, is because it is in irrational connection that becoming emerges:

Time’s direct image is not time in itself, but rather the force of virtuality and becoming, or what remains both outside of, yet in reserve and immanent to, our contemporary modes of existence. The irrational interval does not signify or represent; it resists. And it restores a belief in the virtual as a site where choice has yet to be determined, a reservoir of unthought yet immanent possibilities and modes of existence.678

This direct-image of time will also produce a subject who is more amenable to the process of making connections among such “irrational” image relations, and is more open to the heterogeneity that might also result from it.

From Sequence to Series

As I have demonstrated in previous chapters, James Brown’s music had displayed the power of the rupturing “cut”, perhaps most famously indicated through his punctuating of his music with shrill, irrationally placed screams. The trademark James Brown scream is indicative of this new type of composition where the music no longer attempts to caress the listener, but instead will launch a type of sonic assault on the senses.

The James Brown scream is perhaps indicative of the type of overwhelming op-signs and son-signs that Deleuze argues would exacerbate the break with the action-image of the movement-image regime.679 For these op-signs and son-signs are direct presentations of time, forming non-localizable relations to the general composition thus bringing an aberration that will break the continuity of an action-reaction schema. 680 Deleuze says that these pure optical and sound situations lead to the “recollection-image”, a concept that will be central to the direct experience of time

678 (Rodowick 1997: 204) 679 (Deleuze 1989: 44-48) 680 (Deleuze 1989: 41)

225 because such “recollection-images” have the effect of fragmenting the simple flow of linear movement-image composition. As Deleuze says, “…the optical (and sound) image in attentive recognition does not extend into movement, but enters into relation with a ‘recollection-image’ that it calls up”.681

Within the context of cinema, for example, this “recollection-image” is the actualisation of an unrealisable past that exists only virtually, and this process of actualisation is actually a form of creation for as Deleuze contends, “[m]emory is not in us”.682In this context of the time-image cinema such recollection distorts and distends the narrative flow of the cinematic text as its recalling of unrealisable pasts causes the story to slip between indiscernible actual-virtual temporal relationships and the present of the image becomes increasingly ambiguous in the process.

Within a musical context then, we might question, for instance, how the much re- sampled James Brown scream might prompt such a “recollection-image” and how this might operate within the logic of the composition. For the James Brown scream as sample source, provides a series of concurrent temporal dimensions - as an actualisation of an unrealisable past – the virtual past or the present that it once was (when recorded) – but also as a musical component of the present itself as musical composition.

In fact the James Brown scream is tantamount to a type of hallucination, the way he punctuates the music in this apparently irrational way, beckons one to ask, just what is it that is making him scream this way? What is the point? One usually has a laugh at such idiosyncrasy, but the point is that these punctuations break the flow of the composition and for this reason perhaps operates in a fashion similar to the “recollection-image” attributed by Deleuze as central to the composition of the time- image regime. The pure affective relations instigated through such irrational, and idiosyncratic vocal techniques are also perhaps the reason why James Brown samples have become a staple of DJ and sampling culture. Within these post-soul compositions, the James Brown scream will, for instance, begin to appear in places within the composition that one would not normally consider rational in a normal

681 (Deleuze 1989: 45-46) 682 (Deleuze 1989: 98)

226 everyday experience of events. This strange juxtaposition of sounds through new types of musical montage will instead lead to such recollection-images, which in turn, might conjure up the emergence of “op-signs” and “son-signs” - the catalysts for this plunging of the audience into pure recollection of the time-image. However, this use of a segment of a James Brown record is not just a “flashback” in the sense that a flashback in terms of cinema is like a subordinate back-story that will justify the “present” of the film. Within the time-image, past, present and future co-exist in a non-hierarchical relation, not one that privileges “reality”. The musicians operating with a time-image music perhaps share the same concern and they do not make these old records subordinate to the present. Instead they become a thoroughly integrated study of co-existent time.

The time-image form of musical composition would also appear to be aware of the power of temporal disorientation as an affective experience, as such irrational cuts and sampled “recollection-images” will deliberately rupture the simple succession of a past, present and future moving sequentially. This is what gives the time-image a “chaosmotic” relationship between actual and virtual poles of time, a new found relationship to time that will require that the audience enter into thought with these images, and that they might, in vain perhaps, attempt to make sense of the signs thrown up by the texts, where thought is not the object itself, but rather, “…an act which is constantly arising and being revealed in thought”.683

Within the context of the time-image cinema, this newfound relation to thought signifies a thinking cinema, and one that readily works against the “common sense” logic that would constrain it aesthetically. Deleuze, for instance speaks about the “camera consciousness” that is to be found in the work of Antonioni and Godard684 and perhaps might be understood similarly to a postmodernist cinematic self- reflexivity which ruptures the story space.

As I discussed in the previous chapter, Brown had demonstrated a reluctance to follow any logic and in doing so had readily opened up to the possibilities for the music that lay “outside” of musical thought. Much of this integration of “irrational”

683 (Deleuze 1989: 169) 684 (Deleuze 1986: 74-75)

227 elements of the music is exhibited through his compositional style. This can be seen for example in the way Brown self-reflexively composes his music and how he converses with his musicians, joking and laughing (or even chiding them) in the process. Take for instance the track, GetitTogether(1967) where Brown seems impervious to the audience’s critical judgement of the track “if you hear any noise it’s just me and the boys” (a line that would be appropriated as the basis of a whole track by George Clinton’s P-Funk) or Brown teasing his musicians about playing their solos “have another – no, be cool”. These idiosyncrasies of Brown’s compositional methods of indeterminacy being captured as it is recorded ruptures the idea of a hermetically sealed composition of the type that had been fetishised under previous notions of composition.685

The Crystalline

Instead of thinking of a musical totality based on logical continuity and flow the new time-image oriented music is instead less concerned with this continuity of passing presents, but more concerned with the interplay of time through rupture.686 The introduction of such irrationally placed elements as the James Brown scream, for instance will threaten to punctuate the flow of the music going on underneath it. Such overwhelming affective elements will thus break the circuit of action-reaction as we enter into the ambiguity of the image’s virtual-actual relations. In short we have difficulty distinguishing between past and present.

This inability to discern between virtual and actual images is what Deleuze refers to as the crystal-image, again a central feature of this manifestation of the more fragmented time/space relations that characterise the time-image. For Deleuze this fragmentation of space (and time also as this will affect memory, as I shall document shortly) is exacerbated through the proliferation of these any-space-whatevers. The

685 See earlier footnote that discusses in detail, the objections raised by Jeremy Gilbert over the use of “composition” rather than “improvisation” (Gilbert 2004a: 118-139) 686 In his article, “Hiphop Rupture” (2000) Charles Mudede argues for Hip-Hop’s deliberate courting of an ‘aesthetics of imperfection’. Hiphop’s embrace of rupture, he writes, renders it, “…the true imperfect art”. As Mudede writes, “…instead of retaining the beauty of a sample, keeping its rigid form intact, hiphop breaks the sample, disrupts it, jams it (literally). It's as if a perfect thing was made only to be broken, fragmented, paused, denied its moment of fulfillment. Hiphop does not avoid errors; it makes them, mimics them. And the most gifted producers are masters of mistakes” (Mudede 2000).

228 indeterminate, fragmented space is a manifestation of these spaces impinging on the “organic” presupposition of a linkage of space through action, and an understanding of time as a product of a rational succession of movements. For the populations living under these circumstances, those in the post-war, but also in the post-soul, the apparent unity of “rational” space fragments into these “any-space-whatevers” which are dominated by the irrational and disconnected.

This time-image is a product of this breakdown in simple rational explication of time and space. Hence the time-image is instead constructed around an “inorganic” or “crystalline” image of thought, Deleuze’s description of this newly skewed set of relations of time and space. The crystal image is indicative of the multi-faceted and indiscernible real that emerges from this breakdown in rational time and space. As such the crystal will provide a system of exchange between “…actual and virtual, the limpid and opaque, the seed and the environment”687 all of which maintain their indiscernability even though they remain distinct:

In fact the crystal constantly exchanges the two distinct images which constitute it, the actual image of the present which passes and the virtual image of the past which is preserved: distinct and yet indiscernible, and all the more indiscernible because distinct, because we do not know which is one and which is the other.688

For Deleuze, the crystal image, is “the coalescence of an actual image and its virtual image, the indiscernability of two distinct images” 689 and “…stands for its object, replaces it, both creates and erases it”. 690 This coalescence will encompass the movement between “de-actualized peaks of present” and “virtual sheets of past”.691 It is like the camera describing an existential property. For example, a crystalline image of people will not just depict an action, but use the medium itself to 'carry out a primordialgenesisof[them]intermsofablack,orawhite,oragrey[or]...of colours'.692 The crystal image integrates the manipulation of the properties of the film itself as affect. This is what Deleuze refers to as “crystalline narration” and which is

687 (Deleuze 1989: 74) 688 (Deleuze 1989: 81) 689 (Deleuze 1989: 127) 690 (Deleuze 1989: 126) 691 (Deleuze 1989: 130) 692 (Deleuze 1989: 201)

229 concerned with pure optical and sound situations, which take over after the collapse of the sensory-motor form of sequence.693

We can argue that this re-assembling of such virtual “sheets of past” into new temporal configurations is precisely at the heart of thought behind the electronic dance musics to emerge from this time. The new techniques honed by the DJ’s, such as scratching and mixing, deliberately solicited new relations with time (and even narrative). These practices deliberately solicit the power of the irrational cut. In doing so, they help to bring the possibility of new textual relations and connections to an “outside” that had not previously existed. This style of composition veered away from dialectical narrative and brought about a process of additive synthesis694 or that which Deleuze and Guattari referred to as “nomad thought”.695 Such nomad thought, “…replaces the closed equation of representation, x=x=not y (I=I= not you) with an open equation: …+y+z+a+… (…+arm+brick+window)…[i]t synthesises a multiplicity of elements without effacing their heterogeneity or hindering their potential for future rearranging”.696 Maintaining a serial perspective between relations is no less than a proposal for a new ethics, in the sense that it suggests the very importance of such constant reassembling of life. The reassemblage of images as sounds in this “irrational” way unleashes their virtual potential, although the efficacy of this method requires the right environmental conditions if this virtuality is to be properly actualised. By this I mean that the immanent existential conditions of the post-soul experience meant that the climate was right for such new relations of time/space to take hold. One does not will chaos when one is contented.

693 (Deleuze 1989: 128) 694 Deleuze’s extrapolates on additive synthesis in his book on the painter, Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon: The Logic Of Sensation, using the example of the analogue synthesizer: “Analogical synthesizers are "modular": they establish an immediate connection between heterogeneous elements; they introduce a literally unlimited possibility of connection between these elements, on a field of presence or finite plane whose moments are all actual and sensible. Digital synthesizers, however, are "integral": their operation passes through a codification, through a homogenization and binarization of the data, which is produced on a separate plane, infinite in principle, and whose sound will be produced only as a result of a conversion-translation. A second difference appears at the level of filters. The primary function of the filter is to modify the basic color of the sound, to constitute or vary its timbre. But digital filters proceed by an additive synthesis of elementary codified formants, whereas the analogical filter usually acts through the subtraction of frequencies ("high-pass", "low-pass,"...). What is added from one filter to the next are intensive subtractions, and it is thus an addition of subtractions that constitutes modulation and sensible movement as a fall. In short, it is perhaps the notion of modulation in general (and not similitude) that will enable us to understand the nature of analogical language or the diagram” (Deleuze, 2003: 95). 695 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 379) 696 (Massumi 1988: xiii)

230 The “Seers” of the Turntable

This “nomad” thought alleviated by the irrational cut allows thought to break free of the strictures of identity, and to create irrational links, which are necessary for creative connections. Alleviated of a narrative version of the world, a time-image aesthetic will opt instead for a belief in the world, rather than the subjectively reiterated knowledge of a represented world. This is important because it is only through breaking free of identity that more heterogeneous musical connections can be made, and within this time-image music this will allow the rhythms of Brown’s groove to link up with the electronica of Germany and even outer space in the case of Afrofuturism.

It may be the very failure of representation that is the most affective weapon in the DJs arsenal, although to look beyond the common sense relations of narrative and sequence, the DJs act as a type of ‘seer’, a character that will emerge from this any- space-whatever situation. These seers say Deleuze, “…cannot or will not react, so great is their need to ‘see’ properly what there is in the situation”.697 We might find a correlation between the ‘seers’ of the cinematic any-space-whatevers and the DJ of the post-soul generation, who must contend with the existential malaise of the decline in logical action. These are the seers who see life before them but unable to react in the normal way to such situations, are stimulated to find new ways of dealing with them. Hence the need to “see” (or in the case of our musical example to think with musical images) clear of the situation which implores them to put images together in new ways, as a way of proposing a possible way out of the overwhelming sense of powerlessness experienced after the break in the sensory-motor-schema:

[n]ow this sensory-motor break finds its condition at a higher level and itself comes back to a break in the link between man and the world. The sensory-motor break makes man a seer who finds himself struck by something intolerable in the world, and confronted by something unthinkable in thought.698

697 (Deleuze 1989: 28) 698 (Deleuze 1989: 169)

231 To alleviate this break with “common sense”, or to approach the unthinkable in thought requires the naïvety of the “seer”.699 Thus we might account for these new aesthetics and creating a particular relationship with the existential situation of post- soul, and the any-space-whatever, as a manifestation of the DJs/samplers’ attempts to “see”. This in turn implores the compulsion to keep replaying the sample or break in an attempt to make sense of the situation at hand. So “desperate” are they, that they do not mind turning to “absurd” methods to “see”. But given the circumstances this failure to make adequate causal sense of events means that they will attempt to recombine images over and over as a result.

Whilst this might be a frustrating endeavour it also gives rise to the productivity of the any-space-whatevers which forces such seers into a relation with the vast potential connections that might be made. It is being in this seer-like position that requires DJs to continually return to the records, to enter and leave them in such a seemingly irrational fashion. In this effort to “see” the DJ tries, of course, to give this break beat its “real” context, only for that context to be compromised by the broader existential paradigm in which the seer is immersed. The musical narratives cannot be played in their entirety anymore, perhaps because the seers can no longer see the connection of the old record to the chronological sense of the world that once existed. Which brings the whole notion of chronological time into some disrepute. As Deleuze writes, “[t]he visionary, the seer, is the one who sees in the crystal, and what he sees is the gushing of time as dividing in two, as splitting. Except, Bergson adds, this splitting never goes right to the end”.700 In the crystalline regime, the past, present and future become both irreconcilable and increasingly indiscernible701 and “…what indiscernability makes visible is the ceaseless fracturing or splitting of nonchronological time”.702

The irony of the situation is that whilst the failure of connection of the virtual past and present circumstance will rupture the sensory-motor-situation, it also forces the seer to contend with the “chaosmos” of relations that emerge as perspectives of the crystalline-image. As Deleuze says, “there is no doubt that attentive recognition, when it succeeds, comes about through recollection-images: it is the man I met last week at

699 (Deleuze 1989: 126) 700 (Deleuze 1989: 81) 701 (Deleuze 1989: 81) 702 (Rodowick 1997: 92)

232 such and such a place…But is precisely this success which allows the sensory-motor flux to take up its temporarily interrupted course again”.703 This “attentive recognition” procured through the recollection-image “informs us to a much greater degree when it fails than when it succeeds”. 704 Deleuze ascribes to Bergson, the idea that this failure of attentive recognition will “haunt cinema”, 705 yet it will also inspire it to new dimensions of creativity.

