Reason.com
Father of Funk
The life and afterlife of James Brown
(Page 2 of 2)
In his 1985 novel Schismatrix, the science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling described people who didn't die -- not officially, anyway -- but "faded" instead, their corporal existence replaced by a ghostly "programmed web of speeches, announcements, taped appearances, and random telephone calls." James Brown certainly seemed to be fading for the last three decades of his life. Besides the decline in his output, his personal life fell apart. He was credibly accused of beating one of his wives. After a high-speed car chase he was sentenced to six years in prison, in what the critic Dave Marsh called "perhaps the longest sentence ever given in the United States for a traffic charge." He served two years before being paroled.
But like the faded characters in Sterling's novel, his programmed web of rhythms and shouts is all around us. If you want to fuse Brown's music to the words of Frantz Fanon -- or Richard Nixon, or anyone else -- it's there, just waiting to be deployed. James Brown died on Christmas day, 2006, but he didn't just leave us a great body of work. He left us the tools to make more music long after he's gone.
Jesse Walker is managing editor of reason.
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This article is tea-bagger garbage. Robin Hood's true legacy was fighting against the Norman aristocrats to help the Saxon peasants. During the 1950s in Indiana, Robin Hood was banned reading in some school districts because of right-wing bigots who thought Robin Hood was promoting socialism. Not that there is anything wrong with socialism.