Lefeb­vre uses rhythm to gain access to the par­tic­u­lar­i­ties of space, time, and every­day life, but ends up los­ing the par­tic­u­lar­i­ties of rhythm itself. Rhythm becomes every­thing and every­thing becomes rhythm. Iron­i­cally, the sci­ence that is ded­i­cated to rhythm can­not dis­tin­guish meter from rhythm, and a rhythm from rhythm. In the end, there is not much of a dif­fer­ence between Henri Lefeb­vre and Rickey Vin­cent. Both the philoso­pher and the music critic trans­form rhythm into a cos­mic uni­fier, and thereby deprive it from the ele­ment that gives it its crit­i­cal poten­tial: syn­co­pa­tion or, more pre­cisely, the act of displacement.

Get Up for the Down Stroke

In order to fur­ther clar­ify the sig­nif­i­cance of syn­co­pa­tion to rhythm, I need to shift from Henri Lefebvre’s abstract rhyth­m­analy­sis back to James Brown’s con­crete rhythm pro­duc­tion. Next to down­beat and the One, syn­co­pa­tion is a third inno­va­tion that “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” is often cred­ited for. The song is known to mark the begin­ning of more, and more com­plex, off­beat– and polyrhythms in James Brown’s songs and in pop­u­lar music altogether.

In an ear­lier essays, “The sig­nif­i­cance of the rela­tion between Afro-​American Music and West African Music” (1974), Olly Wil­son argues that West-​African polyrhythms are actu­ally com­plex forms of syn­co­pa­tion. Fol­low­ing Don Knowl­ton (1926), Aaron Cop­land (1927), and Winthrop Sargeant (1938) – Wilson dis­tin­guishes pri­mary rag (or sim­ple syn­co­pa­tion) and sec­ondary rag (or com­plex syn­co­pa­tion). Whereas both of these modes of syn­co­pa­tion emerge from an act of dis­place­ment, they dif­fer in range and com­plex­ity. Pri­mary rag is a momen­tary inter­rup­tion of a par­tic­u­lar rhyth­mic pat­tern, for instance by inci­den­tally stress­ing the one and three instead of the two and four. Sec­ondary rag, on the other hand, emerges from the con­trast between many rhyth­mic pat­terns. These pat­terns, how­ever, can only be rec­og­nized as dif­fer­ent because they are dis­placed in rela­tion to each other. Wil­son there­fore con­cludes that com­plex syn­co­pa­tion is in fact a syn­onym for polyrhythmia:

“The appli­ca­tion of newer ana­lyt­i­cal pro­ce­dures to this ques­tion sug­gests that the dis­tinc­tion between syn­co­pa­tion and polyrhythm is a func­tion of the rhyth­mic hier­ar­chic level upon which the dis­place­ment occurs. Hence, if the fore­ground rhythm (i.e., basic met­ri­cal pulse) is not dis­placed or is dis­placed only momen­tar­ily, the result will be syn­co­pa­tion […] but if the fore­ground rhythm is dis­placed […] or a lesser rhyth­mic level is dis­placed over a long time span, the effect of polyrhythm will occur.” (Wil­son 1974: 9)

The dis­tinc­tion between sim­ple and polyrhyth­mic syn­co­pa­tion also helps to fur­ther define and clar­ify James Brown’s inter­ven­tions. Through an analy­sis of “Super Bad” (1970), Wil­son shows that what is com­monly referred to as down­beat in songs like “Super Bad”, is actu­ally an exam­ple of polyrhyth­mic syn­co­pa­tion. Rather than empha­siz­ing the one and three on all instru­ments, the stress is in fact only shifted for a few of them. The rest of the band remains on the two and four, or vice versa. Brown’s down­beat, there­fore, has to be under­stood as a rel­a­tive ges­ture rather than a fixed structure.

Olly Wilson’s account of the ori­gin of down­beat con­firms the gen­eral con­cept of rev­o­lu­tion that I have devel­oped in the begin­ning of this essay. James Brown’s inno­va­tion did not entail a rad­i­cal, struc­tural trans­for­ma­tion, but actu­ally started with a small, barely per­cep­ti­ble shift. The musicologist’s con­cept of polyrhyth­mic syn­co­pa­tion explains why those look­ing for big changes in “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” end up dis­ap­pointed. The loud bangs and flashes of light­ning sim­ply do not occur. Only a micro­scopic analy­sis is capa­ble of reveal­ing the minis­cule but major dis­place­ments that occur in this song.