This perhaps explains why the beauty of music is to be found in its apparent dysfunction. For some James Brown’s music is precisely that, and I have been privy to many criticisms from others who think that Brown’s music nothing but banal repetition, and often a vamp on a single chord to boot. Yet this repetition, like the example of minimalism discussed in chapter 4, creates the chaosmotic situation of being in the middle, and staying there. A situation that evokes that idea attributed by Deleuze of the chaosmos as the “labyrinth without a thread”.706 Yet the James Brown groove, predicated on repeating a rhythmic pattern with minimal variations, over and over again, might restore a belief in the virtual, as any predetermination based on traditional sequential linkages is plunged into this chaosmos.

A minor music should be open to alternate constitutions of duration precisely because such apprehension of a minor temporality resists the more majoritarian logic of the movement-image, which is about reiterating a sense of agency through control over the outside. The serial relations based on the irrational cuts of the time-image will instead offer potential for reconnection to the vast virtual possibilities that might exist “outside” common sense. Although we should also keep in mind, as Samira Kawash has commented, that “[w]hile this outside cannot, by definition, be represented, Deleuze suggests that it can nevertheless sometimes be perceived”.707 It might also be translated into corporeal becoming as well, a point made in regard to breaks and breakdancing by Félix Guattari himself to Charles J. Stivale:

703 (Deleuze 1989: 54) 704 (Deleuze 1989: 54) 705 (Deleuze 1989: 54) 706 (Deleuze 1994: 56) 707 (Kawash 1998)

233 …[h]owever, there is one that immediately occurs to me, it’s break dancing and music, all these dances which are both hyper- territorialized and hyper-corporal, but that, at the same time, make us discover spectrums of possible utilization, completely unforeseen traits of corporality, and that invent a new grace of entirely unheard-of possibilities of corporality.708

Whilst Guattari does not elaborate upon this corporality in the interview from which it was taken, I might attempt my own extrapolation. Dancing, and in particular, highly stylized forms such as breakdancing are attempts to capture these forces in sensation and translate them. To speak in terms of these “possibilities of corporality” reminds us of the empiricist conversion, that belief in the world, as the sum of its possibilities of movements and intensities, “…so as once again to give birth to new modes of existence”. The artistic response to living with such an intolerable set of circumstances, is to seek out new methods of connecting with the world. In this circumstance, dance would provide an economical way to forge the creation of new relationships, both of the body and also between bodies, in such circumstances. The music to emerge from this situation was obviously so affected by contemporary circumstances that its musicians could not go back to the older, more orthodox compositional precedents. Things are now predicated on the changing of the body, removing it from its commonsense relations to commonsense time and space, probably stripping the body of preconceived notions more than anything. The “caterpillars” and “robots” of breakdancing and other forms of a becoming- corporeality are formed in response to the new music that called them forth.

Through the musical use of the irrational cut, the DJs would take the affordances that emerged from the incommensurable relations between “sound images” and make them something liveable. They gave old records totally new actualities by bringing out a virtual potential. Who knew that such records could inspire bodily becomings such as breakdancing? Furthermore, the work of DJs and breakdancers indicate a commitment to a belief in the world in which the forms of dancing are so overtly different from the logical postures of the determined world. This might indicate

708 (Lascaibar 1998)

234 “…the erasure of the unity of man and the world, in favour of a break which now leaves us with only a belief in this world”.709

The Medium of a New Duration

The material evidence of a belief in these new forms of composition was perhaps signalled through the emergence of the 12-inch record. I would contend that the 12- inch record is a direct consequence of this increased emphasis on the temporal nature called for by the groove resulting in the birth of the 12-inch single in the mid- 1970s.710 The medium was the culmination of several years of experiments in groove taking place in the late 1960s-early 1970s in discotheques by DJ/producers such as Francis Grasso, Walter Gibbons711 and Tom Moulton. All of these would experiment with their, “…favourite tracks to make them longer and more danceable”.712 Each of the dance artists in their own way contributed to the pioneering of this practice of the artificial extension of the duration, often by editing sections of tape.

The virtues of Grasso, Gibbons, and Moulton et al. have previously been described at length in books such as Brewster and Broughton’s Last Night a DJ Saved My Life (1998). The process of early remixing, was, as they described it, re-editing.713

709 (Deleuze 1989: 187-188) 710 This emergence of the twelve inch is discussed at length in Brewster and Broughton. As they recount in their book, the first 12-inch single, was So Much For Love by Moment of Truth. “It was something which Moulton made for a very select group of his DJ friends and although Roulette later released it on 7-inch, the larger format was never commercially available”. (Brewster & Broughton 1999: 170) 711 Gibbons work on remixing may well have been inspired by dub if Brewster and Broughton’s description is anything to go by: “Gibbons was much more radical in his approach, stripping songs right down to their most primal elements and reconstructing them into complex interlocking layers of sound. Like his wild, tribalistic DJing, his remixes emphasised the rhythmic essence of a track. Walter Gibbons loved his drums. (Brewster & Broughton 1999: 171) The success of Moulton and Gibbons resulted in the eventual adoption of the format by both the record companies and the public at large. 712 See (Brewster & Broughton 1999: 167) Although Brewster and Broughton make the distinction that, ‘strictly speaking, these tapes were re-edits and not remixes. A re-edit is a. new version made by cutting up and splicing together chunks of the original song in a different order, usually using a tape recorder, a razor blade and some sticky tape. A remix is a more involved process where the original multi-track recording of the song is used to build a new version from its component parts. If you think of re-editing as making a patchwork version, then remixing is where you actually separate the individual sonic fibres of a song - i.e. separate the bass track from the drum track from the vocal track - and weave them back into a new piece of musical fabric”. (Brewster & Broughton 1999: 168) 713 (Brewster & Broughton 1999: 167) Rather uncannily, Tom Moulton began his career in the early 1960s as a promotions man at King Records, home of James Brown (Moulton, Brewster, & Broughton 1998) As Brown was King’s biggest artist, it is perhaps interesting to consider just how Brown’s music influenced Moulton in creeping up the length of the records. There is another link between Brown and re-editing experiments. It is also interesting to note that some of the first recognised tape editing

235 Brewster and Broughton note that Moulton was one of the first people to gain notoriety for remixing, credited with remixing cuts as early as 1972. 714 Moulton had “…the idea of producing a tape specifically made for dancing”715 and remarked that he “…thought it was a shame that the records weren’t longer, so people could really start getting off”.716 Moulton then set about the laborious task of putting together such a tape. Whilst the culmination in the invention of the 12” single was just as much accident as anything else, as the story goes, Moulton, having run out of 7” blanks, took up the offer of the mastering engineer to press the track on 12”.717 Yet the form of the music had already long anticipated the method of its capture and it would have happened sooner or later.

This was another innovation that Brown had created the necessary affordances for. For Brown had long pushed the limitations of the old 7” single. Unable to be contained by the limitations of the 7” single Brown instead began to use both A and B sides for tracks, split into “parts 1 and 2”,718 and when that wasn’t enough, used further singles to complete the track. For example, 1971’s Make It Funky was initially released on one single with “Part 1 and 2” covering A and B-side and with “Part 3”719

experiments were also associated with Brown and King Studios. In 1969, King Records released a single, by an artist going by the name of "Steve Soul”, who was in fact, James Brown. The title of the records was A Talk with the News, and rates a mention in discussions of early tape editing experiments. The record was really just a promotional single with different cuts of James Brown tracks mixed in to answer the questions. As Neil McMilan says of the record in his article on the history of cut and paste which appeared in Big Daddy magazine, “…despite occasional comic misfires, it’s easy to see how the humorous interplay between spoken word and sampled excerpt sets the blueprint for the satirical and narrative elements not only of Steinski’s cut-ups but, even if unconsciously, many a scratch DJ’s acapella routines” (McMilan 2002). In fact in the notes to a double CD of early break beat classics called Break Sessions,itcredits James Brown with the first “break”. “What was the first break? That’s a moot point. James Brown put together a couple of records credited to "Steve Soul” in the early 1970s (sic), which were basically edits of many of his records with an announcer talking over them” (McCann 2002). I think this is probably drawing a long bow (even as a James Brown fan) because it doesn’t really have the same purpose as the later break edits would. 714 (Brewster & Broughton 1999: 167) 715 (Brewster & Broughton 1999: 167) 716 (Moulton in Brewster & Broughton 1999: 167) Brewster and Broughton then discuss how Moulton’s “…forays into editing soon led him to studio-based remixing” (Brewster & Broughton 1999: 168) giving BT Express an R&B No.1 single with his re-edit to Do It ‘till You're Satisfied in mid 1974. (Brewster & Broughton 1999: 168) 717 (Brewster & Broughton 1999: 170) The first 12-inch singles were limited to test pressings made by Moulton of his mixes, although as Brewster and Broughton add, “Eventually, though, the record companies got wise to the benefits of the 12-inch and started using the format for DJ-only promotion. No one is exactly sure when these label-sanctioned promotional 12-inches arrived on the streets, though the general view is that the first was Dance Dance Dance by Calhoun, in spring 1975” (Brewster & Broughton 1999: 170). 718 (Brown 1971b) 719 (Brown 1971c)

236 (another section of the same track) on the next single. This type of staggered release was also used for two separate single releases to come from the 1973 remake of Think.720As Cynthia Rose has commented, Brown’s idiosyncratic use of 7” singles would foreshadow later innovations such as the 12 –inch of the disco period. 721 As Cynthia Rose writes, “What Brown’s circular, extended vamps really needed was that 12" single format brought to prominence by disco (and dominant throughout the”80s via soul hits, rap releases and club remixes)”.722

Brown’s groove based funk tore away from the more conventional and linear compositional structures of R&B and would result in R&B’s gradual displacement by the more groove-oriented genres such as funk and disco. The non-linear, serial repetition of rhythms, which were so important to Brown’s oeuvre, would have a dramatic effect on music as they called for a new form of response, one that might be characterised as one of immersion rather than attention to linear structure. We can find the new non-linear forms that courted the groove in the DJ mixes that were artificially extended in the discotheques:

In disco the musical pulse is freed from the claustrophobic interiors of the blues and the tight scaffolding of R&B and early soul music. A looser, explicitly polyrhythmic attack pushes the blues, gospel and soul heritage into an apparently endless cycle where there is no beginning or end, just an ever-present "now." Disco music does not come to a halt...restrictedtoathree-minutesingle,themusicwouldbe rendered senseless. The power of disco lay in saturating dancers and the dance floor in the continual explosion of its presence.723

Disco’s emphasis on the ever-present “now” might indicate a more vital relationship with the affective pleasure to be found in the music rather than in the broader political environment. This of course, shifts the focus to an emphasis on the politics of affective relations rather than action predicated on the previous action-image idea of narrativised events. Although the very physical nature of dancing might appear to be about action and hence related to the action-image, in fact the opposite is true – as understood from an existential point of view. The image of thought behind dancing

720 (Brown 1973c) and (Brown 1973c) which came out in April and June 1973 respectively. 721 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 103) 722 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 103) 723 (Chambers in Werner 2000: 207)

237 and its lack of determination of its gestures is the very opposite to the logic of action- reaction and agency. The beauty of dancing is of course in the process of losing one’s self in an undetermined form of space/time. Hence its appeal to those who have the least power in regard to agency in relations to majoritarian politics – which is why it had perhaps an inordinate appeal to the marginalised in the community, such as its black and gay audiences, or to those “Idiots” for whom there was another way of being outside hegemonically constructed time and space.724 The necessity of developing events for such becomings gave rise to the block parties and discotheques and would allow the minor cultures to attempt to connect with the world again. By connecting, I mean a way of connecting with the world outside of the limitations of imposed time/space, and to do so also required the development of aesthetics that would bring out the possibilities of new relations to time.

Even if Brown’s commercial status would eventually decline in the mid-1970s, his iconic status would prevail. The innovations of the groove so central to Brown’s music would be further extrapolated by other funk and disco groups throughout the 1970s through groups such as the Ohio Players, Kool and the Gang, the Meters and of course Parliament-Funkadelic. George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic would indeed go as far as to poach many of Brown’s disenchanted ex-musicians, emancipating them from Brown’s autocratic leadership and generally giving them a chance to express themselves on the one in their own way.725 As history has it, the groove would further evolve into disco through the music of Parliament-Funkadelic or The Sound of Philadelphia.726 The link is of course the minor communities, such as those of black

725 Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, George Clinton fronted two groups by the names of Parliament and Funkadelic. Whilst both based their music around funk rhythms, Funkadelic was the decidedly more acid-rock inspired of the two. Although it was perhaps acid as well as members that were common to both groups. The splitting of the groups was to allow Clinton to work for two separate record labels. Thus the groups operating under the broader Clinton umbrella collectively are referred to in the singular as Parliament-Funkadelic. Clinton’s gift for mythology gave Parliament-Funkadelic an extraterrestrial connection (later linked to what would be called Afrofuturism) and producing a musical sub-genre that was referred to as "P-Funk”. Also, in distinction to the James Brown of the 1960s and 1970s (but not the 1980s) who was vehemently anti-drugs, Clinton was anything but, and Parliament- Funkadelic was literally a James Brown band on acid, given that Clinton had been recruiting Brown’s disgruntled musicians from the early 1970s. For example Clinton took on the members of the original JBs of the early 1970s including Bootsy and Catfish Collins and Frank Waddy. This exodus continued during the 1970s and Clinton absorbed other prominent James Brown band members such as Fred Wesley and Maceo Parker, in turn. 726 See for example the episode, Make it Funky from the television series, Dancing in the Street (1996) for a full account.

238 and gay cultures who attempted to emancipate themselves from the constraints of hegemonic time for as long as possible.

