James Brown: Apprehending a MinorTemporality

John ScannellBA (Hons)

University of New South Wales

A thesis submitted in fulfilmentof the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Media, Film and Theatre University of New South Wales

July 2006

i

ABSTRACT

This thesis is concerned with popular music's working of time. It takes the experience

of time as crucial to the negotiation of social, political or, more simply, existential,

conditions. The key example analysed is the funk style “invented” by legendary

musician James Brown. I argue that James Brown's funk might be understood as an

“apprehension of a minor temporality” or the musical expression of a particular form

of negotiation of time by a “minor” culture. Precursors to this idea are found in the

literature of the “stream of consciousness” style and, more significantly for this thesis,

in the work of philosopher Gilles Deleuze on the cinema in his books Cinema 1: The

Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. These examples are all concerned

with the indeterminate unfolding of lived time and where the reality of temporal

indeterminacy will take precedence over the more linear conventions of traditional

narrative. Deleuze’s Cinema books account for such a shift in emphasis from the

narrative depiction of movement through time (the “movement-image”) to a more

direct experience of the temporal (the “time-image”), and I will trace a similar shift in

the history of popular music. For Deleuze, the change in the relation of images to time

is catalysed by the intolerable events of World War II. In this thesis, the evolution of

funk will be seen to reflect the existential change experienced by a generation of

African-Americans in the wake of the civil-rights movement. The funk groove

associated with the music of James Brown is discussed as an aesthetic strategy that

responds to the existential conditions that grew out of the often perceived "failure" of

the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Funk provided an aesthetic strategy that

allowed for the constitution of a “minor temporality”, involving a series of temporal

negotiations that eschew more hegemonic, “common sense”, compositions of time

and space. This has implications for the understanding of much of the popular music

that has followed funk. I argue that the understanding of the emergence of funk, and

of the contemporary electronic dance music styles which followed, would be

enhanced by taking this ontological consideration of the experiential time of

“minorities” into account. I will argue that funk and the electronic dance musics that

followed might be seen as articulations of minority expression, where the time-image

style of their musical compositions reflect the “post-soul” eschewing of a narratively

driven, “common sense” view of historical time.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

An early version of chapter 5 is published in issue 26 (Spring) of the journal Context

(2003) as entitled “James Brown: The ‘Illogic’ of Innovation”.

Financial assistance for the writing of this thesis came in the form of an Australian

Postgraduate Award, and I would like to thank the Department of Media, Film and

Theatre at UNSW for their continued support of my project, including the research

grants which assisted my attendance at a number of conferences. The department also

graciously provided me with study space and computer facilities at various stages of

my candidature. Special thanks to the administrative staff Julie Miller and Jennifer

Beale. The Department of Media, Film and Theatre is blessed with some of the most

devoted academic staff imaginable and all of whom continue to contribute to the

collegial atmosphere that made the completion of this task more pleasurable than it

would have otherwise been. The opportunity to teach in the department has also

contributed significantly to my own learning, and so to the work in this thesis. I would

also like to thank members of the Australia-New Zealand branch of the International

Association for the Study of Popular Music has been a remarkable source of

encouragement and friendship over the period of my candidature.

There are so many people that I would have to thank by name, Gay Hawkins, Charles

Mudede, Alison Huber, Fred Wesley, Denis Crowdy and indeed all of the staff at the

Centre for Contemporary Music Studies, Tigger Wise – and anyone that in my haste I

have forgotten – all of whom have provided me at some stage with vital information

and/or excellent advice and have contributed to the thesis in their own way.

Of course an extra special thanks needs to be extended to my supervisor, Andrew

Murphie, whose assistance continues to extend beyond the call of duty. His countless

hours of support and guidance not only in regard to this thesis, but many other extra-

curricular matters, have been invaluable. Andrew’s reputation precedes him anyway,

but I will continue to sing his praises forever. Finally I want to thank my parents, Joan

and John Scannell, they know what they had to put up with over the years. I dedicate

this work to them with all my love.