Anne Danielsen does exactly that. She steps five years fur­ther back in time in an attempt to locate Wilson’s polyrhyth­mic syn­co­pa­tion in its com­monly assumed ori­gin: “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” As to be expected by now, Danielsen once again con­cludes that this fabled rev­o­lu­tion pri­mar­ily takes place in sto­ries and anec­dotes rather than in the song itself. She shows that “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” is not a heav­ily syn­co­pated – let alone polyrhyth­mic – song at all. As opposed to the leg­end of the down­beat, how­ever, the musi­col­o­gist can­not fully ban­ish this nar­ra­tive to the realm of fic­tion. A tiny and ambigu­ous exam­ple of syn­co­pa­tion man­ages to resist her scrutiny:

”The only ele­ment that pulls in the direc­tion of a pulse level above eights is the “under­sized” phras­ing in horns and gui­tar men­tioned above: the down­beat in antic­i­pa­tion” (Danielsen 75)

On “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”, the “short toot” of the horns on the fourth beat are much shorter than expected, whereas the guitar’s “snappy phras­ing” on the sec­ond beat is equally odd. The under­stated horns and gui­tar sug­gest to make space for a heavy beat on the one… they seem to antic­i­pate a down­beat. These raised expec­ta­tions, how­ever, are not met. Clo­sure is sus­pended. On “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”, the stress never lies on the first beat of the mea­sure. Anne Danielsen there­fore refers to this effect as down­beat in antic­i­pa­tion.

The down­beat in antic­i­pa­tion should not be con­fused with a ‘nor­mal’ down­beat. If any­thing, the rhyth­mic pat­tern of “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” is a dis­torted back­beat, but that qual­i­fi­ca­tion does not do jus­tice to its com­plex­ity either. Rhyth­mi­cally, the song is marked by ambi­gu­ity. On the one hand, the short phras­ing of the horns and gui­tar empha­size the absence of a down­beat. On the other hand, this act of nega­tion actu­ally brings the one and three to the fore.

The phrase “down­beat in antic­i­pa­tion” refers to this ambigu­ous ges­ture, rather than the par­tic­u­lar pat­tern that pro­duces it. It is an aes­thetic strat­egy that is not lim­ited to “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” or the music of James Brown. Down­beat in antic­i­pa­tion has to be under­stood a com­plex, dis­cur­sive oper­a­tion, a play with expec­ta­tions irre­ducible to down­beat, back­beat, or any other rhyth­mic pattern:

”Put sim­ply, the rhythm as a whole points to one loca­tion of the main basic pulse, while a cer­tain part of the groove, the down­beat in antic­i­pa­tion, denies it. The groove as a whole refers the pulse to the beats, while the down­beat in antic­i­pa­tion hides them: what is antic­i­pated never arrives; there is no orderly, unam­bigu­ous down­beat. The accu­rate beat is thereby sus­pended, because one has already passed the beat that was expected to come. The down­beat in antic­i­pa­tion is, in other words, not equal to a real down­beat that is played to early. The antic­i­pa­tion is played too late to form a syn­co­pa­tion – as such it never com­pletes its own move­ment. The clos­ing, which is as sig­nif­i­cant for its shap­ing as the begin­ning, never occurs: the antic­i­pa­tion never ends on an alter­na­tive strong beat. It only over­shad­ows the beat that is sup­posed to be there – or, alter­na­tively, it stretches the beat out in time.” (Danielsen 85)

Strictly speak­ing, “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” is not syn­co­pated because the horns and gui­tar do not actu­ally break with the main rhyth­mic pat­tern. The back­beat is never bro­ken and only tem­porar­ily dis­placed. The trick that James Brown repeat­edly pulls off in this and later songs is actu­ally fairly sim­ple. The horns and gui­tar are played twice as fast as the rest of the instru­ments. Whereas the lat­ter play half notes, the for­mer play quar­ters. Dif­fer­ently put, to the lis­tener the song as a whole sounds slower than its actu­ally played. As a result, some of the notes that may sound odd are not really syn­co­pated (in the sense of pri­mary rag.) This per­ceived syn­co­pa­tion is actu­ally the result of the dif­fer­ence in tempo between the dif­fer­ent instru­ments, rather than a dis­place­ment within the main rhyth­mi­cal pat­tern. In other words, in the case of down­beat in antic­i­pa­tion the sim­ple syn­co­pa­tion that the lis­tener expe­ri­ences is actu­ally an effect of polyrhyth­mic syn­co­pa­tion. Con­se­quently, not each instance of sec­ondary rag is an exam­ple of pri­mary rag, and not every polyrhythm relies on down­beat in antic­i­pa­tion. These are three dif­fer­ent rhyth­mi­cal ges­tures that nonethe­less share their most impor­tant qual­ity: they rely on an act of displacement.