The One: James Brown’s sim­ple change is actu­ally a com­plex pro­ce­dure that con­sists of a series of rep­e­ti­tions. Each of these oper­a­tions is aimed at reduc­tion. Its result is rhythm stripped down to its bare min­i­mum, and this core turns out to be arhyth­mic. Through this pro­ce­dure, the artist trans­formed rhythm from a sta­ble foun­da­tion to a self-​destructive one. Still, it remains a foun­da­tion nonethe­less. The One grounds a rhythm. To per­form this oper­a­tion, how­ever, knowl­edge of music is not enough. Again, the One is a dis­cur­sive rather than a musi­cal act. It is an oper­a­tion that is irre­ducible to a deter­minable pos­i­tive con­tent: the inter­ven­tion coin­cides with its meaning.

Even though the terms “essence” and “com­mon core African­ness” may sug­gest the exact oppo­site, Olly Wil­son makes the same argu­ment in the fol­low­ing quote:

”There­fore, the par­tic­u­lar forms of black music which evolved in Amer­ica are spe­cific real­iza­tions of this shared con­cep­tual frame­work which reflect the pecu­liar­i­ties of the Amer­i­can black expe­ri­ence. As such, the essence of their African­ness is not a sta­tic body of some­thing which can be depleted but rather a con­cep­tual approach, the man­i­fes­ta­tions of which are infi­nite. The com­mon core of this African­ness con­sists of the way of doing some­thing, not sim­ply some­thing that is done.” (Wil­son 1974: 20)

James Brown’s inno­va­tions are his inter­ven­tions, and it is in this sense that the artist fits in the tra­di­tion of African music. Colo­nial­ism made sure that this his­tory can­not be marked by con­ti­nu­ity. African music, how­ever, devel­oped an alter­na­tive to an unin­ter­rupted story. Its his­tory con­sists of the cuts that it per­forms. Para­dox­i­cally, James Brown (and many others)could only belong to this lin­eage by break­ing with it… but only until his inno­va­tions were re-​appropriated by tra­di­tion. The fact that it is dif­fi­cult to hear his rev­o­lu­tion now, is not a flaw of the music. It is an inevitabil­ity. The groove can only be dis­rupted for a moment. Rev­o­lu­tions are not per­ma­nent breaks, but are sus­pended inter­rup­tions in a cycli­cal motion.

On the con­cep­tual side, the same prob­lem keeps repeat­ing itself in dif­fer­ent forms. In order to define a rev­o­lu­tion, cycli­cal­ity, rhythm, or syn­co­pa­tion, an irre­ducible act of dis­con­ti­nu­ity is indis­pens­able. On the ana­lyt­i­cal side, a sim­i­lar series of dis­place­ments occurs: down­beat, the one, syn­co­pa­tion, down­beat in antic­i­pa­tion. None of these notions as such could explain why “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” was a rev­o­lu­tion. I could go on for­ever, never reach a def­i­nite answer, but always end up with the same conclusion.

Nonethe­less, it is wrong to assume that the recur­ring answer is: an irre­ducible act of dis­con­ti­nu­ity. It would be a mis­take to believe that I kept stum­bling upon the exact same inter­ven­tion over and over again. On the con­trary, in order to be really irre­ducible every oper­a­tion must be unique. In other words, analy­sis should not be sat­is­fied with repeat­ing the same, sim­ple answer: an an irre­ducible act of dis­con­ti­nu­ity, an event. It has to show how each of these oper­a­tions is con­sti­tuted. I there­fore pro­pose to dis­tort the tem­po­ral­ity. A rev­o­lu­tion has no past and future, it pro­duces a past and future. Rather than end­ing with the irre­ducibil­ity of the act, it is nec­es­sary to start from the inter­ven­tion itself. “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” is an excel­lent exam­ple of such a minis­cule and major shift: a rhyth­mic slip.