Irrational Cuts and Existential Statements

The continuing development of these emphatic groove-oriented forms of composition would occur concurrently in other any-space-whatevers such as the discotheques and the block parties not only of the United States but elsewhere. Whilst I will shortly discuss the example of Kraftwerk, there are many individual movements that would emerge from this courting of the groove, all significantly occurring with a similar historical time span. Other examples would include the sound system culture that emerged from the ghettos of Trenchtown and in particular the rise of an irrational music par example, namely dub, at around the same time in the late 1960s.727 It perhaps goes without saying that any such places of becoming were dedicated to the transcendence of the banality of common sense time and space and the distinctly chronological time that marked the menial, low paid jobs that many of those people had to endure between trips to the dance floor.

I think it is fair through all this to emphasise the foundational nature of Brown’s funk in helping to emancipate the groove like no other music before. Its message was that a groove would always be of importance to any minor culture whose everyday life was so overwhelmingly imposed upon by the dominant forms of hegemonic time. The groove was vital to this undoing of space, which was achieved through the groove’s shift from a compositional concentration on “movement” within the composition to a more temporal orientation.

727 The style referred to as “dub” evolved from the creation of new “versions” of previously recorded tracks, produced mainly through a liberal coating of effects such as reverb and echo. An interesting point that once again draws upon the influence of James Brown is made by Lloyd Bradley who writes in Bass Culture (2001), that this practice of creating new instrumental version sides may well have been influenced by the Godfather’s practice of putting an instrumental “Part 2” of the B-sides of his singles (Bradley 2001: 313).One of the most feted of these early dub producers, is King Tubby. King Tubby put his sound system rig “Tubby’s Home Town HiFi” together in 1968 (Bradley 2001: 314). “He introduced echo, reverb and sound effects to the dance by bringing a range of specially built or modified outboard gear to his control tower” (Bradley 2001: 314). Tubby’s sonic experimentation had a lot to do with the development of the dub style, and the issuing of instrumental reggae "versions" would become standard practice evolving into the sub-genre of “dub” reggae(Bradley 2001: 314-320).

239 Increasingly innovative compositional approaches were deployed in service of the maintenance of the groove and it was the differences in these approaches that produced the generic distinction between electronic dance music cultures. Most of the styles to emerge from this period would alleviate a determined sense of time from its totalisation or rational projection through a system of “irrational cuts”. The electronic dance music genres to emerge from this period involved myriad manifestations of the application of such irrational cuts, although they were also common to both disco and hip-hop:

Beatmatching, cuts and blends (or “running” records, as Pete calls it) were required skills on the gay scene thanks to pioneers like Terry Noel, Francis Grasso, Steve D’Acquisto and Michael Cappello. Grandmaster Flowers, who’d been playing since 1967, as well as Plummer, Maboya and Pete Jones himself, deserve credit for developing the same skills at the same time and - crucial to our story - for showing them off to the wide world of greater New York. ‘they would say that Flowers was a mixer and I was a chopper,” says Pete, describing Grandmaster Flowers” style as being closest to the DJs in the gay clubs. “Flowers was an expert mixer. He didn’t chop too many of the records, he would blend. Plummer was a mixer also, but I liked to chop, I liked to get the beat BANG! BANG! - I loved to chop. Even before I had a cueing system, I liked to chop them records up”.728

It is in service of the ever present “now” or a series of “presents” that informs such “mixing and chopping”. This wilful cultivation of the irrational cuts coalesces into a sense of immersion rather than imploring the action required by the linear logic of narrative.

This requires the kind of circular, hypnotic rhythms that Brown elicited from his finely honed rhythm orchestras, although it perhaps goes without saying that the intricacy and precision required to maintain this rhythmic lineage, let alone the stamina, meant that such grooves were generally impossible for lesser mortals to muster. If Brown set a precedent here, the intensity of that precedent would call for the subsequent emancipation and transformation of the synthesizer, from an instrument of progressive rock into a dance music instrument.

728 (Brewster & Broughton 2001)

240 FromColdSweattoNoSweat

Brown’s pioneering work with rhythm took popular music from a linear logic of verse/chorus/verse structure into groove-orientated musics within the space of a decade. The intense nature of Brown’s rhythms not only began to dominate popular music composition, but also in doing so began to anticipate the appropriate hardware to take up such affordances, which is why I believe that the ensuing convergence of the electronic with the rhythms of dance music culture is the product of the rhythmic intensity set up by Brown’s bands. Brown set high standards when it came to maintaining a particular level of intensity and from there on in, it would require dance music producers to come up with some rather innovative ways of keeping up. This point is confirmed by Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones who says that Brown was:

The precursor to all modern dance music. James tried to get his band to play like a machine. The rhythm section just kicked over all the time. When machines did came intro dance, music people complained that the sound wasn’t real or soulful, but here was James Brown pushing his band into playing as tightly as a machine. He was a tyrant as a bandleader- he forced his band to play exactly what he wanted where he wanted it ...It was a groove machine! I liked his other tunes like Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag but this was the future. Kids today understand how to put a groove together like they didn’t in my day and it’s all down to James Brown.729

Electronic invention would go on to assist in an aesthetic so difficult to achieve without several drummers and years of hell on the chitlin circuit, let alone Brown’s despotism and the vast reserves of funk musicians on hand. The intricacy and precision required to maintain this rhythmic lineage was almost impossible to emulate without the type of finely honed rhythm orchestra that few could easily muster.

The much vaunted influence of Kraftwerk on electronic dance music in the 1970s was perhaps due to their ability to maintain the speed, accuracy and intricacy that was expected on the dance floor, post-Brown, but finding a more efficient way of doing so. Their method was not only more efficient but also a product of the aesthetics of the Protestant work ethic as much as anything else. As former drummer Wolfgang Flür has commented in the documentary Better Living Through Circuitry,tryingto

729 (Harrington & Jones 2002: 9)

241 maintain the appropriate rhythms via a conventional drum kit is hard work and made you sweat, so an electronic kit was, “...very elegant you know, without sweating...”730

Groups such as Kraftwerk had also tapped into the aesthetic possibilities of previous movements in twentieth century music via the European avant-gardes, and the German postwar legacy such Stockhausen and the Cologne school as well as Cage and Musique Concrete. This was also part of a broader popular music lineage that went from Stockhausen into Kraftwerk and into Euro disco through producers like Georgio Moroder.731

Just as was occurring simultaneously on the other side of the Atlantic, Kraftwerk too were on the vanguard of addressing the type of “powerlessness” of thought that Deleuze discusses in relation to Artaud. For the young post-war German youth had to bear the weight of a history that they did not want to inherit. In his book, IWasA Robot (2003), former Kraftwerk member Wolfgang Flür discusses the difficulty of identifying with being German as the post-war generation. It was through new rhythms and approaches to composition that they could potentially transform this relationship to their immediate history:

Our immediate past was haunted by the Second World War, a nightmare which brought incomprehensible suffering to the nations around us and to our own, provoked by the dreadful mass stupidity and repulsive military fanaticism of a generation submissive to orders. What did we young people have to be glad about when we thought about our country and about our parents, who had caused it all, participated in it or had at least looked away like cowards? There was nothing for our generation to look back on; there was only the future.732

Perhaps one of Kraftwerk’s most endearing and successful attributes was their adoption of the most exaggerated of German stereotypes, yet adopting this difference

730 (Flur in Reiss 2001) 731 As Brewster and Broughton tell us: “Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte were two transplanted foreigners set down in Munich; one Italian, the other English [who] produced Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby” (Brewster & Broughton 1999: 185). Moroder was “…inspired by, of all things, Iron Butterfly’s prog-rock epic “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” (Brewster & Broughton 1999: 185). So the acid fuelled epics of progressive rock, “…lengthened what had originally started out as a four-minute song to fill one whole side of an album, nearly 17 minutes in all. It became one of disco’s first worldwide hits” (Brewster & Broughton 1999: 185). 732 (Flür 2003: 241)

242 through repetition, successfully enabled their transcendence of the limits of what these stereotypes represented. Their self-mythologizing also enabled them to selectively acknowledge the past without being subsumed by it – enabling them to concentrate not on the narratives of their immediate environment – but rather the audience “who were missing”:

Kraftwerk’s great theme is - and was- their fascination with the real modern world. Raised in industrial Dusseldorf, Hutter and Schneider flirted briefly with vague classical tunes and then had a go at reproducing the clank and clatter of factory towns in the early ‘70s. Soon, they moved on to embrace technology in all forms.733

Technology presents itself, not only to Kraftwerk, but also in the case of African- American communities and the discotheques as an allegiance to a future,734 a synthesis created in order to move ahead without the preconception of maintaining the “reality” of a lineage.

Testament to the productivity of these irrational connections was the way in which the music of what might have appeared to be two incongruous worlds residing on either side of the Atlantic would be so readily synthesised by an Afrika Bambaataa, with a track such as Planet Rock (1982)735 in which the stoic calculation of German electronica, met the ravages of the ghetto and the post-soul gangs of the Bronx.

Such irrational connections were made just as readily in the techno to emerge more generally from Detroit as well. This was a musical connection of future oriented sounds that looked for a “people to come” and one that might emerge from the “any- space-whatevers”, whether the Bronx, Detroit or Dusseldorf. Bambaataa’s star rose through his “appropriation” of Kraftwerk,736 but he was also quick to bring Brown

733 (Quantick 1991: 4) 734 Afrofuturism provides such an example of the creation of a future.AsMarkDerywritesinthe essay/interview “Black to the Future: Afro-Futurism 1.0” (1994): “Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th century technoculture- and more generally, African American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future - -might for want of a better term, be called "Afro- futurism”' (Dery 1994: 180) 735 (Afrika Bambaataa and Soul Sonic Force 1982) 736 It was undoubtedly a difficult prospect for the older artists to accept how their music had “returned” in its repetition. For instance, in his autobiography I Was a Robot former Kraftwerk member, Wolfgang Flür lambasts Afrika Bambaataa over the latter’s appropriation of the group’s work. Flür discusses the use of unauthorised sampling as a form of “theft” (Flür 2003: 247), and by example recounts his

243 into the picture. For instance, Bambaataa acknowledged his debt to Brown when the two went into the studio together to do a 12" single collaboration, Unity (1984). This track saw the two musicians rapping over a medley of Brown beats and was an early acknowledgment of the proliferation of the currency of his music on the street.737 Interestingly, Bambaataa’s single came at a time when James Brown’s profile needed some bolstering, especially for the 80s post-soul generation who had not been particularly aware of the seminal block parties, or of how much of hip-hop’s musical culture was based on James Brown’s music.

Brown’s Crystalline Refrains

Brown has provided many affordances in the creative evolution of electronic dance music cultures and the continuing popularity of James Brown’s music as a sample source, such as one of his screams, remains powerful, because it conjures up that pure affective relation that Deleuze describes as a “son-sign” that punctures the rational time and space of hegemonic domination.

Brown’s squeals and grunts have indeed become ubiquitous, as a grunt or a well- timed “Good God!” can be conveniently inserted into the sampled work as a work of affective intensity, one that can stand for itself, that is not tied to narrative. Furthermore, this is usually an intensity to which the majoritarian culture remains blind. Brown’s voice takes on a crystalline quality based on the way that it fragments the sequential logic of the music as it solicits a form of recollection that transcends its more benign virtual status. Many of the elements of his music, such as the punctuating experience of Bambaataa’s and Arthur Baker’s Planet Rock as an “American-style piece of music” (Flür 2003: 247), although one wonders how Planet Rock could be considered “American-style” seeing it was based on a hybrid of the group’s tracks, Numbers and Trans-Europe Express (and itself evocative of the transitional space of any-space-whatever). Flür continues to criticise the samplers such as Bambaataa and writes, “They didn’t even ask in the first place whether Kraftwerk was in agreement with this, let alone pay for the use of the samples. This is the nastiest kind of theft! Since the introduction of sampling technology, this has happened on a daily basis in the music industry. Artists are continually robbed of their intellectual property. It’s impossible to take something like that lying down…I have nothing against sampling in general, if the owner is asked before and acceptable conditions are negotiated” (Flür 2003: 247-248). In the time-honoured tradition of “never ask a policeman”, negotiation of course is untenable in this circumstance, as most experimentation would become impossible under such circumstances. This is why Deleuze so steadfastly rejects any reiteration of moralism that will only impose upon the more pressing philosophical task at hand and which also been half the battle with popular music theory. This merely demonstrates that the dominant population will always by nature be blind to the cutting edge of the minor and in fact serves becoming. 737 The single was only reasonably commercially successful and thus perhaps reinforcing Brown’s continued “minor” status.

244 screams, take over where language fails. Yet a James Brown sample extricated from the past and reiterated through the music of DJ or sampler provides a temporal juxtaposition that calls the construction of time itself into question.

The crystal will allow for a series of transversal relations that transforms any punctual or static past into the flow of the past. Emphasising the difference between the punctual and the transversal is the best way to pursue the ensuing shift from the sequential to the serial, or from representation to nomad thought. We could cite this compositional process as the shift toward the non-linear and the serial found in remix culture. Through their aesthetic practices, the problematic takes precedence over the space of determination. This reminds us of a relationship between minor art and seriality as Rodowick notes, “Few have noted that most of Deleuze’s examples of ‘serial’ cinema come from ‘hybrid’ and postcolonial filmmakers, including Pierre Perrault, Glauber Rocha, Ousmane Sembene, the Los Angeles school of African American filmmakers, and many others”.738

The music of the post-soul will rely on these relationships of falsifying official history through the juxtaposition of recollection brought into the present. As I will discuss in the next chapter, it will bring these times into a relationship between the crystal and its virtual image in relation to the productive powers of the false. Thus it is important here to note the characteristics of the crystal: the indiscernability of the real and the imaginary, the inexplicability of differences in the present, the undecidablity of truth or falsity of different versions of the past and finally the incompossibility of the image.739 This final characteristic, which Deleuze borrows from Leibniz, refers to decisions pertaining to the contingency of possibility. These essential elements of the time-image, are expressed more clearly by Rodowick:

...sequences are formed not through linear succession in space and chronological succession in time. The "will to falsehood" of the direct time-image draws all of its powers from this quality of incommensurability: indiscernability of the real and the imaginary in the image; inexplicability of narrative events; undecidablity of relative perspectives on the same event, both in the present and in the relation of present and past; and, finally, the incompossibility of narrative

738 (Rodowick 1997: 140) 739 (Rodowick 1997: 179)

245 worlds, which proliferate as incongruous presents and not-necessarily- true pasts.740

The “seers” are perhaps more applicable to a minor cinema because of the need to “see” and in our example to “hear”. In this chapter I have attempted to show how the DJ as “seer” has attempted to extract the alterity from past narratives by breaking them up and subjecting them to the “irrational”. This allows connectivity to the outside of “common sense” as a given logic. The discovery of this outside brings about a new belief in the world because it presents connections rather than accepting the narratives that once led to totalising structure. If crystalline narration is deliberately “ problematic”,741 in this way, so too is the music of the post-soul generation, although I should also point out that for Deleuze the “problematic” is always productive. Each time a break beat is emancipated, for instance, it allows the line of time from which it emerged to be emancipated in the process. The past becomes free again. In this respect, the old soul records can be seen as part of a big pool of virtual past. Each moment out of all the old records also alludes to a potential future that can be brought out through the overturning of the past in this way. Rather than maligning or judging the past, the images of the past are delivered back as pure blocks of pragmatic potential. To do this requires strengthening relations with the virtual. Art brings out the power of the virtual. This is of course the very power of the music, but is also a reflection of what Deleuze attributes to a will-to-power that was once expressed in the determined time/space of the narrative and which will in turn become the powers of the false.