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Table of contents

Page Number

ABSTRACT i

Acknowledgements ii

Table of Contents iii

INTRODUCTION/PREFACE 1

1. The Apprehension of a Minor Temporality 13

The One 13

Duration, Art and Thought 16

Soul and Post-Soul Aesthetics 19

The Intolerable 19

Restoring Belief In The World 22

James Brown as Political Figure 25

Deleuze and Guattari’s “Minor” 28

“Minor” Literature, “Minor” Music 31

The Literature on James Brown 33

Musicology and Essentialism 36

2. Creating Rhythms in an Any-space-whatever 42

The Black Atlantic 42

Augé’s non-place and Deleuze’s any-space-whatever 47

Recollection, Virtuality and the Post-Soul Aesthetic 51

An Aesthetic Expression of “Blackness”

- Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song 53

The Body 57

Ethology – Brown as Linking Different Minority Becomings 58

Histories Major and Minor 61

Post-Soul Recollection 64

Creative Responses to Intolerable Circumstances 68

Deleuze and Popular Music 72

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3. The Rapture and the Rupture 79

Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture –

Please Please Please 79

Difference and Repetition 85

The Gospel Years 90

Baraka’s Changing Same 94

4. The “I” Becomes “We” - Contextualising the Soul Aesthetic 98

The “I” Becomes “We” 100

Brown and Africa 105

Perspectives on Time - Aion/Chronos 107

The Irrational Cut 111

The Splitting of Time 114

Minimalism 116

Affect 122

5. Soul as Movement-Image 129

Soul as Movement-Image 132

The T.A.M.I show 134

Countering the British Invasion 137

Appropriation or Becoming? 139

What Can a Body Do? 143

Overcoming the Limits of Representation 146

The Foundations of Funk 152

Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag 154

Funk’s “Industrial” Elements 161

An Expedient Production of Territory 165

Don’t Do No Soloing Just Keep What You Got 169

v

6. Funk as Thought without Image 175

Brown’s Departure 176

The Idiot 179

Brown as “Seer” 188

Musical Thought Without Image 195

7. From Cold Sweat to No Sweat 200

The Decline of Soul’s “Action-Image” 201

The Post-Soul any-space-whatever 205

Tougher Grooves for Tougher Times 209

The Proxy Politician 214

“Give It Up or Turnit a Loose” 216

The Breaks 221

From Sequence to Series 225

The Crystalline 228

The “Seers” of the Turntable 231

The Medium of a New Duration 235

Irrational Cuts and Existential Statements 239

From Cold Sweat to No Sweat 241

Brown’s Crystalline Refrains 244

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8. When He Returns 248

Accounting for Brown’s Return 251

The Simulacrum 254

Powers of the False 258

Representation and Appearance 260

Becoming Rather Than Stories 264

Sampling and the Subversion of Representation 266

Post-Human Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music 269

James Brown as Cliché 271

Capital M Memory 274

BIBLIOGRAPHY 277

1

INTRODUCTION

This thesis gives a much more complete account than has been given before of the

importance of James Brown’s musical innovations. In doing so, it develops a concept

of importance to the junction of popular music and social theory. The concept

proposed is the “apprehension of a minor temporality”, or the way in which certain

forms of expression, and in the case of this thesis, the music of James Brown, might

catalyse the experience of minorities and allow them to move into the future

differently.

Known also as Soul Brother No.1, The Godfather of Soul, The Minister of the New

New Super Heavy Funk and The Original Disco Man,1 James Brown was born in the

midst of the Depression into the heavily segregated, Deep South of Barnwell, South

Carolina in 1933.2 Given the adverse circumstances from which he would make his

spectacular ascent, Brown’s life may well be construed as an exemplary protraction of

that observation made by the philosophers, Deleuze and Guattari, that out of chaos,

milieus and rhythms are born.3 In addition, they write: “[f]orces of chaos, terrestrial

forces, cosmic forces: all of these confront each other and converge in the territorial

refrain”.4 There have been few territorial refrains that have converged on the world

with the impact of Brown’s trademark downbeat of “the one” - that rhythmic lynchpin

of funk, and the rhythmic foundation of much dance music to the present day.

