Rhythm is rev­o­lu­tion­ary because it is in excess. This may sound nice in the­ory, but how does it sound in prac­tice? These leads to the same kind of ques­tions that I started this essay with. What does excess sound like? What kind of noise do rev­o­lu­tions make? The answer to these ques­tions is now sim­ple: none. Still, rev­o­lu­tions do occur in music. In fact, look no fur­ther than “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”. It is not the down­beat that makes the music of James Brown sound syn­co­pated. Even the down­beat in antic­i­pa­tion became a cheap trick after a while. No rev­o­lu­tion can ever be explained from a pat­tern; no mat­ter how com­plex that pat­tern might be. There is no rhythm with­out an unex­pected shift.

”We always come back to this ‘moment’: the becoming-​expressive of rhythm, the emer­gence of expres­sive proper qual­i­ties, the for­ma­tion of mat­ters of expres­sion that develop into motifs and coun­ter­points. We there­fore need a notion, even an appar­ently neg­a­tive one, that can grasp this fic­tional or raw moment.” (Deleuze/​Guattari 322)

In my opin­ion, James Brown’ the One refers to the same ‘moment’ that Deleuze and Guat­tari describe in this quote: the becoming-​expressive of rhythm. As Rickey Vin­cent argued, the One can­not be reduced to the first beat of a mea­sure, even though this might be its points of depar­ture. His answer – cos­mic uni­fier – how­ever, is not the only imag­in­able sur­plus value. In spite of its name, the One actu­ally a twofold oper­a­tion. James Brown’s shifts (1) pro­duce and reveal a het­ero­gene­ity of rhyth­mic pat­terns and then (2) com­bine those dif­fer­ent strands into a polyrhythm. In other words, the One plu­ral­izes before it unifies.

Even more impor­tant than the pro­duc­tion of a plane of het­ero­gene­ity, is the fact that not all rhyth­mic inter­ven­tions are the same. Dif­fer­ent shifts con­struct dif­fer­ent sound­scapes. The plu­ral­ity of these cuts, how­ever, can­not be exclu­sively explained from the pat­tern itself. From the per­spec­tive of the pat­tern, they always seems to be the same. This moment can only be defined neg­a­tively: as a break, cut, dif­fer­ence. Wilson’s and Danielsen’s close analy­sis of James Brown’s inter­ven­tions, how­ever, has revealed that these cre­ative acts come in many shapes and form. Rather than solid­i­fy­ing one par­tic­u­lar oper­a­tion into the essence of James Brown’s music, I argue that it is exactly the ongo­ing chain of dis­place­ments that marks its rev­o­lu­tion­ary aspect. Down­beat, syn­co­pa­tion, and even down­beat in antic­i­pa­tion are not goals in them­selves but dif­fer­ent tac­tics that serve – in this par­tic­u­lar case – the same pur­pose: to lib­er­ate rhythm.

Through repet­i­tive and strate­gic inter­rup­tions, James Brown released rhythm from its sec­ondary and instru­men­tal role to melody and har­mony. The fact, how­ever, that rhythm now occurs in between – notes, instru­ments, pat­terns – does not mean that it does not exist. Danielsen bor­rows a term from Gilles Deleuze to describe the onto­log­i­cal sta­tus of rhythm: it is virtual.

”Even though the struc­tures of ref­er­ence at play in a rhythm are not actual sound, they should not be regarded as some­thing abstract or exter­nal to the music. Rhythm hap­pens, so to speak, in the midst of actual sound and non-​sounding vir­tual struc­tures of ref­er­ence (which, more­over, might have to do with the per­cep­tual processes gen­er­ated in the lis­tener), and the sound­ing event may play both with and against the vir­tual struc­ture.” (Danielsen 47)

I agree with Danielsen that the fact that rhythm occurs in-​between does not make it unreal but vir­tual. Still, I believe that Danielsen over­looks the fact that rhythm is not only vir­tual, but also the other way around. In other words, Deleuze’s ‘vir­tual’ does not pri­mar­ily con­sists of struc­tures and rela­tions but of sus­pended inter­rup­tions. The so-​called “vir­tual struc­tures of ref­er­ence” are merely an effect of these unex­pected shifts, or as Danielsen calls the, “sound­ing events”. Such irre­ducible acts of dis­con­ti­nu­ity, how­ever, do only not occur in music and sound. Every tem­po­ral process can be sus­pended. As long as there is time, there is rhythm (and vice versa).