As I will discuss in chapter 8, it is falsity that is far more interesting to creative thought. It is through false relations that might emerge through the juxtaposition of representation and appearance that unleash the power of the simulacra and the powers of the false. We might consider musical samples as such “powers of the false”, a positive form of simulation that departs from “established truth” to produce its own reality. In fact, the seriality that was a product of the time-image image in this chapter has an intrinsic relationship to the simulacra, which is used by the minor to extract a co-existent temporality from the constraints of a chronos. These powers of the false

740 (Rodowick 1997: 179) 741 (Deleuze 1989: 174)

246 will be examined in the next chapter because they show how the irrational connections of the time-image might pursue a “people to come” who are perhaps at odds with the given “truths” of the current political situation.

247 CHAPTER EIGHT WHEN HE RETURNS

In the last chapter I suggested that the music of the post-soul might correspond to the “crystalline” regime of the time-image in Deleuze’s Cinema 2. I also suggested that the soul aesthetic corresponded to the “organic” movement-image. The last section of the previous chapter proposed that the powers of the false of the crystalline time image offer much potential for theorising DJ/sampling culture. In this chapter, I will argue that the powers of the false are central to the emergence of the time-image because they demonstrate the creative power of time. As quoted in chapter 1, Deleuze has explained that the powers of the false might make possible a process of “becoming rather than stories”, leading to an ontological shift from movement-image to time-image. Through the powers of the false, becoming is able to eschew the common sense notions of time/space that we have come to associate with “movement”. Becoming is no longer framed within the narrative forms of a teleological time.

Twentieth century musical composition also reflected this existential shift aesthetically. The more avant-garde composers of the fine music tradition are most often cited as responsible for these changes in composition. They saw fit to move away from the closed totality of composition and to affirm chance and indeterminacy. John Cage is one such figure, famously making use of chance operations, such as in the consulting of the I-Ching, to determine the compositional process. This type of indeterminacy is central to his compositions, including Music of Changes (1951)742 and Williams Mix (1952). 743 In the latter case, chance operations were used to determine the choice and length of the tape splices that would make up the piece. Further indication of the world of music opening up to chance were other experiments concurrent with Cage’s, including the work of composers such as Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry of the musique concrète movement (1951).744 An early precursor to sampling, the musique concrète method involved an assemblage of tapes of “found sounds” which, having been subjected to various forms of manipulation such as

742 (Morgan 1991: 362) 743 (Morgan 1991: 467) 744 (Morgan 1991: 463-464)

248 variable playback speeds, or reversal, were then composited into new electronic compositions.745 The legacy of these more avant-garde streams of the fine music tradition affected production of the more mainstream styles of popular music, through artists such as The Beatles, David Bowie and Brian Eno, to name but a few.

The innovations of these artists have already been subject to much commentary, academic and otherwise. Rather less covered, however, are some of the chance- affirming devices introduced through African-American music practice, and throughout this thesis, I have attempted to give Brown his rightful place among such musical liberators of thought. By way of example, I have discussed the legacy of the irrational cut derived from the gospel tradition as one of these less celebrated chance affirming musical strategies that made use of indeterminacy to provide a vital form of tension to the musical event. The highly repetitive aesthetic of funk’s groove might be seen to demonstrate an affirmation of chance through repetition, where devices such as the “irrational cut” throw any simple chronological time into disarray.

Much of the tension involved was created by the music’s subversion of the more “common sense” function usually attributed to repetition (here taken as repetition of the predictable). A differently repetitive music such as funk has the effect of disorienting the listener as it plays with the vagaries of time. It provides an undulating repetition that diverts its audience away from teleological “goal” and devoid of any specific guide as to where they are exactly in the musical trajectory, which would otherwise be lost in the groove. For repetition can be quite mysterious. Indeed, contrary to common sense, the object (musical or otherwise) that is repeated does not produce similitude, but difference. The certainty that the repeated has an intrinsic relationship to the object it is repeating is never guaranteed. I have previously detailed this idea in chapter 2, where Deleuze has argued that repetition does not change the object of contemplation so much as it changes something in the mind that contemplates it.

Brown embraced chance as a compositional aesthetic, and from the late 1960s onward he would increasingly improvise his way through many of his funk compositions,

745 (Morgan 1991: 463-464)

249 lyrically and instrumentally. However, I am less concerned with the manifestation of chance in improvisation as I am with funk’s repetition as chance’s most overt expression. The funk groove’s underlying tension through chance in repetition was also found in Brown’s musicians who were gripped by the anxiety of uncertainty as they clung onto Brown’s hand signals and winged their way through the track as best they could.

What might be so liberating about this affirmation of chance? As I will argue in this final chapter, it is better to accept this chaos of the “outside” and harness its power as a form of expression, rather than be subsumed by a fear of it. I have previously suggested that if chaos is the inherent existential condition of the post-soul period, a politics of the post-soul might have to work with it. By chaos, here, I mean the imminent existential social conditions described by concepts such as the any-space- whatever or the schizophrenia of the double consciousness of the Black Atlantic subject. Taken together, a chaos of heterogeneous temporal dimensions related to the any-space-whatever is synthesised as the inner durational experience of the post-soul subject. Given the ongoing condition of the fragmented minor subject, an embrace of chaos is vital, as it provides the possibility of empowerment.

Art, such as funk, provides a productive strategy that enables the minor subject to brace itself against the indeterminate chaos, by using it to their advantage. So, the DJing/sampling culture inherent to the artistic expression of the post-soul generation can be seen to apprehend chaos and indeterminacy as an aesthetic force. This is perhaps a musical correlate to the type of ritual undertaken by those who go swimming in mid-winter for “health reasons”. Only by actively embracing potential death can one overcome imminent conditions as a source of fear. In fact, such an activity can become refrain from which further rituals and mythologies can be built, all necessary steps for the production of “a people”.

Within this context, the sampling of Brown’s music might be seen to be the reworking of refrains for a people to come. The post-soul generations indulge in Brown’s refrains with the bracing effect of cold Siberian ice water – a wilful plunge into the chaosmos in order to ward off its ill effects.

250 In the reworking of Brown’s refrains, there is a very different relation to the past. In this respect, DJs and samplers might be seen to engage with the Brown sample as “recollection-image” , a concept which Laura Marks make use of in relation to postcolonial cinema,

[a] recollection-image embodies the traces of an event whose representation has been buried, but it cannot represent the event itself. Through attentive recognition it may provoke an imaginative reconstruction, such as a flashback, that pulls it back into understandable causal relationships.746

Brown’s refrains will take on a ritualistic power for the post-soul generations because of their capacity to inspire such imaginative reconstruction, a new assertion of a history, and an escape from subordination to the dark shadow of an unrecallable past.

Accounting for Brown’s Return

We have reached a point where many of Brown’s refrains - the screams, the horn stabs, the “funky drummer” samples - seem to be sampled so often as to have become part of the public domain. However, I have decided not to weigh the chapter down with a mass of examples of what James Brown samples have been used or where and when they have been used. I do not think that a sustained citation of specific examples would amount to more than “sample trainspotting”. Lists of the many thousands of Brown samples used in electronic dance music genres are the subject of excellent websites that keep comprehensive databases of such things, such as The Breaks.com site,747 acting as the content for the legions of “breakbeat” compilations – including the recently released James Brown’s Greatest Breakbeats (2005).748 As comprehensive references of the use of Brown samples can be found elsewhere, and in abundance, my examples are necessarily limited.

I will now account for the return of James Brown’s refrains via the turntable, the pause-tape or the sampler. This return has provided a musical staple for the music of

746 (Laura U. Marks 2000: 50) 747 (The-Breaks.Com 2005). In fact to get an idea of how much James Brown has been sampled, one only has to do an artist search for James Brown on said site. 748 (Brown 2005b). There is also the accompanying Funky People’s Greatest Hits dedicated to artists from the Brown Production stable(Brown 2005a)

251 the post-soul generation.749 In fact, the ongoing fascination of electronic dance music producers with Brown’s work has contributed to whole genres of music. Referring to himself as an “overall product of the post james brown music generation”, Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson, from hip-hop group The Roots, comments:

it would be redundant for me to remind you of mr. Brown’s anchor in classic hip hop (“funky drummer”), new jack swing (lyn collins' immortal ‘think (about it)”), drum and bass (‘soul pride” accounts for at least 40 per cent of the genre’s drum breaks) – or any of the offspring that these offspring offsprung.750

Thompson’s comment is but one testament to the legacy of Brown’s refrains within contemporary electronic dance music culture. Indeed, as I will recount later in the chapter, by the late 1980s to early 1990s, the sampling of Brown was so widespread that one particular Belgian Techno group sought fit to declare James Brown “dead”751 – perhaps the ultimate testament to his impact on contemporary dance music culture.

In relation to this pervasive influence within DJing and sampling culture, Cynthia Rose has written that Brown might be seen as, “…the Andy Warhol of twentieth- century sound: a talent without whom it is simply impossible to try and imagine popular music”.752 Perhaps we might examine this relationship between Brown and Warhol more thoroughly.

For Deleuze, “Pop Art” demonstrated the power of the simulacrum, a point made in the following quote by Brian Massumi:

…the point at which simulacrum began to unmask itself was reached in painting with the advent of Pop Art. In film, it was Italian neo- Realism and the French New Wave. Perhaps we are now reaching that point in popular culture as a whole. Advanced capitalism, Deleuze and

749 This of course is not just Brown, but his individual musicians have become famous for their contribution. For instance Clyde “Funky Drummer” Stubblefield would later release his own sample CDs and midi drum beat packages (Stubblefield 1993). The release came within a few years of newfound acclaim and on the back of the mass sampling of his work that was occurring. This included collaborations with contemporary rock musicians such that with fellow Wisconsonian, Butch Vig on Garbage’s debut album, Garbage (1994). 750 (Ahmir '?uestove' Thompson 2001: 16) 751 I refer here to the single, James Brown is Dead (LA Style 1991) the details of which I will cover in detail later in the chapter. 752 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 16)

252 Guattari argue, is reaching a new transnational level that necessitates a dissolution of old identities and territorialities and the unleashing of objects, images and information having far more mobility and combinatory potential than ever before…The challenge is to assume this new world of simulation and take it one step farther, to the point of no return, to raise it to a positive simulation of the highest degree by marshaling all our powers of the false toward shattering the grid of representation once and for all.753

Contributing to this shattering of representation, the aesthetic practices of DJ and sampling cultures have reconceived the simulacrum in their own way. I would argue that it is only through this subversion of the “common sense” of representation that art can maintain an active campaign of the becoming of a “people”. I have suggested that the post-soul generation itself might be seen as an emergence of such “a people”, one made possible through a shattering of representation.

Mark Anthony Neal contends that the post-soul aesthetic is characterised by its active “bastardisation” of the memories of soul past. As I have described it in the previous chapter, the narratives of soul records were discarded as a source of narrative potential. Soul music was instead stripped back to its breakbeats. The bulk of their musical “message” was left unrecalled. This practice demonstrates Neal’s contention that such tactics are the, “…components of post-soul strategies that willingly “bastardise” black history and culture to create alternative meanings, a process that was largely introduced to the post-soul generation via the blaxploitation films of the 1970s”.754 Neal’s concept of “bastardisation” is an important concept, but I would like to take this idea further. For post-soul “bastardisation” might also be considered as a freeing of the simulacrum, or, to quote Brian Massumi, to provide a “means rather than an end” for the past it pulls apart. 755

This notion of a positive use of the simulacrum is somewhat removed from that identified with the postmodern analysis favoured not only by Neal, but other academic analyses such as those by Richard Shusterman,756 George Lipsitz,757 and

753 (Massumi 1987) 754 (Neal 2002: 22) 755 (Massumi 1987) 756 See “The Fine Art of Rap” (Shusterman 1991). 757 For example, George Lipsitz’s Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism And The Poetics Of Place (1994)

253 Russell Potter.758 An acceptance of what is now traditional postmodern analysis requires an implicit acceptance of the Platonic form of the simulacrum759 (even if it is critical about its results). A Deleuzean simulacrum, on the other hand, does not accept any implicit relationship to an original model at all.760

The Simulacrum

Instead of categorising the simulacrum in a Platonic fashion - as the poor copy - Deleuze’s theory gives the simulacrum a reality of its own. I will shortly provide some relevant examples, from what might be described as “postmodern” artistic practice. However, prior to doing so, I will briefly discuss the reasons why Deleuze was so inspired to “overturn Platonism” – and, by extension, previous ideas about the simulacrum - in texts such as Difference and Repetition and TheLogicofSense.761 Deleuze believes that through this overturning of Platonism we might begin to overcome the conceptual problems that have arisen as a result of our fixation on the concepts of the Same or Similar taken as the primary points of analysis.

In the section of the Logic of Sense (1990) entitled “Plato and the Simulacrum”, Deleuze analyses the hierarchy of images that continue to pervade our contemporary sensibilities as a legacy of Platonic thought. The “common sense” understanding of representation involved is one dependent upon a hierarchy that starts with the original as model, the copy as the faithful reproduction of the model, and finally, external to this relationship, the simulacrum as the bad reproduction of the original model.762 Plato considers the simulacrum to be nothing more than third rate in relation to the original, and second rate in relation to the copy.

