Whereas music critic Rickey Vin­cent uncrit­i­cally affirms and repro­duces the rev­o­lu­tion­ary sta­tus of “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”, musi­col­o­gist Anne Danielsen takes upon her the ungrate­ful task of debunk­ing this myth. In her book Pres­ence and Plea­sure. The Funk Grooves of James Brown and Par­lia­ment, she argues that many of the appraised fea­tures which the song has become syn­ony­mous with – down­beat, syn­co­pa­tion, vocal per­cus­sion, the One – were retro-​actively attrib­uted by musi­col­o­gists and crit­ics. In an attempt to cor­rect this long his­tory of uncrit­i­cal recep­tion, she goes against the grain and sep­a­rates the facts from the myth through a metic­u­lous analy­sis of James Brown’s songs. While Danielsen acknowl­edges James Brown’s sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to pop­u­lar music, she points out that his sig­na­ture sound was grad­u­ally intro­duced through­out the 1960s rather than in a sin­gle song:

”Cer­tainly, many of the songs from this period – from “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” in 1965 to the more fleshed-​out funk tunes of the early 1970s – are more or less funk. They are, how­ever, some­thing else as well. It is usu­ally dif­fer­ent aspects of dif­fer­ent songs that point toward the “new style”: all of the fea­tures listed above – semi-​improvised vocals, one-​chord “har­mony,” implied polyrhythm, the rhyth­mic riff­ing of the horn sec­tion and the gui­tar, the frag­men­ta­tion of the bass line, and an over­all per­cus­sive approach – are rel­e­vant, but they are sel­dom, if ever, present at the same time. The tran­si­tion from rhythm and blues to funk, the for­mer rep­re­sented by tunes like “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” and “I Got You (I Feel Good)” (1965), the lat­ter by “Cold Sweat” (1967), is in many ways rather vague, either because the new fea­tures to some extend were already there or the older ones remained present” (Danielsen 39)

Just like Rickey Vin­cent, Anne Danielsen defines funk through Olly Wilson’s five ten­den­cies (31−32). She shows, though, that “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” does not really con­tain these ten­den­cies (and again, I would argue that she too mis­reads the term as ‘fea­tures’). Only a few of them are present in a pre­ma­ture form. Even the much lauded down­beat is mostly miss­ing from the song: ”More­over, the tune is char­ac­ter­ized by a faster tempo than “Cold Sweat” and by an obvi­ous back­beat” (74) Danielsen thereby decon­structs the myth of the rev­o­lu­tion­ary begin­ning of funk that crit­ics such as Vin­cent have been con­stantly repro­duc­ing in the last four decades. In real­ity, the ori­gins of the genre are dis­persed. Accord­ing to Danielsen, it took almost a decade after “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” before all the pieces fall into place. James Brown’s “The Pay­back” (1971(almost got it right, but the five ten­den­cies first really came together in the ‘P-​funk’ of Parliament/​Funkadelic.

On a descrip­tive level, Danielsen avoids and cor­rects the broad, gen­er­al­iza­tions that crit­ics such as Vin­cent make. On a nor­ma­tive level, how­ever, the musi­col­o­gist is guilty of the same kind of retroac­tive rea­son­ing that she accuses (main­stream) music his­tory of. The only dif­fer­ence between Vin­cent and Danielsen is that the latter’s point of ref­er­ence lies in the near future rather than in a dis­tant past. By nor­ma­tively defin­ing “fleshed-​out” funk as the full pres­ence of all five ten­den­cies, she implic­itly deval­ues songs like “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” to lesser, or not-​yet funk. As a result, James Brown’s six­ties funk becomes the aes­thet­i­cally infe­rior pre­de­ces­sor to George Clin­ton’s sev­en­ties p-​funk flavor.

So, even though James Brown and his bands in most ways ful­fill the style ten­ta­tively summed up in The New Rolling Stone Ency­clo­pe­dia of Rock’s attempt at a “def­i­n­i­tion” of funk – “bass-​driven, per­cus­sive, polyrhyth­mic black dance music, with min­i­mal melody and max­i­mum syncopation” – there might be a higher order than the alpha­bet­i­cal at work when the next def­i­n­i­tion to appear is “Funkadelic: See George Clin­ton”. (91)

Whereas Rickey Vincent’s idea of ‘pure funk’ derives from its African roots, Anne Danielsen’s ver­sion is ful­filled in the music of Parliament/​Funkadelic. While the musicologist’s analy­sis is far more sub­tle and inter­est­ing than the critic’s, she relies on the same work-​based, nor­ma­tive aes­thet­ics. Danielsen and Vin­cent both declare a spe­cific set of songs – rather than Wilson’s abstract ideal – as the norm. Con­se­quently, this notion of ‘pure funk’ func­tions as a stan­dard accord­ing to which every other song is mea­sured and – by def­i­n­i­tion – inevitably fails.

