Anne Danielsen dis­cov­ers that “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” only knows an instance of “false” syn­co­pa­tion. But the fact that this inter­ven­tion is not capa­ble of break­ing the pat­tern does not make it flawed . On the con­trary, I believe that the aim of James Brown’s inter­rup­tions is exactly the pro­lon­ga­tion and height­en­ing of such moments of sus­pense. In the decade fol­low­ing “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”, the artist refined this strat­egy to per­fec­tion. At his peak, Brown’s rhyth­mi­cal skills were com­pa­ra­ble to those of a cow­boy that punches out the pro­file of his tar­get with­out actu­ally hit­ting it. On songs like “Cold Sweat”, “The Pay­back”, and “Super Bad”, down­beat in antic­i­pa­tion is no longer a devi­a­tion from a rhyth­mi­cal pat­tern, it has become the song’s foundation.

”Viewed this way, the down­beat in antic­i­pa­tion is some­thing more than a local phe­nom­e­non tied to par­tic­u­lar posi­tions in the fab­ric of rhythm. It is rather a way of phras­ing that even­tu­ally comes to char­ac­ter­ize fig­ures of rhythm in gen­eral and then spreads to whole lay­ers of rhythm.” (Danielsen 75)

Anne Danielsen cor­rectly shows that “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” just hints at this strat­egy and, in a sense, only antic­i­pates the down­beat in antic­i­pa­tion. Still, it is a mis­take to dis­miss this par­tic­u­lar song as an imma­ture pre­cur­sor to Brown’s later work. Even though the song’s inter­ven­tion is only minis­cule, it is nonethe­less a sig­nif­i­cant and nec­es­sary step towards more com­plex forms of syncopation.

The down­beat in antic­i­pa­tion is simul­ta­ne­ously a pre­cur­sor, a com­bi­na­tion, and a dis­tor­tion of Wilson’s two modes of syn­co­pa­tion. None of these three acts of dis­place­ment, how­ever, is causally con­nected to the down­beat itself. It would there­fore be a mis­take to assume an imme­di­ate con­nec­tion between syn­co­pa­tion and down­beat, let alone con­flate them. There is noth­ing what­so­ever that makes a down­beat inher­ently syn­co­pated. A beat that con­stantly stresses the one and three sounds equally mechanic as one that stays on the two and four. Syn­co­pa­tion is irre­ducible to the down­beat or any other rhyth­mic pat­tern; it coin­cides with an act of dis­place­ment. This shift can only be defined as a (tem­po­rary) break with a par­tic­u­lar struc­ture, even if – as is the case with com­plex syn­co­pa­tion and the down­beat in antic­i­pa­tion – the dis­place­ment itself is, or becomes, part of another pattern.

Olly Wil­son and Anne Danielsen’s analy­ses of James Brown’s inter­ven­tions pro­vide a dif­fer­ent angle to the ques­tion that rhyth­m­analy­sis could not solve: What dis­tin­guishes rhythm from meter? While the musi­col­o­gists agree with the philoso­pher that rhythm is rela­tional and there­fore a mul­ti­plic­ity, their con­cept of polyrhythm is very dif­fer­ent from Henry Lefebvre’s. Polyrhyth­mia is not the result of har­mony and syn­chronic­ity between dif­fer­ent ele­ments. On the con­trary, close analy­sis of Brown’s music reveals that polyrhythm is the effect of mul­ti­ple, spe­cific acts of dis­place­ment. Arrhyth­mia, not eurhyth­mia, con­sti­tutes polyrhythmia.

“In arrhyth­mia, rhythms break apart, alter and bypass syn­chro­niza­tion (the usual term for des­ig­nat­ing this phe­nom­e­non). A patho­log­i­cal sit­u­a­tion agreed! – depending on the case; inter­ven­tions are made, or should be make, through rhythms, with­out brutality.”

Whereas Henry Lefebvre’s descrip­tion of arrhyth­mia is cor­rect, his diag­no­sis and treat­ment could not be more wrong. It is actu­ally eurhyth­mia with­out arrhyth­mia that leads to a patho­log­i­cal state. Olly Wil­son ver­bal­izes an insight that James Brown – and for this very rea­son, he really was the hard­est work­ing man in show busi­ness – per­formed through­out his career: occa­sional, bru­tal, unex­pected inter­ven­tions are nec­es­sary to either keep a rhythm going or to start a new one. Arrhyth­mia is not antirhyth­mia; it is nei­ther the enemy of rhythm, nor is it an acci­den­tal state of excep­tion. Syn­co­pa­tion, and other kinds of dis­rup­tions, are a nec­es­sary con­di­tion for the emer­gence and con­tin­u­a­tion of rhythm. Again, it is an irre­ducible act of dis­place­ment that dis­tin­guishes meter from rhythm. Rhythm can only be con­sti­tuted through inter­rup­tion. Arrhyth­mia is not rhythm’s anti­dote, it is its antipode. You can­not walk on one foot, let alone dance.