758 (Potter 1995). For instance, in his Spectacular Vernaculars (1994), Russell Potter will subsequently describe Hip-Hop as a form of “…highly sophisticated postmodernism” (Potter 1995: 13). Potter’s basic argument is to show how hip-hop is a self-conscious political practice, hence the “ludic resistance postmodernism” (Potter 1995: 13). However, I would argue for giving precedence to becoming rather than speaking of things in terms of postmodern “resistance”, particularly as the latter begins to steer close to an assimilation into the dialectical (Deleuze, 1994: 263). 759 For example, in his essay, “Realer Than Real: The Simulacrum According To Deleuze and Guattari” (1987), Brian Massumi critiques the notion of simulation as theorised by Jean Baudrillard, which requires an acceptance of a Platonic theory of representation and where the simulacrum is perceived as a copy of a copy and this giving way to the “hyperreality” of contemporary society (Massumi 1987). 760 Deleuze’s discussion of the Platonic form of the simulacrum appears as an appendix in TheLogicof Sense (1990) (Deleuze 1990b: 253-265). 761 (Deleuze 1994: 126) 762 (Deleuze 1990: 253-265)

254 Deleuze, of course, seizes on this point, arguing on the one hand, that the simulacra should be untied from “originals” and “copies” and, on the other hand, that we might use the simulacra’s powers of falsity - of production of difference in a disturbance of representation - to its own ends. Whilst the simulacrum possesses an extrinsic resemblance to the model, it is never intrinsically or absolutely connected to it and thus the simulacrum will maintain its own reality instead. Thus contrary to the way we might normally regard the simulacrum, the Deleuzean simulacrum has its own life. It is not merely a shadow of a more authentic model. This entitles it to generate becomings away from hierarchies of representation. Deleuze will contend that the becomings that emerge on behalf of the simulacrum are all just as real and valid as any “original”, and thus proposes, “…that if the simulacrum still has a model, it is another model, a model of the Other (l'autre).763

As I have just mentioned, the Deleuzean simulacra often maintains an extrinsic relationship to the model, but this is very different to the intrinsic one implied by the faithful copy. In his “reversal of Platonism”764 Deleuze denies the hierarchical relationship that gives the “original” a primacy over the copy, and instead attempts to bestow simulation the power of its own subversive becoming, “In short, there is in the simulacrum a becoming-mad, or a becoming unlimited…a becoming always other, a becoming subversive”.765

As Deleuze also contends in this essay “Plato and the Simulacrum”, there is an anti- Platonism which is always at the heart of Platonism and as such, “…the different, the dissimilar, the unequal – in short, becoming-may well be not merely defects which affect copies like a ransom paid for their secondary character or a counterpart to their resemblance, but rather models themselves, terrifying models of the pseudos in which unfolds the powers of the false”.766 Deleuze will mobilise these pseudos so that they are given a life of their own, one unencumbered by subordination to some notion of originary identity.

763 (Deleuze 1990: 258) 764 (Deleuze 1990b: 253) 765 (Deleuze 1990: 258-259) 766 (Deleuze 1994: 128)

255 This Deleuzean emancipation of the simulacra will thus underscore a basic incompatibility between his work and the way the simulacrum is conceived within most postmodern analysis. Hence, Deleuze will stand apart from the lineage of scholars that have lamented the wicked ways of the simulacrum, including Baudrillard, Jameson and Attali, all of whom assume an implicit Platonic point of view.767 Many critical postmodern theories have a general tendency to treat repetition with scorn, being as it is characteristic of the mass reproduction of the commodity form that distinguishes life under late capitalism.768

Much postmodern theory might be considered an expansion of the social effects of mimesis first questioned by Benjamin in his seminal Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936/1977).769 It should be noted that Benjamin was actually rather optimistic about the potential of the copy to undermine the authority of the “superstructure”.770 However, Benjamin also veers into Platonic thought when he begins to lament the effects of mechanical reproduction on the “aura” of the original.771 Whilst Deleuze makes no specific mention of Benjamin’s famous essay, he would have undoubtedly shared the latter’s optimism concerning the ability of the copy to undermine the power of the “superstructure”, although one would think that Deleuze would stop short at claiming any degradation of an “aura”,772 as it relies on a

767 For Baudrillard’s inherent Platonism see footnote 733. For Jameson see footnote 740 below. The final section (and general outlook) of Attali’s Noise (1985) such as that found in “Chapter 5: Composing” is optimistic about what music might do for society. Attali will comment, “A new noise is being heard (a new way of making music), suggesting the emergence of a new society” (Attali 1985: 133). However on the way through, Attali will write about how, “[r]ecording introduces a new network for the economy of music, encouraging ‘the individualized stockpiling of music ...onahugescale’” (Attali 1985: 32). This is particularly prevalent in “Chapter 4: Repeating”, which says that repetitive mass production is indicative of broader social relations. Hence we learn that collective consumption gives way to individualized accumulation where the jukebox replaces the concert (Attali 1985: 95). Music stops being a social event and instead the audience will stockpile music for individual satisfaction (Attali 1985: 100-101). 768 For a negative repetition is intimated in the Jamesonian idea of postmodern culture as pastiche. For Jameson, pastiche merely recycles the modern cultural styles of the past to the point of stagnation. Pastiche in this sense being merely an imitation founded upon the copy of an original. In an interview with Anders Stephanson, Jameson speaks of the need, “[t]o undo postmodernism homeopathically by the methods of postmodernism: to work at dissolving the pastiche by using all the instruments of pastiche itself, to reconquer some genuine historical sense by using the instruments of what I have called substitutes for history” (Stephanson & Jameson 1989: 59). 769 (Benjamin 1977: 384-408) 770 (Benjamin 1977: 384-385) 771 Whilst Benjamin is generally optimistic about the effects of mechanical reproduction in creating a more egalitarian relation to the work of art within the “substructure”, his work also betrays some lingering romanticism about the dissipation of the object’s uniqueness that is a necessary effect of the “decay of the aura” (Benjamin 1977: 388). 772 (Benjamin 1977: 388-389).

256 notion of a primal, original image. As John Rajchman comments in relation to Deleuze’s ideas, “…in a modern world of stupefying banality, routine, cliché, mechanical reproduction or automatism, the problem is to extract a singular image, a vital, multiple way of thinking and saying, not a substitute theology or ‘auratic object’”.773 As the mass commodification of images tends to be judged against “reality”, the postmodernist will lament the very type of “crystalline” characteristics that Deleuze will find so productive. These are characteristics I have discussed in the previous chapter, including the indiscernability of the real and the imaginary, the inexplicability of differences in the present, the undecidablity of the truth or falsity of different versions of the past and, finally, the incompossibility of the image. The inability to discern what is real and false is for Deleuze the key to a production of difference.

Such indiscernability is indeed anathema to the type of postmodern perspective espoused by Baudrillard, who stakes his intellectual claim on the fact of the simulacra maintaining a second rate relation to an “original”:

Indeed the very idea of appropriation, and of what Jean Baudrillard called ‘the simulacrum” is fully impregnated by the tradition of melancholy and panicked reaction to loss or absence; in this respect it is quite unlike the idea of the simulacrum that a forgetful Baudrillard had appropriated from Deleuze, which involves not a loss but an intensification of the real, linked to a condition of things prior to Forms.774

This panic is reflected in much debate and discussion around electronic dance musics and their “appropriation” of other artists’ music. Many commentaries on the subject spend most of their time concerned with the morality behind such practices, rather than the pragmatics.775 Yet all of this equivocation keeps us away from examining how the musical text actually works. Contra critical postmodern theories then, it is not the authenticity of the work of art at stake, its meaning in relation to an origin. Rather,

773 (Rajchman 2000: 125) 774 (Rajchman, 1997: 59) 775 Such as the aforementioned exchange between Mtume and Nelson George where Mtume lambasts the use of sampling (George 1999: 99)

257 as Deleuze and Guattari will say, the question posed by desire ‘…is not “What does it mean?” but rather “How does it work”?776

This philosophical position requires the simulacra be understood as a means rather than an end. Massumi provides an example, “…an insect that mimics a leaf does so not to meld with the vegetable state of its surrounding milieu, but to reenter the higher realm of predatory animal warfare on a new footing…It constitutes a war zone”. 777 It is only embracing the notion of a simulacrum existing for itself that will allow us to join the battlefield and wage war against “official” memory. Rather than represent, the role of art is to create this “war zone”.

Powers of the False

One aspect of this “war” might be the attack on representation, in which a power of the false is mobilised into battle. Such a war has some strange qualities, however. The war may never have a discernible time/space to be carried out in, as the powers of the false plunge the battle back into the chaosmos of virtual alterity (contained in the present’s co-existent past). In Deleuze’s Cinema books it is through these powers of the false, that the time of a time-image cinema will begin to be “opened up”.

Deleuze had already alluded to the appearance of the powers of the false in Cinema 1, as exacerbating the shift from movement-image to time-image cinemas. Here the “[m]aking-false becomes the sign of a new realism, in opposition to the making-true of the old”.778In Cinema 2, the powers of the false become based upon a re-evaluation of the relation of truth to will-to-power. Deleuze attributes this re-evaluation to Nietzsche, who “…under the name of “will to power”, substitutes the power of the false for the form of the true, and resolves the crisis of truth, wanting to settle it once and for all, but, in opposition to Leibniz, in favour of the false and its artistic, creative power”.779

776 (Deleuze & Guattari 1983a: 109) 777 (Massumi 1987) 778 (Deleuze 1986: 213) 779 (Deleuze 1989: 131)

258 The new realism that Deleuze alludes to is found, for example, in the “empiricist conversion” expressed through the neo-realist style that was to emerge after the events of World War II. This style of cinema would mark the decline of the more “revolutionary” pre-war cinema, exemplified in the dialectical montage of Eisenstein.780 Perhaps what the neo-realist cinema had learned from the events of the Second World War is that there was no point fighting over truth because time will always overturn the truth claims behind it. For example when Deleuze writes in Cinema 1 that the various crises that led to the break the action-image, “only had their full effect after the war”781 this is because the action-image reflected, “…an image of Truth as globalizing or totalizing apperception, linking humanity and the world as commensurable points in a sensorimotor whole…in an indirect image of time”.782Hence Deleuze says the break in action-image reflects what “Nietzsche had shown, that the ideal of the true was the most profound fiction”.783 This signals the importance of creative thought in opposition to the dogmatic thought that would lead to fascism - an extreme, but very real, example of what happens as a result of any dogmatic pursuit of truth. To avoid this dogmatically driven destruction, one might instead remain open to the productive power of falsity.

The “powers of the false” is a concept that is not only found in Deleuze’s Cinema books. It had initially appeared in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983), and is further extrapolated in Difference and Repetition. The concept is based on a Deleuzean interpretation of Nietzsche’s eternal return:784

Metaphysical reiteration of the ideal is founded on the death of God and on the dissolution of the ego. Recurrence in the Dionysian world must not be understood as the return of something that is, that is one, or that is the same. What recurs is not being, but becoming; not identity, ideality, but difference.785

780 (Deleuze 1986: 36-38) 781 (Deleuze 1986: 206) 782 (Rodowick 1997: 184) 783 (Deleuze 1989: 149) 784 (Deleuze 1994: 299) 785 (Lingis in John Marks 1998: 58)

259 Deleuze uses the powers of the false to construct a kind of perspectivist position that might develop from allowing one to remain open to the conceptual instability of identity that results from this eternal return of difference.

To apply this concept to the practices of DJing and sampling culture, the James Brown sample is submitted to its own form of eternal difference, rather than being perceived as distinctly real or true in any ideal sense. Just as in Deleuze’s explication of Nietzsche’s “eternal return”, any musical repetition of difference should be seen as positive, and is thus not subject to the type of negation that has been traditionally attributed to repetition. Such positive difference continues to inspire contemporary sampling culture even as it competes with the Platonic ideals of State sanctioned copyright as reflective of the “common sense” of law.

The Deleuzean idea of the powers of the false should not, however, be understood as the pursuit of the untrue, as a simple negation of value, or even as in a dialectical relation to an established truth. Instead, difference itself provides the necessary means to open up the conditions for self-determination and becoming. D.N. Rodowick has summarised these ideas rather concisely in the following passage:

In the organic regime, truth can only be found, discovered, or described. But there is a "falsifying" narration, Nietzschean in inspiration, which does away with the opposition of true and false and instead creates truth positively. The primary question for Deleuze is how thought can be kept moving, not toward a predetermined end, but toward the new and unforeseen in terms of what Bergson calls the Open or "creative evolution". Thus the organic and crystalline regimes are qualitatively different with respect to how they answer the question "What is thinking?" For the former it is the discovery of concepts through negation, repetition, and identity toward ever more self- identical Being; for the latter it is the creation of concepts through difference and non-identity in a continually open Becoming.786

Representation and Appearance

786 (Rodowick 1997: 85)

260 The embrace of the continually open becoming is perhaps the ultimate task of the artwork, as to create is to essentially diverge from an adherence to identity or truth and instead take up falsification. As mentioned previously, however, the powers of the false can often work by mobilising extrinsic resemblance, or appearance, against a deeper sense of meaning to “faithful” representation. As Paul Patton discusses in his essay, “Anti-Platonism and Art”,787 much postmodern art “works” through this type of play on representation and appearance. As Patton remarks, “[m]uch postmodernist art is explicitly concerned with the reproduction of appearances. The shock value in some cases derives from the fact that what is reproduced is the appearance of earlier artwork themselves”.788 Here is a “productive” account of postmodern practice, somewhat at odds with postmodernist critics such as Baudrillard. By way of illustration Patton will discuss the work of artist, Sherrie Levine, whose oeuvre consisted of the rephotographing or repainting of all or part of works by earlier artists. This type of approach is shocking for the reason that it deliberately subverts the traditional notions of a meaningful original and less meaningful copy. Yet it also brings the “original” into a new relationship with its copy, one that will directly challenge our concepts of representation and appearance. Patton comments here on, “…the conception of the artist’s task: the reproduction of appearances rather than their representation”.789 This type of artistic practice juxtaposes what become just different appearances, not “appearance and representation”. The effect is to create a serial relation between the works rather than emphasise the hierarchy of representation. The artwork now revolves around Plato’s exiled simulacrum. The original will not necessarily maintain a hierarchical relationship with the copy any more but instead form part of a series drawn into correspondences.

Patton’s discussion of this play of representation and appearance can be instructive for thinking about another apparently postmodern phenomenon such as sampling in a new way. For the digital replication at the heart of sampling practice will necessarily transform the history and context of the music that is repeated. As Clare Colebrook comments here, “the essence is repeated or affirmed, not by a repetition of something that is the same; repetition is difference. For what we repeat is the power of each

787 (Paul Patton 1994) 788 (Paul Patton 1994: 142) 789 (Paul Patton 1994: 142)

261 event to affirm itself over and over again in different ways. Art is crucially tied to difference and repetition”.790 The artwork that embraces such difference should not be conceived in terms of a divergence from an original model but should instead be considered as that power to repeatedly produce new forms:

For production, at least in one of its senses, essentially involves the transformation of a raw material into a product. It is therefore inseparable from the creation or the institution of a difference where none existed before. The means of production, which include the artist’s conceptual as well physical materials and techniques, are the means by which this difference is created. By contrast, representation, at least in one of its senses, essentially involves the maintenance of an identity; the reappearance of that which appeared before.791

This is why representation is not at the heart of artistic endeavour, but as already proposed in chapter 1, is instead concerned with the production of affects and percepts, or the bloc of sensations found within the artwork. These sensations create relations that connect bodies rather than divide them. The powers of the false are in such ways dedicated to the creation of new perspectives and new thoughts that might arise out of the juxtaposition of representation and appearance.