James Brown’s shifts not only eman­ci­pated rhythm from melody and har­mony, but also released it from its con­fine­ment to the aural. In his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, the artist recalls the record­ing ses­sions of “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag” and says:

”I had dis­cov­ered that my strength was not in the horns, it was in the rhythm. I was hear­ing every­thing, even the gui­tars, like they were drums. I had found out how to make it hap­pen. On play­backs, when I saw the speak­ers jump­ing, vibrat­ing a cer­tain way, I knew that was it: deliv­er­ance. I could tell from look­ing at the speak­ers that the rhythm was right.” (Brown and Tucker, 159)

It is strik­ing that James Brown recalls his dis­cov­ery as a visual expe­ri­ence. Obvi­ously, he does not imply that rhythm belongs to sight rather than sound. Brown points out that there is a plu­ral­ity of senses involved in rhythm. Rhythm is nei­ther sonic, visual, olfac­tory, nor hap­tic. It takes place in-​between the senses, in a realm of its own. Nonethe­less, Brown needed an acci­den­tal shift him­self in order to dis­cover the One. His own words sug­gest that this change from sight to sound was unin­ten­tional. The artist never planned the inter­ven­tion that became syn­ony­mous with his name. It was not James Brown that per­formed an irre­ducible act of dis­con­ti­nu­ity, the One pro­duced him. He is lit­er­ally a sub­ject of rhythm, or – as Deleuze and Guat­tari call it in ‘On the Refrain’ – a rhyth­mi­cal per­sona .

Rhyth­mic Slip

“Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag” is not a rev­o­lu­tion because it made any cos­mic alter­ations. On the con­trary, it sim­ply per­formed a minus­cule shift. A change that can­not be seen, touched, smelled, or heard but is real nonethe­less. Iron­i­cally, I believe that music his­tory made a tiny slip of its own while deter­min­ing James Brown’s place. In their attempt to make sense of the artist’s words, both crit­ics and musi­col­o­gists com­monly assumed that the stress lies as follows:

“I changed from the upbeat to the down­beat. Sim­ple as that really.”

Obvi­ously, the empha­sis dis­ap­pears in the shift from speech to writ­ing, and the artist’s true inten­tions will remain unknown. Nev­er­the­less, I would like to point out that the mean­ing of the quote changes com­pletely if the stress slightly changes:

“I changed from the upbeat to the down­beat. Sim­ple as that really.”

Maybe James Brown did not want to empha­size the upbeat and down­beat but the change and its sim­plic­ity. In that case, one might argue that the fol­low­ing state­ment would have sufficed:

“I changed. Sim­ple as that really.”

Still, that would not be quite the same, since the speci­ficity of the shift is lost in the process of reduc­tion. There is a fine line between sim­pli­fi­ca­tion and over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion. James Brown con­stantly tried to stay on the right side of that bor­der. As I have tried to show in this arti­cle, no shift is alike and there is noth­ing more com­plex than sim­ple change. The One is a com­plex, dis­cur­sive oper­a­tion marked by an inher­ent ambi­gu­ity: it eman­ci­pates rhythm by dis­rupt­ing it. Para­dox­i­cally, arrhyth­mia not only dis­rupts a beat, it starts and/​or sus­tains it as well. This ambi­gu­ity is really easy to rec­og­nize in Brown’s music. The ele­ments that guar­an­tee the con­tin­u­a­tion of the groove are pre­cisely those that inter­rupt it.