For fifty years, Brown’s jubilant rhythms have forged all manner of musical

syntheses, not least are those that have emerged from decades of DJing and digital

1 The most creative reference to Brown’s monikers might be found in the Grammy winning four CDbox set Star Time (1991). Each CD is titled after the title afforded, or promoted by Brown himself, forthat respective period - Mr. Dynamite (mid 1950s-early 1960s), The Hardest Working Man inShowbusiness (mid 1960s), Soul Brother No. 1 (late 1960s – early 1970s) and The Godfather of Soul(early 1970s – early 1980s) (Brown 1991c). All of these titles are discussed in more detail by Brownhimself in his 1986 biography, written with Bruce Tucker, James Brown, The Godfather of Soul(Brown& Tucker 1986)2 For the record, James Brown was not born in 1928. The derivation of this incorrect attribution of a1928 date of birth for James Brown is discussed in detail by Geoff Brown in his biography, JamesBrown: Doin’ It To Death, (Geoff Brown 1996: 26-27). In short, a UK journalist uncovered the recordsof a different James Brown (who also happened to be a singer), who was born in Pulaski Tennessee,rather than Barnwell, North Carolina. Once published however, these details have continued to bereiterated by subsequent Brown biographers. Lazy journalism prevails, as does the 1928 birth date.3 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 313)4 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 312)

2

sampling and have contributed to the widely held belief that Brown is ‘…the most

sampled African-American recording artist in the history of recorded entertainment’.5

Whilst the actual number of samples ceded to James Brown is perhaps impossible to

accurately measure, at the turn of the 1990s, it was a number already estimated to be

at least in the thousands6 and in the meantime is more likely to have approached the

tens of thousands.7

Such observations are testimony to the fact that Brown’s musical pulse continues to

resound through contemporary musical aesthetics. This is a legacy so readily

mandated that it moved DJ Shadow to write in the liner notes of his 1996 album

Endtroducing: 8 “All Respect Due to James Brown and his countless disciples for

inventing modern music”.9 Whilst a heartfelt, and perhaps overly generalised tribute,

Shadow’s comments reflect a common assessment of Brown’s musical legacy:

“Whatever anyone says about Brown, however, he has exerted the greatest influence

on modern dance music”.10

Whilst the extent of Brown’s legacy, musically, culturally and otherwise, continues to

inspire, the simple fact is that, despite such enthusiastic proselytising on Brown’s

behalf, there has not been a sustained account, academic or otherwise, of the ongoing

endurance of his musical innovations.11 To be sure, Brown has been the subject of

5 As Geoff Brown writes in his introduction to James Brown: Doin’ It to Death (1996), “James Browndominated the black American music ratings for nigh on 15 years. And 15 years later he was being soextensively sampled that, internationally, his original recordings could be heard more frequently thanthe music of any other individual pop star”(Geoff Brown 1996: 10). For example, the siteFunkyStuff.com lists a string of James Brown’s “most sampled” tracks. From a list of a dozen ofBrown's most sampled songs they have derived a list of 650 samples (and this list is hardly exhaustive).Among Brown’s most sampled songs are titles such as Funky Drummer (1970), Get on the Good Foot(1972), The Payback (1974) and Funky President (1975) (funkystuff.com). This assertion is nowcommonly accepted based on estimates, and its reiteration can be found, for instance, in the followingtexts – See (Geoff Brown 1996: 10) and (Rice 2003: 463).6 (Weinger & White 1991: 44). As White and Weinger write, “Aficionados estimate that between twoand three thousand recorded raps of the late 1980s featured a James Brown sample in some form”(Weinger & White 1991: 44).7 ‘…architect of funk, godfather of soul and the source of 10,000 hip-hop samples’ (Christensen 2003).8 (DJ Shadow 1996). The album alternately known as both Endtroducing/Entroducing (both titlesappear on my CD), topped the February 2002 edition of DJ culture magazine Muzik of the “Top 50Dance Music Albums of all Time” (Muzik 2002: 51).9 (DJ Shadow 1996)10 (Brewster 1993: 66). Rather strangely Brown doesn’t figure highly in Brewster’s otherwisesuperlative discussion of DJ culture, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life (Brewster & Broughton 1999).11 Whilst not available at the time of writing, Wesleyan University Press has announced a November2006 release for Anne Danielsen’s, Presence and Pleasure-The Funk Grooves of James Brown andParliament (2006).

