From the ocean comes a notion
that the real eyes lies in rhythm,
and the rhythm of vision is a dancer.
From the lookin’ come the see­ing,
one with real eyes real­ize
the rhythm of vision is a dancer,
and when he dance, it’s always on the one.

Par­lia­ment – Mr. Wiggles

There is some­thing inher­ently mis­lead­ing about the word ‘rev­o­lu­tion’. While the term sug­gests a change of astro­nom­i­cal pro­por­tions, these colos­sal expec­ta­tions are hardly ever met. That does not mean that rev­o­lu­tions did, do, or will not hap­pen at all; they sim­ply come in unex­pected shapes, forms, col­ors, and sizes. The rev­o­lu­tion that I will dis­cuss in the fol­low­ing, for instance, is tiny. Still, even this assess­ment of its size is not accu­rate enough. In this par­tic­u­lar case, visual metaphors are wrong alto­gether. Nei­ther a tele­scope nor a micro­scope will help a sin­gle bit to observe it. This rev­o­lu­tion can­not be seen at all.

Resort­ing to other sen­sory metaphors, sonic ones for instance, does not help much either. While we expect a rev­o­lu­tion to come with a big bang, these loud sounds are hardly ever heard. As a mat­ter of fact, the rev­o­lu­tion that I will dis­cuss in this essay was so silent that at the time of its occur­rence it could hardly be heard at all. Iron­i­cally, this major break­through almost got lost amongst the plethora of sounds and noises that sur­rounded it. Lis­ten­ing back, it is still impos­si­ble to hear this rev­o­lu­tion directly. Rais­ing the vol­ume does not help either, since it would only amplify the back­ground noises. This strange rev­o­lu­tion started nei­ther with a whis­per nor a scream but occurred some­where in-​between these other sounds, in a realm that is nei­ther visual nor acoustic.

At this point, I will shift from the word ‘rev­o­lu­tion’ to a rev­o­lu­tion. The event that I would like to denom­i­nate as such is James Brown’s intro­duc­tion of ‘the One’ into pop­u­lar music. While this term ini­tially des­ig­nated the first beat of a mea­sure, its mean­ing in funk music can no longer be reduced to its orig­i­nal use. In this essay, I will try to explain what James Brown and his suc­ces­sors – Sly Stone, George Clin­ton, Betty Davis, Bootsy Collins, Rick James, and Prince to name a few – actu­ally mean when they use this enig­matic term, and argue that the One was noth­ing less than a twofold rev­o­lu­tion in soul, pop, and rock music. First, the One released rhythm from its sec­ondary and instru­men­tal role to melody and har­mony. Sec­ond, and more impor­tantly, this rev­o­lu­tion eman­ci­pated rhythm from its musi­cal, and even its audi­tory con­straints. After James Brown’s inter­ven­tion, rhythm is no longer exclu­sively con­nected to the ear – or any other sense for that mat­ter – but becomes an inter­play between mul­ti­ple types of sen­sory data.

Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag

“The James Brown sound I didn’t learn from nobody. It’s from me“
“I taught them every­thing they know, but not every­thing I know”

– James Brown

At first sight, Brown’s major break­through seems to be restricted to a minis­cule inter­ven­tion. On “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” (1965), the singer broke with the con­ven­tions of the pop­u­lar music of his time. Instead of empha­siz­ing the sec­ond and fourth beat of every mea­sure, Brown accen­tu­ated the first and the third. In the singer’s own words:

“I changed from the upbeat to the down­beat. Sim­ple as that really.” (Brown qtd. in Pareles)

Sim­ple as it may have been, it is very dif­fi­cult to pre­cisely deter­mine – let alone explain – what James Brown did. In spite of the singer’s own beliefs, for one, the answer can­not be found in the down­beat itself. In fact, “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” is far from its first or most exem­plary occur­rence in music his­tory. At best, the song marks a break with the con­ven­tions of the soul and pop music of its time. Not nearly enough to call this song a rev­o­lu­tion, or so it seems at least.

Let’s shift back to the con­cept of ‘rev­o­lu­tion’ then: if this term proves to be so ambigu­ous and prob­lem­atic, why not avoid it alto­gether? Within the con­text of this essay, my answer would be that ety­mo­log­i­cally the con­cept pre­cisely com­bines the two con­tra­dic­tory move­ments that I need in order to call “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” a rev­o­lu­tion. In her book On Rev­o­lu­tion (1963) Han­nah Arendt points out that the term has its ori­gin in 16th cen­tury astron­omy, and that its lit­eral mean­ing in that dis­ci­pline is – at least at first sight – the exact oppo­site of its metaphor­i­cal use in phi­los­o­phy and pol­i­tics. ‘Rev­o­lu­tion’ does not refer to the men-​ignited process that leads to a rad­i­cal new order in his­tory, but to the eter­nally recur­ring cycli­cal motion of the stars; an unstop­pable, nat­ural force rad­i­cally out­side the reach of human agency.

“While the ele­ments of nov­elty, begin­ning, and vio­lence, all inti­mately asso­ci­ated with our notion of rev­o­lu­tion, are con­spic­u­ously absent from the orig­i­nal mean­ing of the word as well as from its first metaphoric use in polit­i­cal lan­guage, there exists another con­no­ta­tion of the astro­nomic term which I have already men­tioned briefly and which has remained very force­ful in our own use of the word. I mean the notion of irre­sistibil­ity, the fact that the revolv­ing motion of the stars fol­low a pre­or­dained path and is removed from all influ­ence of human power.” (Arendt 47)

Arendt dis­tin­guishes between two aspects of astro­nom­i­cal rev­o­lu­tions: irre­sistibil­ity and cycli­cal­ity. In the con­tem­po­rary, philo­soph­i­cal or polit­i­cal use of the term, the stress clearly lies on the first of these two terms, whereas the sec­ond seems to have dis­ap­peared. Still, it believe that it is a mis­take to think that the moment of a rad­i­cal new begin­ning has com­pletely replaced the cycli­cal aspect of a rev­o­lu­tion. While nov­elty may appear to be irrec­on­cil­able with the idea of an eter­nally recur­ring cycle, I will argue that it is not. In order to show that, how­ever, it is nec­es­sary to make a fur­ther dis­tinc­tion within the con­cept of cycli­cal­ity itself.

A cycli­cal move­ment is more com­plex than it ini­tially may seem to be; twice as com­plex to be pre­cise. From a the­o­ret­i­cal per­spec­tive, a cycle is not a sin­gle but a twofold motion. Two ele­ments are nec­es­sary to define a cycli­cal move­ment: it has to con­sist of both a rad­i­cal change as well a return. In order to dis­tin­guish a cycle from mere move­ment, both of these aspects need to be present. Nei­ther one of them can be more impor­tant than the other. The fact of the return does not reduce the change to a mere sur­face effect, nor does the rad­i­cal nature of the change rel­a­tivize the return.