Deleuze discusses the powers of the false at work in a cinematic context in Cinema 2. Using the example of Welles’ FForFake(1974),792 Deleuze cites the example of the forger who will make the “copy” to the specifications of the art dealer. The art dealer cannot tell the painting is a fake because the forger makes it avoiding all the mistakes that he learned from the dealer.793 As such, these forgeries have taken on a status that cannot be reduced. Instead they now exist for themselves. The rather arbitrary nature of the different statuses of repetition is proved by the dealer who will happily accept a collapse of reality and falsity when it is financially advantageous to do so. Deleuze celebrates this “forger” who gives the simulacra its own pragmatic existence and exhibits how powers of the false will so easily make a mockery of an adherence to truth, dependent upon the situation in which it emerges. The re-appearance of the

790 (Colebrook 2002: 92) 791 (Paul Patton 1994: 142) 792 (Welles 1974). In Cinema 2 Deleuze refers to FForFakeas It’s All True, which is actually another (uncompleted) film by Welles. This may have been a simple mix-up by either Deleuze or in translation. The movie known in English as FForFakewas titled Vérités et Mensonges (Truth and Lies) in France. See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072962/ for further details. 793 (Deleuze 1989: 146)

262 work as simulacrum brings out a newfound serial relation. The original must now contend with its copy, but also both become simulacra. Through the unleashing of the simulacra, the forger creates a new plane of time where the copy exists as an accepted original and forges new relations around the “copied” work.

This scenario may well be familiar to those who have witnessed the re-appearance of recorded works in break beat or sampling culture. Rather than being perceived as the poor copy, the sample should be seen as the means to free the alterity and transversality inherent in the musical assemblage of the “original”. In terms of the pragmatics of the sample as simulacrum for itself, the point is, who cares – does it work? That is, does it make us respond, react, dance? For example, an album such as Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back is considered the greatest hip-hop album ever,794 even though just about every track on the album is based on the past refrains of James Brown.795 Such a positive reception can only be the result of a suspension of judgement of the simulacrum. That the simulacrum is often unconditionally embraced is why Deleuze will argue that we need to maintain a more pragmatic perspective on the return of such refrains. Instead of negating the connections made, or assimilating them back into an originary identity, we might instead look at productive relations to emerge from this process.

In some respect Deleuze’s ideas do apologise for what we might refer to as “plagiarism” – which in itself might be seen as taking the egalitarian relations created

794 As Hip-Hop Magazine, The Source, writes in their special 100th Issue special, Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, which takes the title of hip-hop’s “best album”, “…is not only the greatest hip-hop album of all time, it’s one of the greatest albums in all the world of music”(The Source 1998: 174). The album continues to enjoy the title of the best hip-hop album among the more rock-oriented magazines as well, for instance it was the top ranked hip-hop album in Rolling Stone's “The Rolling Stone 200 The Essential Rock Collection”(Nathan Brackett 1997: 70) 795 As Musik was to remark in its 2002 article on “The Top 50 Dance Albums of All Time”, Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (the highest rated hip-hop album on the list at No. 19) was “…the sound of the apocalypse, as orchestrated by James Brown”(Musik 2002: 45). Here are some of the James Brown samples used on the album. Rebel Without A Pause (samples from James Brown's Get Up Offa That Thing and Funky Drummer). Bring The Noise (samples James Brown's Funky Drummer).Don't Believe the Hype (samples James Brown's Escape-ism and IGotAntsinMy Pants). Terminator X To The Edge of Panic (samples James Brown's Funky Drummer and Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved). Night of the Living Baseheads (samples James Brown's Soul Power Pt. I and Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved). Caught, Can We Get A Witness? (Samples James Brown's Soul Power Pt. I and James Brown produced - Bobby Byrd track Hot Pants... I'm Coming, I'm Coming, I'm Coming). Prophets of Rage (samples James Brown's Cold Sweat). Party For Your Right To Fight (samples James Brown's Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved and James Brown produced - Bobby Byrd track I Know You Got Soul). Cold Lampin' With Flavor (samples James Brown produced - Bobby Byrd track I Know You Got Soul). See TheBreaks.com for myriad other samples (The-Breaks.Com 2005)

263 through the copy to its logical degree. However, the real fear of plagiarism is the fact that it works, and this is why appropriate measures are taken to control its preponderance.

In sum, despite a common sense morality telling us otherwise, the most productive perspective to take in regard to the simulacrum is that of the forger. An embrace of simulacra will always provide a more favourable intellectual position than maintaining a slavish adherence to truth for its own sake. As Deleuze will remind us, we should keep in mind the Nietzschean idea that the pursuit of truth is folly because, if we were to apprehend such truth, life would have no point.796 To think in terms of truth is to be implicitly bound up in the dogmatic maintenance of identity. Forgers and outlaws are necessary to aid the construction of the new but only because they operate outside the law, where the latter concept is encompassing of common sense and moral judgements, and even ‘truth” itself. As Deleuze will write, “[t]he truthful man in the end wants nothing other than to judge life; he holds up a superior value, the good, in the name of which he will be able to judge, he is craving to judge, he sees in life an evil, a fault which is atoned for: the moral origin of the notion of truth”.797

Becoming Rather than Stories

In fact, the seeking of the “truth” of an event can only serve to create more problems than it solves. By way of example we could look to the ambiguities surrounding the “biopic” or the biographical movie. Whilst its creators may attempt to faithfully represent some prominent life story, they invariably do no more than provide a surface representation of a life. At the same time, the biopic’s attempts to imitate or emulate the life of its subject will actually – within this surface - create more difference in the life of its subject.

By way of example, Laura Marks compares two films detailing aspects of the life of Malcolm X - Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992) and the Black Audio Film Collective’s

796 In Cinema 2, Deleuze argues that one of the main points of Nietzsche’s critique of truth is that “the ‘true world’ does not exist, and, if it did, would be inaccessible, impossible to describe, and, if it could be described, would be useless, superfluous” (Deleuze 1989: 137) 797 (Deleuze 1989: 137)

264 Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993).798 Marks criticises Lee’s “biopic” approach because she believes that it represents, “…a teleological Malcolm whose life is validated in the official context of history”. 799 Marks’ criticism is based on the observation that Lee’s attempts to faithfully reproduce the chronological events of Malcolm’s life do not provide us with the same affects of, say, alienation and minority of which he was a product. It is only in comprehending, one might say feeling, these affects, that one is drawn into the struggles surrounding power and becoming (of a people). On the other hand, Seven Songs for Malcolm X, whilst also attempting to comment on his life uses a very different technique, instead making use of a jarring juxtaposition of images that might get the viewer to feel the same affective force that produced a Malcolm X in the first place. Marks does not necessarily criticize Lee’s direction as deficient. Rather the problem is in fact that it conforms to the limits of a more conventional biographical approach.

For Marks, the problem of the biopic lies in the fact that by giving the representation of the subject precedence, one tends to elevate the model/copy relationship to the point where it distracts the audiences from the more important question of the power of affect. The viewer of the biopic might be more inclined to attend to the fidelity of the represented character than engage with the affect that gave rise to the subject in the first place. In short, the biopic leaves many viewers cold. Any attempt to directly represent the subject as a sum of movements through history will never successfully capture the singular nature of the affects that comprise the subject. In fact, what generally happens when we see biopics is that we spend time picking flaws in such films. This diverts one’s attention from the affective politics involved. One cannot be immersed in the experience of the affects of a person’s life if one is being directed instead towards “inconsistencies” in the depictions of history.800 Of course, filmmakers claim to represent the truth about a particular subject, but as the truth is ultimately inaccessible then the biopic becomes an attempt to represent the unrepresentable.

798 (Laura U. Marks 2000: 67) 799 (Laura U. Marks 2000: 67) 800 For this very reason I hope there will never be one about James Brown!

265 Sampling and the Subversion Of Representation

The use of exiled simulacra has now been discussed in relation to the visual arts and cinema. I believe that it might be beneficial for music to be evaluated in this way. Deleuze’s powers of the false are a more than appropriate conceptual device for discussing contemporary electronic dance music practices. For instance, we might begin to understand that each time a sample re-appears it reveals an affective intensity, and if this intensity “works” it will be powerful enough to return again. We could suggest that just as in the cinematic example of Seven Songs for Malcolm X proposed by Marks, a DJ could create a similar relation to affect through the heterogenous operation of the “irrational cut”.

The aforementioned cinematic example of Malcolm X has musical correlates. These provide a fresh perspective on his recollection. We might look to the ways DJs have used samples of his voice as reclaimed musical content in an early hip-hop track, like No Sell Out (1983).801 Malcolm’s voice is used in such a way that it takes on an alienating quality because these sound bites are placed within time/space assemblages that they were never previously envisaged to be in. By extension, the track demonstrates the difference between linear time and a more heterogenous reassemblage of time. The re-appearance of these appropriated fragments of time can subvert the dominance of a history that holds power over the description or “meaning” of these “events”. A track like No Sell Out provides a minor engagement with, and subversion of, official reminiscences, suggesting that a figure of such cultural importance deserves a form of enunciation that transcends mere cliché. More generally, DJing and sampling culture have often made use of new economies of the musical refrain to overturn majoritarian control of the truths of history. They replace the falsity of official discourse with their own. New forms and approaches to music beckon to the invention of a people who have no affective representation – or only official representation – available to them.

It is in the pursuit of becoming in wake of official histories that forgers have become so prevalent, and no more so than in the last couple of decades in popular music. The

801 (LeBlanc & Malcolm X 1983)

266 minor must “forge” if only because their representation is always in the hands of the State. As Deleuze will say: “…the moment the master, or the colonizer, proclaims ‘there have never been people here", the missing people are a becoming, they invent themselves, in shanty towns and camps, or in ghettos, in new conditions of struggle to which a necessarily political art must contribute”.802

The potential application of the powers of the false in overturning colonised memory have been discussed in works such as Samira Kawash’s essay, 415 Men: Moving Bodies, or, The Cinematic Politics of Deportation (1998) and as well as in Laura Marks’ studies of “Third World” political cinema in the aforementioned The Skin of the Film (2000). Using their own unique examples, these authors pursue the use of the productive powers of the false in relation to the studies of minor and post-colonial politics and cinema.803

The minor subject attempts to render visible “a people” through the power of their own myth making, an idea that Deleuze suggests in Cinema 2: “What is opposed to fiction is not the real; it is not the truth which is always that of the masters or colonizers; it is the story-telling function of the poor, in so far as it gives the false the power which makes it into a memory, a legend, a monster”. 804 This observation might further elucidate the uses of DJing and sampling as a means of “the poor” to counteract “official” truths, or official representation. Should not a minor people commit “the flagrant offence of making up legends” as a means of their own becoming?

In this regard, of course, electronic dance music cultures are no strangers to such mythmaking, of which such examples have been referred to during the course of this thesis – “gangsta rappers”, Zulu Nations, Teutonic robots, Afrofuturists and Wu-Tang Clans. Such mythologising is of course a mandatory practice for any self respecting electronic dance music producer, from the elaborate pseudonyms used by the early DJs (many such examples referred to in this thesis) to the creation of hyper-hybrid stage personas drawn from a range of disparate and deceptively congruous sources

802 (Deleuze 1989: 217) 803 See (Kawash 1998: 132-134) and (Laura U. Marks 2000: 65) 804 (Deleuze 1989: 150)

267 such as comic books, kung-fu films, technoculture, Eastern philosophy and notorious gangsters which are brought together and rendered significant with a requisite linguistic flourish.805

As discussed in chapter 5, Deleuze attributes the directors of the cinéma vérité style with the power of a falsification correlative to any other fictional cinematic style. In this way the “reality” of the sample too, similarly falsifies as it repeats. From another angle, the return of the sample might also suggest its own type of antagonism of history as it affirms the similitude between the conditions that caused it to repeat,and the conditions of its creation. For example, we might think of the return of the James Brown sample, even as it occurs decades after its creation, as indicative of a similitude between the conditions of the environment that produced it in the first place, and that which exacerbated its return. The question here would be, what does it say about the experience of the African-American musician who allows Brown to return in the mid 1990s, in the form of a refrain from a record that originally came out in the early 1970s?806 We are able to deduce something from this juxtaposition – a correlation that could only be made through the simulacrum. The re-appearance of James Brown himself is also a necessary part of the potential antagonism and juxtaposition that is delivered via repetition.

Given the power of the false to take on the truth of history, it comes as little surprise that technical machines such as the turntable or sampler are so readily mobilised to the assistance of such becomings. For a minor people must use everything at their disposal, to circumvent their subordination to an official history. Here again there is difference in repetition, wherever the techno copy is turned against its “common

805 The undisputed champions of self-mythologising are the Staten Island group, the Wu-Tang Clan who probably brandished the most elaborate personas of all. The group would liberally weave together all manner of such constituents – comic books, kung-fu flicks, Eastern philosophies, notorious gangsters (and much more) into some of the most finely honed (and often downright wacky) personal fictions ever devised. Furthermore, an extended account of such mythologising in electronic dance music cultures can be found in Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures In Sonic Fiction (Eshun 1998). 806 There are so many examples of James Brown samples from the early 1970s re-appearing at this time, but I have in mind here, a popular one – the use of the sample of James Brown speaking the words “I don't know” from the introduction of 1971’s Make It Funky. This use of the James Brown refrain as a voice from the past speaking to a contemporary commentator was used for instance in A Tribe Called Quest’s track, What Really Goes On? from the album Beats, Rhymes and Life. The rapper Q-Tip asks, “What really goes on?” and the James Brown sample responds: “I don't know”? This sample was also subsequently used in a similar way on Slum Village’s I Don’t Know (the track named after the Brown sample) which appeared on the album, Fantastic, Vol. 2 (Slum Village 2000).