3

several biographies, and his musical contributions have been referenced in numerous

academic texts. 12 Yet many of these studies fall short when it comes to qualifying

Brown’s sustained impact upon a creative evolution of electronic dance music culture.

This is the aim of this study. Rather than merely assimilate Brown’s work within a

general history of funk, or simply name check him amongst a litany of artists

responsible for electronic dance music,13 I felt that what was required was an ontology

that would more actively account for Brown’s emphatic assault on popular music's

working of time.

I have always been of the opinion that the emergence of Brown’s funk, commonly

dated to the 1965 release of Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag, and appearing at the very

peak of civil-rights optimism, was something more than just mere coincidence. Whilst

accounts of funk’s innovative nature are many, there has been no explanation as to

why this style would occur at this particular time. In this thesis I will argue that the

propulsive drive of the new funk aesthetic might have been channelling the imminent

existential conditions surrounding the music of the time and attempting to enunciate it

in musical form.

In order to mobilise my arguments I draw extensively on the work of the philosophers

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who impressed upon me some of the philosophical

concerns that would inspire this ontology of “the one”. I was particularly struck by the

12 Brown’s musical innovations have been discussed in numerous titles such as, Gerri Hirshey’sNowhere To Run (1985) Rickey Vincent’s Funk (1996), Geoff Brown’s James Brown: Doin” It ToDeath (1996) or Craig Werner’s A Change is Gonna Come (2000) to name but a few of the moredistinguished accounts.13 (Poschardt 1998). There are many texts that do discuss Brown’s musical legacy in one way oranother, although due to the more encompassing perspectives of their respective texts are perhapslimited to discussing Brown with either the soul tradition or part of a more general genealogy ofelectronic music cultures. Some of the texts in which Brown does figure in some way, include: MichaelHaralambos, Right On: From Blues to Soul in Black America (1974). David Toop (1984) The RapAttack: African Jive to New York Hip Hop, Gerri Hirshey, Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music(1985). Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom(1986). Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm and Blues (1988). Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Musicand Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994). Rickey Vincent, Funk: The Music, the People,and the Rhythm of the one (1996). William Eric Perkins, Droppin' Science: Critical Essays on RapMusic and Hip Hop Culture (1996). Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, BlackConsciousness and Race Relations (1998). Ulf Poschardt, DJ Culture (1998). Bill Brewster and FrankBroughton, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey (1999). Jeremy Gilbert andEwan Pearson, Discographies: Dance Music, Culture, And The Politics Of Sound (1999). CraigWerner, A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America (2000). Murray Forman, The'Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop. Music/Culture (2002). CherylLynette Keyes, Rap Music and Street Consciousness. Music in American Life (2002). Guthrie P.Ramsey, Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (2003).

4

idea that they attribute to Paul Klee, that the role of the artist is to “render visible”

rather than render or reproduce that which is already visible.14 In their account of

what the musical composition might “render visible”, Deleuze and Guattari write,

“… music molecularizes sound matter and in so doing becomes capable of harnessing

such nonsonorous forces as Duration and Intensity.” 15 Foregrounding this idea of

music’s otherwise nonsonorous apprehensions, this study attempts to account for

some of these many “nonsonorous forces” that might be revealed through an analysis

of Brown’s musical compositions. It suggests that funk’s timely emergence might

have been a musical expression of a more immanently sustained minor temporality.

This is not to say that Brown’s music was a product of calculation. Much to the

contrary, it was his commitment to experimentation that produced a musical

mutability that was perhaps even alienating to Brown himself at times. He explains

this in reference to the release of Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag:

‘It’s a little beyond me right now,’ JB told a radio audience upon thesingle’s release. ‘I can’t really understand it. It’s the only thing on themarket that sounds like it. It’s different. It’s a new bag, just like Isang’.16

Whether or not this “new bag” marks the actual invention of funk is moot. Indeed, the

well-versed musical devotee might contend otherwise; that the real roots of funk can

be heard in sounds predating Brown, such as the “New Orleans beat” of Huey “Piano”

Smith and the Clowns, practiced in turn by Earl Palmer.17 Yet it is not where funk

came from that is of concern, but rather what it would become. In this sense Brown

can legitimately claim to have harnessed the power of the funk into a force of

becoming, and one that would connect to the future with much greater force than the

contributions of his closely related musical peers and contemporaries.

