While in the­ory both aspects of a rev­o­lu­tion are of equal impor­tance, in prac­tice the stress con­stantly shifts from the one to the other; some­times the move­ment of change is accen­tu­ated, some­times the instance of the return. Together, I would argue, this moment and motion are not com­pleted or syn­the­sized into a full cycle, but the peri­odic oscil­la­tion between change and return con­sti­tutes a sim­ple – con­cept of – rhythm. This is where I would like to locate rev­o­lu­tions. They take place nei­ther in a visual nor in an acoustic or any other sen­sory realm. Rev­o­lu­tions are rhythmical.

Every­thing is on The One

“My con­tention is that there were three B’s, and now there’s four:
Beethoven, Bach, Brahms and now, Brown.”

– James Brown

Another shift: from the rhythm of rev­o­lu­tions to a rev­o­lu­tion in rhythm. “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” is com­monly rec­og­nized as a major land­mark in the his­tory of pop­u­lar music. Noth­ing cap­tures the almost myth­i­cal sta­tus of the song bet­ter than the fol­low­ing quote from Rickey Vincent’s ground­break­ing study Funk. The Music, The Peo­ple, and The Rhythm of the One:

“The God­fa­ther him­self broke down the break­through song, the 1965 “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”: ‘That was the turn­around song. It turned every­one around. Because I went on one and three as opposed to the music (count) bein’ writ­ten on two and four. But I also took gospel and jazz and defied all the laws.’ The jerky gui­tar, absurdly off­beat bass line, and sharp burst of brass and gui­tars had a per­cus­sive feel that was never heard before.” (Vin­cent 60).”

In this quote, there is absolute con­sen­sus between Brown and Vin­cent about the impor­tance of “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”. In fact, the critic’s appraisal flows smoothly into the artist’s tout­ing of his own horn, and vice versa. They pro­claim in uni­son that “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” was noth­ing but a rev­o­lu­tion; the song’s minor shift from back­beat to down­beat proved to be so much more than just a rhyth­mic slip.

Rickey Vin­cent equates this sur­plus value of Brown’s inter­ven­tion with the One. To him, this enig­matic con­cept far – infi­nitely – exceeds the first beat of a mea­sure. The One refers to the spir­i­tual unity of the entire uni­verse. The gospel accord­ing to Vin­cent goes as fol­lows: In the begin­ning there is the One. The One con­sti­tutes a rhythm, then this rhythm con­nects the dif­fer­ent mem­bers of a funk band, then this funk band includes the audi­ence in its cir­cle of one­ness, and so on, until it finally unites the entire uni­verse. James Brown’s rhyth­mic slip becomes a cos­mic slop.

Vin­cent claims that this power of the One to “raise rhythm to a cos­mic level” derives from African spir­i­tual per­for­mances in which “everyone’s indi­vid­ual rhythms are essen­tial to the total vibe” (37). In order to estab­lish the impor­tance of this African legacy to funk, the critic uses the five so-​called ten­den­cies of African music that com­poser and musi­col­o­gist Olly Wil­son defines in his essay “The Het­eroge­nous Sound Ideal in African Amer­i­can Music” (1992). Accord­ing to Wil­son, African music is marked by:

• a ten­dency to rhyth­mi­cal contrasts
• a ten­dency to sing and play in a per­cus­sive manner
• a ten­dency to include call-​and-​response structures
• a ten­dency to cre­ate a high den­sity of musi­cal events
• a ten­dency to incor­po­rate the body in music making

Wil­son sub­se­quently argues that these same ten­den­cies are also present in African-​American music. Rickey Vin­cent uses this argu­ment to root funk in African spir­i­tu­al­ity. This con­clu­sion, how­ever, rests on a mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the word ‘ten­dency’. Vin­cent ignores the fact that Wil­son uses a very pre­cise term, and sim­ply reads it as ‘fea­ture’ or ‘qual­ity’. Ten­den­cies are dynamic, and not impor­tant as such. They tend towards some­thing else. In the case of African and African-​American music these incline towards het­ero­gene­ity. To Wil­son, the com­mon denom­i­na­tor between these forms of music there­fore does not lie on the descrip­tive level of the ten­den­cies them­selves but on an under­ly­ing, nor­ma­tive level. Both African and African-​American music tend towards what he calls a ‘het­ero­ge­neous sound ideal’:

”By this term, I mean that there exists a com­mon approach to music mak­ing in which a kalei­do­scopic range of dra­mat­i­cally con­trast­ing qual­i­ties of sound (tim­bre) is sought after in both vocal and instru­men­tal music. The desir­able musi­cal sound tex­ture is one that con­tains a com­bi­na­tion of diverse tim­bres.” (Wil­son 1992: 159)

Although Wil­son searches for the com­mon traits of African and African-​American music, he is very cau­tious not to treat them as one mono­lith block. He does not try to show that both forms of music are iden­ti­cal, or even exist as such. On the con­trary, these five ten­den­cies con­sti­tute an ana­lytic frame­work that enable Wil­son to dis­tin­guish between dif­fer­ent kinds of African and African-​American music. The fact that these gen­res and sub-​genres are orga­nized around an ideal pre­vents him from con­fus­ing his tools for aes­thetic qual­i­ties – in a descrip­tive as well as a nor­ma­tive sense.

By using ‘ideal’ and ‘ten­dency’ as his main con­cepts, Wil­son intro­duces an ana­logue logic. Through his pre­cise choice of words, he under­lines that African and African-​American music strive for rather than real­ize their het­ero­ge­neous sound ideal. The unbridge­able ten­sion between this abstract ideal and its con­crete man­i­fes­ta­tions forms the unsta­ble, com­mon core of African and African music. Dis­place­ment is rule rather than excep­tion. This inher­ent impu­rity and insta­bil­ity, how­ever, should not be under­stood as a lack; they are the drive behind the music. Putting an end to this move­ment – in the form of an ori­gin or a telos – is nei­ther pos­si­ble nor desirable.

Rickey Vin­cent, on the other hand, con­fuses Wilson’s five ten­den­cies for a pos­i­tive def­i­n­i­tion of the het­ero­ge­neous sound ideal. More­over, he tem­po­rally and spa­tially locate this ideal in pre­colo­nial Africa. The authen­tic roots of funk – and all other forms of African-​American music – lie in the moth­er­land. “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” actu­ally marks a return to these ori­gins and must be under­stood as the con­tin­u­a­tion of an ancient, spir­i­tual tra­di­tion. In Vincent’s view, James Brown’s rev­o­lu­tion­ary shift is actu­ally a reli­gious leap backwards:

”Many of the world’s reli­gions (par­tic­u­lar African ones) empha­size a “cos­mic one­ness” with every­thing, rather than the West­ern Chris­t­ian con­cepts of man “fear­ing” God, man ver­sus nature, mind ver­sus body, intel­lect ver­sus intu­ition. The African spir­i­tual root of The Funk is impor­tant because the essence of funk music, as well as the funk atti­tude, is a return to cer­tain tra­di­tional ways, among which are the basics of music-​making; a cel­e­bra­tion of the earthy, funky, emo­tion­ally vital way of life; and a cos­mol­ogy of “one­ness” in which every­thing and every­one in the uni­verse is inter­con­nected.” (258)

In his por­trayal of ‘The One’, Rickey Vin­cent uncrit­i­cally repro­duces all stereo­types of both black music and the daisy age, with one small, but for our cur­rent pur­poses highly sig­nif­i­cant, dif­fer­ence: rhythm has replaced har­mony in its role as cos­mic uni­fier. From the first beat of a mea­sure to the entire uni­verse, from an African past, via an African-​American present, to a global or even cos­mic future: Rickey Vin­cent attrib­utes infi­nite pow­ers to the One. It is ironic that pre­cisely the het­ero­ge­neous sound ideal that Wil­son rec­og­nizes as a com­mon thread in both African and African Amer­i­can music gets trans­formed into an homog­e­niz­ing cos­mol­ogy.