Nonethe­less, I would argue that this nor­ma­tive bias – that I would like to bap­tize: Adornian-​fallacy – itself is the inevitable result of the strat­egy that they chose to approach James Brown’s music. Ulti­mately, Vin­cent and Danielsen make the exact same mis­take: they try to find the rev­o­lu­tion in the music itself. The musi­col­o­gist and the music critic thereby rid Brown’s inno­va­tions from their most impor­tant qual­ity: the fact they are acts, inter­ven­tions or – in my terms – oper­a­tions.

In spite of their praise for James Brown’s work, Vin­cent and Danielsen miss the rev­o­lu­tion­ary aspect of “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”. Their focus on the authen­tic­ity and the ori­gin and/​or telos of funk pre­vent them from truly acknowl­edg­ing James Brown’s rhyth­mi­cal inno­va­tions. It does not really make sense to declare his work ‘ground­break­ing’, when it is either a mere rep­e­ti­tion of African music or an imma­ture ver­sion of P-​funk.

The under­ly­ing con­cept of his­tory that Vin­cent and Danielsen apply to funk music obstructs the emer­gence of real inter­ven­tions. Still, Vin­cent and Danielsen both need an inter­rup­tion in order to pro­claim funk’s home­com­ing and/​or ful­fill­ment. The music spa­tial and tem­po­ral dis­place­ment from pre­colo­nial Africa to post­colo­nial Amer­ica, or (much less pre­ten­tious) from Char­lotte, North Car­olina in the 1960s to Detroit, Michi­gan in the 1970s, is not an acci­den­tal detour. The moment of a return/​fulfillment can only be defined in rela­tion to a process of change. More­over, the process can­not be explained from the moment, and vice versa. Every rev­o­lu­tion needs an irre­ducible act of dis­con­ti­nu­ity: its rhythm needs to be syncopated.

Talkin’ Loud & Sayin’ Nothing

Time to shift from a musi­cal to a philo­soph­i­cal per­spec­tive on rhythm. With­out explic­itly using the term, the French philoso­pher Henri Lefeb­vre uses the idea of syn­co­pa­tion – the dis­place­ments of beats or accents – to appro­pri­ate and revi­tal­ize the con­cept of rhythm. In Ele­ments of Rhyth­m­analy­sis: An Intro­duc­tion to the Under­stand­ing of Rhythm (1992), he rejects the mechan­i­cal con­no­ta­tions that this con­cept has acquired in com­mon lan­guage. Lefeb­vre insists that rhythm is more than the peri­od­i­cal rep­e­ti­tion of notes, move­ments, or objects:

”We eas­ily con­fuse rhythm with move­ment, speed, a sequence of move­ments or objects (machines, for exam­ple). Fol­low­ing this we tend to attribute to rhythms a mechan­i­cal over­tone, brush­ing aside the organic aspect of rhythmed move­ments. Musi­cians, who deal directly with rhythms, because they pro­duce them, often reduce them to the count­ing of beats: ‘One-​two-​three-​one-​two-​three’. His­to­ri­ans and econ­o­mists speak of rhythms: of the rapid­ity or slow­ness of peri­ods, of eras, of cycles; they tend only to see the effects of imper­sonal laws, with­out coher­ent rela­tions with actors, ideas, real­i­ties. Those who teach gym­nas­tics see in rhythms only suc­ces­sions of move­ments set­ting in motion cer­tain mus­cles, cer­tain phys­i­o­log­i­cal ener­gies, etc.” (Lefeb­vre 5 – 6)

Syn­co­pa­tion is the implicit point of depar­ture for Lefebvre’s ‘rhyth­m­analy­sis’: a sci­ence ded­i­cated to rhythm and its entan­gle­ment with every­day life. Fol­low­ing Friedrich Niet­zsche, he con­sid­ers the rep­e­ti­tion of reg­u­lar pat­terns as a sign of meter rather than rhythm. The word ‘meter’ has to be taken lit­er­ally. It is a prin­ci­ple that enables the quan­tifi­ca­tion, and sub­se­quent com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion, of space and time. Meter coin­cides with a repeat­ing move­ment that divides and sequen­tial­izes, like metronomes, mechan­i­cal clocks, or the machines in a fac­tory. As a result of this rep­e­ti­tion, space and/​or time are trans­formed into a series of equal pieces. Since such arti­fi­cially reg­u­lar inter­vals can only be pro­duced by mechan­i­cal devices, Lefeb­vre iden­ti­fies meter with tech­nol­ogy.