Feet Don’t Fail Me Now

“Get On the Good Foot.” This deceiv­ingly sim­ple phrase that Brown often shouts when he actu­ally makes a shift – and, of course, the title of one of his biggest hits – cap­tures the dif­fer­ence between rhythm and meter per­fectly. For one, these five words mark the unpre­dictabil­ity of the inter­rup­tion. It is impos­si­ble to know in advance, which of your two feet is the good one. It all depends on the moment in which the phrase is heard. As opposed to meter, rhythm is time-​critical.

More­over, “Get On the Good Foot” implies that the sub­ject of rhythm is dynamic rather than sta­tic. In fact, even the nature of his or her activ­ity itself is already pre­sumed in the phrase. James Brown expects, bet­ter yet, demands that his audi­ence is danc­ing… just like the per­former him­self. In most other pedal activ­i­ties – walk­ing, bik­ing, run­ning, or march­ing — there is no good foot, only another. Both feet are equal and the shift from the left to the right one is com­pletely irrel­e­vant. In danc­ing, on the other hand, the choice between the left and the right foot is highly sig­nif­i­cant, even though it can­not be deter­mined in advance.

The com­bi­na­tion of rhythm and dance seems so obvi­ous that I almost feel embar­rassed to men­tion it. Nonethe­less, it is nec­es­sary to repeat this cliche because James Brown’s inter­ven­tions have changed both rhythm and danc­ing beyond recog­ni­tion. In fact, they changed them to such an extend that it is almost impos­si­ble to recall how these notions were under­stood before. Like rhythm, danc­ing is now jux­ta­posed to meter, to reg­u­lar­ity and pre­dictabil­ity. It is at odds with pre­de­fined moves, steps, ges­tures, and patterns.

In Thus Spoke Zarathus­tra(1880), Friedrich Niet­zsche’s already seems to antic­i­pate this trans­for­ma­tion, but dis­places it to the dis­tant past rather than the near future. Zarathus­tra, his proto-​philosopher, intro­duces the dis­tinc­tion between danc­ing and meter as follows:

”Ask my foot if it likes their melodies of praise and entice­ment!
Truly, to such a mea­sure and tick-​tock beat it likes nei­ther to dance nor to stand still.” (Niet­zsche 188 – 189)

A sim­pler or bet­ter def­i­n­i­tion of rhythm prob­a­bly does not exist: it is some­thing that you have to dance to. The kind of danc­ing that both Zarathus­tra and James Brown refer to is nei­ther bal­let nor ball­room. Their dance has no chore­og­ra­phy. The dancer is, lit­er­ally, slave to the rhythm. Feet fol­low beat, not the other way around. Rhythm itself, how­ever, is not self-​sufficient either. The groove is not a “per­petuum mobile.” It can­not exist with­out unex­pected inter­rup­tions. The dancer, in turn, can there­fore never fully rely on the rhythm. It is the appar­ent reg­u­lar­ity of the pat­terns that is most deceiving.

Apart from the impor­tance of tim­ing and unpre­dictable breaks, “Get on the Good Foot empha­sizes that a third ele­ment is nec­es­sary to con­sti­tute a rhythm: dis­place­ment itself. While you might not know whether it is the left or the right foot, you can count on the fact that it will be the other. The good foot will always be the one that you are not cur­rently stand­ing on. It is the moment of the change, not the choice of feet that is inher­ently unpre­dictable. Shifts between the left and the right foot, the up– and down­beat, change and return, and every other think­able oppo­si­tion can and will become ‘old bag’ pretty fast.

“It is well known that rhythm is not meter or cadence, even irreg­u­lar meter or cadence: there is noth­ing less rhyth­mic than a mil­i­tary march. The tom-​tom is not 1 – 2, the waltz is not 1,2,3, music is not binary or ternary, but rather forty-​seven basic meter as in Turk­ish music.” (Deleuze/​Guattari 313)

In “Of the Refrain” (1980), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guat­tari crit­i­cize – almost ridicule – Henri Lefrebvre’s rhyth­m­analy­sis and its tri­adic schema. While they agree with Lefeb­vre that two ele­ments are not enough to dis­tin­guish rhythm from meter, nei­ther is three, nor in fact forty-​seven. Accord­ing to Deleuze and Guat­tari, rhythm is always in excess. Reg­u­lar and even irreg­u­lar oscil­la­tion between a fixed set of ele­ments can­not con­sti­tute a rhythm, not to men­tion a rev­o­lu­tion­ary one. At least one extra ele­ment is always needed: an irre­ducible act of displacement.