268 sense” use. As Nelson George says on the popularity of the sampler to the hip-hop generation:

We love to take things that were once out of reach - the saxophone, the sampler, the pager - and reinvent the technology in our own image. The sax was invented by Adolphe Sax in the mid-nineteenth century, yet it didn’t become a valued instrument until brothers got their hands on it in the ‘30s. The sampler was invented by sound scientists in the ‘70s but it was via the ears of hip hop producers that this technology found its deepest use.807

George also makes the interesting point here that the sampler would be diverted from its “scientific” future, one originally envisaged by the creators of the Fairlight in the late 1970s as a future based on using digital sampling to recreate reality.808 However, instead of being used to recreate reality, it became even more important in supplementing reality and to inspire new challenges to history through the “recollection-image” which was described earlier in the chapter, as the process of the recapturing of traces of an event whose representation has been buried.

Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music

Technology thus comes into its own as the means to produce alternatives to the official, represented side of history. In the case of Alexander Weheliye, technology will help to undermine a black humanist legacy that was inextricably linked to a hegemonically determined representation of the body. In his article, “Feenin: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music” (2002), Weheliye argues that African-American musicians in contemporary dance music genres deliberately make use of dehumanising musical technologies such as the vocoder as a way of undermining the embodied legacy of “black humanism”.

Weheliye begins his essay arguing against the presumptions of N. Katherine Hayles’ version of the post-human as one relevant only to a dominant white culture. She,

807 (Weheliye 2002: 53) 808 The 1979 release of the Fairlight CMI (Computer Music Instrument) gave the world the first commercially available, polyphonic sampling instrument (Hamer 2005).

269 “... preserves the idea of the liberal subject, represented as having a body, but not being a body”.809 This situation, Weheliye argues, is not applicable to Afro-America due to the fact that they were never considered “human” in white liberalist sense in the first place.810 Weheliye says that African-Americans had long endured the state of being reduced to just “a body” and their value to a dominant society is based on this synonymous relationship with embodiment, such as the singing voice:

Black sacred and later secular music took on two simultaneous functions: proving black peoples’ soul and standing in for the soul of all U.S. culture, keeping the racially particular and national universal in constant tension. Thus spirituals ushered in a long history of white appropriations of black music, ranging from the “slumming” patrons of the Cotton Club, Norman Mailer’s "white negroes," to today’s hip hop “whiggers.” All of this goes to show that while the black singing voice harbors moments of value, as suggested in Barrett’s scheme, it can hardly be construed as a purely authentic force, particularly once delocalized and offered up for national and/or international consumption. The “soul,” and by extension “humanity,” of black subjects, therefore, is often imbricated in white mainstream culture, customarily reflecting an awareness of this very entanglement.811

Weheliye will go on to argue that blacks could never be considered part of the liberal humanist ideal and as such, were always posthuman.

Evidence of the African-American’s ongoing post-human condition, Weheliye contends, can be glimpsed in the widespread use of technologies such as cell phones and pagers in contemporary music production. The re-purposing of these devices might be seen to deliberately undermine the legacy of embodiment of the black humanist tradition, because this technological treatment of the “natural” black voice will obscure its link to an essentialist, humanist tradition, and even perhaps its mainstream commodification. Weheliye also examines the importance of technology in musical-political movements such as “Afrofuturism” and “Hypersoul”, the latter concept having strong correlations with the post-soul dealt with in this study, in that

809 (Weheliye 2002: 22) 810 Weheliye takes exception to Hayles notion that one has to be “free from the will of others” in order to mutate in to the heterogeneous posthuman state and writes that “Certainly, New World black subjects cannot inhabit this version of selfhood in quite the same manner as the “white boys” of Hayles’s canon due to slavery, colonialism, racism, and segregation, since these forces render the very idea that one could be “free from the will of others’ null and void”(Weheliye 2002-24). 811 (Weheliye 2002: 28)

270 soul music itself was very much part of the black humanist tradition. Through the re- purposing of musical technologies and techniques, Brown is delivered a new context of enunciation, as technological oracle rather than song-and-dance-man.

Here we might also consider the way in which the James Brown sample enables Brown himself to transcend his own history, and by extension, many of the constraints of the black humanism of the soul tradition with which he might otherwise have been shackled. In fact we can suggest that integrating – and transforming - the memory of Brown with the technical machine allows minor people to show “what a body can [really] do”.

Yet if all of this becoming of a minor people is rather radical it must be delivered in measured doses for long-term effect. That is why I believe that the way DJing and sampling make use of the simulacrum is along the lines of the adage, that “…if you are going to tell people the truth, you’d better make them laugh…Otherwise they’ll kill you”.812 The humorous statement delivers a repetition of a series of words but the manner in which they are delivered makes all of the difference. To my mind the way a James Brown refrain is delivered back to the world via DJing or sampling culture is like making someone laugh in a dangerous situation. It introduces difference through the back door of the apparently familiar. This is how hip-hop was so significantly able to mobilise the affect that it did. Ease the ranting and raving against oppression on the back of a James Brown refrain, and you can get away with all sorts of statements, and may even call off the attack on yourself for a while in the process. Yet there is also the point to be made that once the current ruse has been discovered it is time to move on.

James Brown Becomes Cliché

In fact, with the domestic affordability of the sampler in the mid to late 1980s, the sampling of James Brown became so widespread that within a few years it would become a cliché. An example that is typical of the attitude of post-soul generation might be the 1988 Stetsasonic track Talkin’ All That Jazz (1988), a track which has

812 Quotation by George Bernard Shaw (attributed: source unknown)

271 become something of a trope among academic writing about hip-hop.813 The track is usually paraded as a defence of sampling,814 especially as it exposes artists that might have otherwise been forgotten: “tell the truth, James Brown was old/ ‘til Eric and Rak came out with “I Got Soul”/Rap brings back old R&B and if we would not/ people could have forgot”.815 At the time of the song’s release, Eric B and Rakim had had some major hit singles which had depended heavily on James Brown samples, in particular the Bobby Byrd sung, James Brown produced, I Know You Got Soul.816

From the evidence otherwise presented in this study, it would be fair to argue that James Brown was never “old”, as suggested by Eric B and Rakim, but in fact the very opposite, his music would accommodate the future, and the post-soul generation would come along and integrate his “untimely” refrains accordingly. Brown’s refrains could be considered untimely precisely because they would contain within them enough of their own virtual alterity that they could be readily re-integrated into contemporary music production again and again.

This is precisely what continued to happen for most of the late eighties and early 1990s, until the record companies started to realise what was going on. When they did, they initiated high profile court cases bringing lawsuits against De La Soul,817 Biz Markie818 and the Beastie Boys819 with the effect of making the samplers scurry for rather more obscure sample sources. The result of the flurry of court cases to emerge at the time caused the sampling of Brown, although still widespread, to decline rather

813 For a close reading of this very song see (Shusterman 2004: 459-479) 814 (Shusterman 2004: 459-479) (George 2004: 438). 815 (Stetsasonic 1988) 816 (Brown 1988) 817 De La Soul was sued over the song, Transmitting Live from Mars,fromthealbum3 Feet High and Rising. Their track sampled a song titled, You Showed Me by the 1960s band The Turtles. This is documented on the “Illegal Art” site, “The Turtles sued De La Soul in 1989 and won a judgment of $1.7 million. For its next album, De La Soul made sure to clear all samples, which cost a total of $100,000” (Farnsworth, Hise, & McLaren 2002). 818 Also documented on the Illegal Art Site/CD, “Gilbert O’Sullivan’s 1991 lawsuit against Biz Markie for the uncleared use of 20 seconds from O’Sullivan’s, Alone Again (Naturally). The case proved a major turning point in the evolution of hip-hop. Markie lost the case; the judge told him, verbatim, "Thou shalt not steal." With that, the era of carefree sampling was over. Sample-heavy albums in the vein of Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back or the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique became impossibly expensive and difficult to release. Many artists continued to sample but retreated into using more and more obscure source material”(Farnsworth et al. 2002). 819 The Beastie Boys were also involved in one of the earliest sampling cases, as Adam Horowitz tells Wired, “You know, I'm pretty sure we were actually the first court case that used the word sampling in it. It was in a lawsuit involving a sample of Jimmy Castor's The Return of Leroy (Part One) on our first album”(Steuer 2004).

272 sharply. Perhaps the samplers were also put off by the stories of an entire floor of lawyers at Polygram, Brown’s record company, dedicated to keeping track of the copyright infringements of Brown’s work alone.820 Whilst this story turns out to be apocryphal, it does serve to indicate the level of engagement with Brown’s catalogue in this new and controversial form of music making.

The subsequent pressure placed on the samplers may in fact have been a good thing because by the early 1990s the use of James Brown samples had become so widespread that it no longer constituted the expression of a minor temporality it once did. Instead it had become a cliché.

As a way of protesting the widespread use of James Brown samples that had dominated dance music around this time, the Belgian techno group, LA Style would achieve great commercial success with the “happy hardcore”821 track, James Brown is Dead822 (1991). This curious single had the distinction of being one of the first of the more “hardcore” techno tracks to reach the mainstream charts. Despite raising the ire of James Brown fans, the track was actually somewhat of a backhanded compliment. To deem James Brown “dead” was to give further credence to his towering influence on electronic dance music genres. Whilst, to my mind, the record was an elaborate in- joke, it also had the more inadvertent effect of a subcultural gesture towards demarcating that fine line between the eternal return of difference and cliché. 823

820 During my research I made email contact with renowned producer, archivist and researcher on all matters soul - Harry Weinger of Universal, and Harry explained to me that he could not confirm nor deny the 'floor of lawyers' story. (Personal Correspondence, email 15th May 2002 - available upon request). 821 Here is a particularly erudite explanation of the “happy hardcore” style: “…at the base of every Happy Hardcore track was a breakbeat - a fast, complex, flowing, synthesised drumbeat. The drums used do not sound like real drums and are not meant to. There is always a bass drum, usually distorted, every beat (4 beats to the bar, hence Happy Hardcore's alternative name of 4-beat). Over this breakbeat can be a variety of things. There can be pianos, strings, stab patterns (sequences of quite hard synthy sounds), uplifiting female vocals, bass (anything from an acid squelch to a deep rumbling sine wave), etc. Most Happy Hardcore tracks are around 160 to 180bpm, but 175bpm seems to be the most common speed. Any faster and it starts becoming Gabba, and slower and it starts becoming house” (Mark White 1996). 822 (LA Style 1991) 823 For instance as DJ Lethal says here, “When I first started, I was buying all the James Brown and Stanley Turrentine records, all the jazz stuff, the Headhunters and the Meters. I got done with the classics pretty fast. Those records were already pretty played out back in ‘89. So I started getting weird, bugged-out records” (DJ Lethal in Kurt B. Reighley 2000: 86).

273 The work of art, whether a sample of James Brown or otherwise, might be seen to become cliché when the repetition of the simulacrum is no longer constitutive of “the means” of the “war zone” but rather becomes an end in itself. That is, it is used as a representation of a practice rather than being a residual effect of the apprehension of a minor temporality. As Deleuze says in Cinema 2, “[a] cliché is a sensory-motor image of the thing”824 – that is the cliché helps us move through our daily lives with ease and without thought. In this circumstance, the use of a James Brown sample becomes cliché when it is used because it is James Brown, rather than the liberation of a beat that happens to have originated with Brown.

Capital M Memory

Whilst the heyday of unrestrained Brown sampling might have waned since the late 1980s and early 1990s, this does not mean that it has stopped. With his catalogue of 800+ songs, the DJs are just a little more cunning about the way they use his refrains, often subjecting them to time stretching and various effects to disguise them, although this is another way to allow them to keep on becoming.825 However, given the currency of Brown’s music the many samples that have appeared time and again, whether Funky Drummer, Think (About It), Funky President to name a few of the most persistent, one wonders just how much more currency is to be gained by their usage, and perhaps the best that might be achieved is like Deleuze says of the creativity of the cinematic auteurs, that they might “parody the cliché”826 although this is in itself not enough to “disturb the sensory-motor connections”. 827

The maintenance of copyright law will also effect the proliferation of cliché, even if it inadvertently adds to the canonical status of the sample in the same gesture. By the

824 (Deleuze 1989: 20) 825 In addition to those previously mentioned, recent use of James Brown samples has tended to be more discreet, can be heard in tracks such as, Pete Rock and CL Smooth’s, “Da Two” on Pete Rock’s Soul Survivor (1998) (Pete Rock & CL Smooth 1998). The Unseen on Quasimoto’s The Unseen (Quasimoto 2000). “Natural Suction” on Wagon Christ’s Musipal (Wagon Christ 2001) (In the Wagon Christ track, for example the break from the 1972 track, Think (About It) is sped up to resemble a drum and bass track. Also Brown continues to be called up for guest spots, appearing for example on the recent Black Eyed Peas track, They Don’t Want Music (Black Eyed Peas with James Brown 2005). Then again a high profile artist with the money and the taste for old-school flavour, will pay the price for the sample, as did Hip-Hop performer, Nas on the track “Get Down” the opening track of the album God’s Son (2002). 826 (Deleuze 1986: 211) and (Deleuze 1989: 22) 827 (Deleuze 1989: 22)

274 time the law begins clamping down on a particular practice, such as sampling, chances are that any artistic revolution has already taken place long before. This is still a lamentable state of affairs, however, and the worst effect of this State co-option, is not so much to be found in the exploitation of the economic gains made through the minor, but rather how such practices more generally serve to reiterate majoritarian power. It is not only a question of those institutions which enforce the law, but of a power they have over – and through – “official” representation. On this point Deleuze and Guattari will distinguish between “memory” and “Memory” in regard to the minor: “Of course, the child, the woman, the black have memories; but the Memory that collects those memories is still a virile majoritarian agency treating them as "childhood memories," as conjugal, or colonial memories”.828 We can see a demonstration of this in the acts of record companies attempting to recoup the memories of the minor via hegemonic representation, whether this is through authorship, publishing as copyrights and so on.

Hence, one of my ongoing concerns with this increasingly litigious society and its continued restriction of practices such as sampling is that this is indicative of deeper cultural engagements that are quashed with a broad sweeping gesture by the law. This concern is reflected in a recent interview with Jeff Tweedy of Wilco who has said that a recent US court decision to ban all music sampling without a licence829 was “racism”.830 Given the ongoing colonisation of memory this is not really as farfetched as it might seem as the decision would appear to deliberately target a genre whose entire oevre is based upon such activity.

