James Brown: Apprehending a Minor Temporality
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James Brown: Apprehending a Minor Temporality 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.