Throughout this chapter I have, in answer to this, suggested the importance of the idea put forward by Deleuze and Guattari, that freeing the simulacrum from its subordination to notions of intrinsic models, and or predetermined hierarchies, is perhaps the only way forward for an ethological view of the world. In fact there is much to be learned from a wilful “bastardisation” as long as the said bastard is set free

828 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 293) 829 The court decision in question is discussed in the article “Court to Hip-Hop Nation: No Free Samples” (2004) as reported by Billboard.com. “A federal appeals court ruled…that rap artists should pay for every musical sample included in their work - even minor, unrecognizable snippets of music”(Associated Press 2004). For more on this story see (Associated Press 2004) and (OUT-LAW News 2004) 830 (Lessig 2005: 069)

275 from a connection to its parent, particularly if it did not even know that parent to begin with. We should instead turn our attention toward the new connections the bastard has forged in its name, rather than simply postulate its attachment to a history that neither it nor its audience will ever really know. This latter denial of the bastard simulacrum its right, as a singular image, forces it to maintain a concept of originary identity would most certainly be considered unethical if applied to a human subject.

Yet the bastard must also be ready to accept the challenge of difference as well. Provided that it maintains difference over identity, at some stage it will assuredly not recognise itself any more. That is precisely what happened when Brown himself came face to face with his own becoming:

At dinner with old friend Cliff White after accepting a special award at Britain’s March 1988 DMC (Disco Mix Club) Championships, Brown betrayed confusion about a reception so rapturous White himself had been stunned. “It was quite amazing standing with him behind that curtain in the Royal Albert Hall, and seeing the place just packed with street kids! It was such a charged atmosphere. Then, when they announced “James Brown” - which had been a well-kept secret - and pulled back the drapes, it was just like the Beatles. Pandemonium! …But back at the hotel,” says White, “every once in a while, James would go back to the evening and say, “But why didn’t they ask me to sing? What was I really there for? Why wasn’t I asked to sing a song? He really didn’t seem to know what it meant”. 831

831 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 151)

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Tagg, P., (1998), 'Review: Interpreting Popular Music by James Brackett', theblackbook.net, available online at http://www.theblackbook.net/acad/tagg/articles/brackrvw.html, 7 October 2001.

Taylor, T. D. (2001), Strange Sounds: Music, Technology and Culture, London: Routledge.

The History Makers.com, (2005), 'Stanley Crouch: Biography', The History Makers.com, available online at http://www.thehistorymakers.com/biography/biography.asp?bioindex=107&ca tegory=mediaMakers, 14 March 2005.

The Source, (1998), 'Best of the Best: The Source 100 Hip-Hop Survey'. The Source : The Magazine Of Hip-Hop Music, Culture & Politics, issue 100, January: 167- 205.

The Tavis Smiley Show, (2004), 'Brown V. The Board of Education', May 19 2004, NPR.org, available online at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1902038, 18 September 2005.

The-Breaks.Com, (2005), The Breaks.Com, available online at http://www.thebreaks.com/, 17 March 2006.

Thompson, A. (2001), 'Give the Drummer Some', in Liner Notes to Live at the Apollo Volume 2: Deluxe Edition. New York: Universal Music: 16-17.

288 Thompson, D. (2001), Funk, San Francisco, Calif.: Backbeat Books.

Toop, D. (2000a), 'Hip-Hop: Iron Needles of Death and a Piece of Wax', in P. Shapiro (ed.), Modulations : A History of Electronic Music : Throbbing Words on Sound, New York: Caipirinha Productions: 88-107.

Toop, D. (2000b), Rap Attack #3 : African Rap to Global Hip-Hop (3rd revised, expanded, and updated edition), London: Serpent's Tail.

Trischler, S., and Ellis, A. (2005), 'Smunk: Pee Wee Ellis', Wax Poetics Online, 28 November 2005, available online at http://waxpoetics.com/content/index.php?article=peewee, 11 January 2006.

U.S. Government, (1964), 'Civil Rights Act (1964)', www.ourdocuments.gov. available online at http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=old&doc=97, 13 July 2005.

Van Peebles, M. (1996), Liner Notes - Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song (VHS), Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song,dir.M.VanPeebles,Xenon Entertainment Group.

VH1, (2001), 'Interview with Chuck D', VH1.com, available online at http://www.vh1.com/shows/events/say_it_loud/chuckd.jhtml, 3 May 2002.

Vincent, R. (1996), Funk : The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One,New York: St. Martin's Griffin.

Wallis, R., and Malm, K. (1990), 'Patterns of Change', in S. Frith and A. Goodwin (eds.), On Record : Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, London: Routledge: 160-180.

Wang, O. (2003), 'Jin Wants You to "Learn Chinese"', Odub.com, available online at http://www.o- dub.com/weblog/2003_12_14_archive.html#107166109401115293, 21 February 2004.

Weheliye, A. G. (2002), '"Feenin": Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music', Social Text 20 (2): 21-47.

Weinger, H. and Leeds, A. (1996), 'Liner Notes' on Foundations of Funk - A Brand New Bag 1964-1969:Polygram. . Weinger, H. and White, C. (1991), 'Are You Ready for Star Time?' in (Liner Notes from Star Time Box Set): Polygram Records: 14-44.

Werner, C. (2000), A Change Is Gonna Come : Music, Race and the Soul of America, Edinburgh: Payback.

Wesley, F. (2002), Hit Me, Fred : Recollections of a Side Man, Durham: Duke University Press.

289 White, C. (1985), The Life and Times of Little Richard, New York: Pocket Books.

White, C. (1989), 'Roots of a Revolution: Liner Notes', Roots of a Revolution.New York: Polygram.

White, M., (1996), 'What Is Happy Hardcore?' MarkWhite.com, available online at from http://www.markwhite.com/HappyNET/links.html, 21 February 2004.

Wikipedia.com, (2006), 'James Brown (Wikipedia Entry)', Wikipedia.com, available online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Brown, 20 April 2006.

Wolk, D. (2004), 33 1/3 Volume 13: James Brown's Live at the Apollo, New York and London: Continuum Books.

Wolk, D. (2005), 'Please, Please, Please: James Brown's Horrible New 'Memoir'', SeattleWeekly.com, 9 February 2005 available online at http://www.seattleweekly.com/music/0506/050209_music_smallmouth.php, 22 February 2005.

Wyman, B. (1990), Stone Alone, London: Viking.

DISCOGRAPHY

A Tribe Called Quest (1996), Beats, Rhymes and Life,Jive.

Afrika Bambaataa and Soul Sonic Force (1982), ‘Planet Rock’, Tommy Boy.

Afrika Bambaataa and James Brown (1984), ‘Unity (Parts 1 - 6)’, Tommy Boy.

Black Eyed Peas with James Brown (2005), 'They Don't Want Music' on Monkey Business:A&M.

Ballard, H. (1968), 'How You Gonna Get Respect (When You Haven't Cut Your Process Yet)?', King.

Brown, J. and the Famous Flames (1956), 'Please, Please, Please', King.

Brown, J. (1962), 'I've Got Money', King.

Brown, J. (1962), 'Night Train', King.

Brown, J. (1963), 'Prisoner of Love', King.

Brown, J. (1964a), 'I'm Tired But I'm Clean' on Pure Dynamite: Live at the Royal, King.

Brown, J. (1964b), 'Oh Baby Don't You Weep (Parts 1&2)', King.

290 Brown, J. (1967), 'Hip Bag '67' on Live at the Garden, King.

Brown, J. (1967b), 'There Was a Time', King.

Brown, J. (1968), 'Say It Loud-I'm Black and I'm Proud', King.

Brown, J. (1969a), 'Ain't It Funky Now (Pts 1 &2)', King.

Brown, J. (1969b), 'Give It up or Turnit-a-Loose', King.

Brown, J. (1969c), ‘The Popcorn’, King

Brown, J. (1969d), ‘Mother Popcorn’, King

Brown, J. (1969e), ‘Let a Man Come in and Do the Popcorn’, King

Brown, J. (1970a), 'Funky Drummer', King.

Brown, J. (1970b), 'Get up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine (Pts 1&2)', King.

Brown, J. (1970c), 'I Don't Want Nobody to Give Nothing (Open up the Door, I'll Get It Myself) (Parts 1&2)' on Sex Machine, King/Polygram.

Brown, J. (1971a), 'Escape-Ism Pt.1 and Pt.2', Polydor.

Brown, J. (1971b), 'Make It Funky (Pts 1 & 2)', Polydor.

Brown, J. (1971c), 'My Part/Make It Funky (Parts 3 and 4)', Polydor.

Brown, J. (1971d), Revolution of the Mind - Live At the Apollo Vol. 3, Polydor.

Brown, J. (1971/1991), Hot Pants (re-issue). New York: Universal.

Brown, J. (1972a), 'Get on the Good Foot', Polydor.

Brown, J. (1972b), 'Public Enemy #1, Pt.1' on Star Time,Polygram.

Brown, J. (1973a), Black Caesar, Universal.

Brown, J. (1973b), Slaughter's Big Rip Off, Universal.

Brown, J. (1973c), ‘Think', Polydor.

Brown, J. (1975), 'Funky President' on Reality, Polydor.

Brown, J. (1986), 'Funky Drummer' on In the Jungle Groove: Polydor/Universal.

Brown, J. (1988), I'm Real, Scotti Bros.

291 Brown, J. (1989), Roots of a Revolution,Polygram.

Brown. J. (1990), Live At the Apollo (CD re-issue of 1963 album), Polygram.

Brown, J. (1991a), 'Get It Together' on Star Time:Polygram.

Brown, J. (1991b), 'Let Yourself Go' on Star Time.NewYork:Polygram.

Brown, J. (1991c), Star Time, Polygram Records Inc.

Brown, J. (1995), Say It Live and Loud - Live in Dallas 08.26.68,Polygram.

Brown, J. (1996), Foundations of Funk - a Brand New Bag 1964-1969,Polygram.

Brown, J. (2001), Live At the Apollo Vol. 2 (Deluxe Edition),Universal.

Brown, J. (2005a), Funky People's Greatest Breakbeats, Universal.

Brown, J. (2005b), Greatest Breakbeats,Universal. Brown, J. and the Louie Nelson Orchestra (1969/2004 (reissue)), Soul on Top (James Brown with the Louie Bellson Orchestra and Oliver Nelson Conducting, Verve.

Cooke, S. (1986), ‘A Change is Gonna Come’ on The Man and His Music, RCA.

Davis, M. (1969), Bitches Brew, Columbia.

Davis, M. (1972), On the Corner, Columbia.

DJ Shadow (1996), Endtroducing,Mo'Wax.

Edan (2004), 'Sound of the Funky Drummer' (uncredited “mixtape”).

Ghostface Killah (2001), Bulletproof Wallets, Epic.

Jin (2004), 'Learn Chinese', EMI.

LeBlanc, K. and Malcolm X (1983), 'No Sell Out', Tommy Boy.

Kool Moe Dee (1987), 'How Ya Like Me Now', Jive.

LA Style (1991), 'James Brown Is Dead', Bounce Records.

Malcolm X (1992), Words from the Frontlines: Excerpts from the Great Speeches of Malcolm X,BMG.

Nas, (2002), ‘Get Down’, God’s Son,Sony.

Pete Rock, & CL Smooth (1998), 'Da Two' on Soul Survivor: Loud Records.

292 Public Enemy (1988), It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back, Island/Def Jam.

Quasimoto (2000), 'The Unseen' on The Unseen: Stones Throw.

Raekwon (1999), Immobilarity, Loud Records/Wu-Tang.

Reich, S. (1987), Early Works: Come out/PianoPhase/Clapping Music/It's Gonna Rain,New York: Elektra/Nonesuch.

Sir Frontalot (2005), 'Good Old Clyde' available online at, frontalot.com.

Slum Village (2000), 'I Don't Know' on Fantastic Vol. 2: Goodvibe.

Stetsasonic (1988), 'Talkin' All That Jazz', Tommy Boy.

Stubblefield, C. (1993), DNA Beat Blocks Groove Construction Kit: Clyde Stubblefield, EastWest.

Stubblefield, C. (2003), 'Interview Footage' on Clyde Stubblefield: The Original. Minnetonka: Liquid 8 Records.

Various Artists (1997), American Primitive, Vol. 1: Raw Pre-War Gospel (1926-36), Revenant Records/Koch Distribution.

Various Artists (1999), 300% Dynamite: Ska Soul Rocksteady Funk & Dub in Jamaica, Soul Jazz.

Wagon Christ (2001), 'Natural Suction' on Musipal, Ninja Tune.

Wu-Tang Clan (1994), 'Method Man' on Enter the 36 Chambers, Loud Records.

FILM AND BROADCASTS

Ain't It Funky Now (2005), from the series Soul Deep, dir. A. Lawrence, BBC.

Ali (2001).M. Mann (Director), Columbia Pictures.

Baadassss (2003), dir .M. Van Peebles, Imagine Entertainment.

Be My Baby (1996), from the series Dancing In The Street: A Rock and Roll History, dir. S. Barrett and H. Thomson, BBC Video.

Better Living through Circuitry-a Digital Odyssey into the Electronic Dance Underground (2001), dir. J. Reiss, Siren Entertainment.

Classified X (1997), dir. M. Daniels, Les Sept Artes/Yeah, Inc.

Electric Miles: A Different Kind of Blue (2004), dir. M. Lerner, Eagle Eye Media

293 FforFake(1974), dir. O. Welles, Janus Film/Les Films de l'Astrophore/SACI.

James Brown the Godfather of Soul: A Portrait (1995), dir. M. Peterzell (Director): Goodmarc Productions/ A&E Television Networks.

James Brown: Man to Man (1968), dir. A. Fisher, Metromedia.

James Brown: Soul Survivor (2003), from the series American Masters,dir.J.Marre, Universal Music.

Jazz - Episode 4: "The True Welcome" 1929 – 1934 (2001), from the series Jazz, dir. K. Burns, PBS Home Video.

John Cage: I Have Nothing to Say and I Am Saying It (1990), from the series American Masters, dir. A. Miller, Kultur Films Inc.

Lenny Henry Hunts the Funk (1992), from the series The South Bank Show, prod. M. Bragg, London Weekend Television.

Make It Funky (1996), from the series Dancing In The Street: A Rock andRoll History, dir. S. Barrett and H. Thomson, BBC Video.

Modulations-Cinema for the Ear (1997), dir. I. Lee, Caipirinha Productions Piano Blues (2004), from the series Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues,dir.C. Eastwood, PBS/Vulcan Productions.

Red, White and Blues (2003), from the series Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues,dir. M. Figgis, PBS/Vulcan Productions.

Soul Brother No. 1 (1978), dir. A. Maben, Swallowdale Productions/RM Productions/MHF.

Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song (1971), dir. .M. Van Peebles, Xenon Entertainment Group.

That Was Rock (Re-Released Title of T.A.M.I. Show) (1965), dir. S. Binder, RBC Entertainment.

The Soul of Stax (1994), dir. P. Priestley, Les Films Grain de Sable.

294