14 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 342)15 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 343)16 (Weinger & Leeds 1996)17 See (Payne 1996: 2-11) and also (Shapiro 2002: 138). Drummer Charles ‘Hungry’ Williams whoplayed with Huey ‘Piano’ Smith and the Clowns is considered the first funk drummer. Williams gavelessons to drummer Clayton Fillyau who was James Brown’s first discernibly “funky” drummer(Shapiro 2002: 20).

5

I posit that Brown’s musical achievement is predicated on his ability to have

“rendered visible” the durational alterity of the “minority” subject. Furthermore, I

argue for Brown’s music being conceived of in terms of an expression of an

alternative duration - in contradistinction to the more hegemonic, “common sense”

notions of time. It is for this reason that Brown’s work might be better considered by

evaluating what his music would give to the future, rather than what it took from the

past. This should not be understood as a discounting of Brown’s musical or cultural

inheritance, but rather as a reflection of his own commitment to insist upon a future

for a minor people.

Indeed Brown’s music has already been accounted for historically, as well as

anthropologically and of course, musicologically, although the results of such

endeavours have often been rather humdrum.18 Eliciting some of my more subdued

responses, for example, are those musicological studies that tend to absorb funk into a

general “African” aesthetic.19 It probably goes without saying that such historically

inclined perspectives do not really tell us anything about why the refrains of James

Brown continue to “work”. Thus, at the heart of my analysis of Brown’s work is a

18 One of the more unappealing examples might be David Brackett’s analysis of James Brown’sSuperbad (1995). Brackett dedicates a chapter of his book, Interpreting Popular Music to adeconstruction of James Brown’s Superbad titled, “James Brown’s Superbad and the Double-VoicedUtterance”. More unfortunate than the essay itself is that fact that it is one of the few academic studiesof Brown’s music. Whilst Brackett rightfully points out that musicological analysis has traditionallybeen heavy handed and loaded with stereotypes such as articulating difference through essentialisedtropes and the like, he really does little to avoid the trap himself. At one instance he is telling us howmuch Europeans love judging music by such “analytical metaphors” as the Golden Mean or GoldenSection, “As is usually the case with analytical techniques used in conjunction with the Europeantradition, why the reader/listener should feel that the presence of GS proportions (or anotherproportional system) is important is rarely explained” (David Brackett 1995: 149). However, aftercriticising this type of essentialism Brackett moves directly into the assimilation of Superbad into suchan analytical metaphor. Not only does Superbad fit perfectly into such a GS system he tells us (DavidBrackett 1995: 155), but also that the apparent spontaneity of the recording of Superbad belies itsperfect fit of the GS, providing evidence that Brown is either “a constructive genius” or “one couldassert that this proves the “naturalness” of James Brown’s music”(David Brackett 1995: 154) andleaves us with the rather spurious conclusion that “[music] flows out of [Brown] like leaves grow outof a tree”(David Brackett 1995: 154). Whilst Brackett offers that this emulates ‘the kinds of mythsreproduced in much writing about James Brown and about black music in general”(David Brackett1995: 154) this doesn’t stop him from making it, or ending his piece with the standard binary betweencultures European and “black”. Brackett writes, "...the more I analyzed and thought about JamesBrown’s music, particularly Superbad, the more I found that I could not avoid discussing the “criticaldifference” between African-American and Euro-American music and culture – that this textcompelled me to confront the issue” (David Brackett 1995: 155).19 From Werner’s A Change is Gonna Come, “…there’s no doubt that once the Godfather of Soul tookhis rhythm stick to ‘the one," American music became something different, blacker, and more Africanthan it had ever been before”(Werner 2000: 25).

6

consideration of the vitality of his musical legacy, the rhythmic affordances that

would lead to so many experimental forms of popular music.

Perhaps in common with other all genre-defying artists, Brown’s nonconformity kept

his musical innovations fresh. In the mid-1960s Brown made some radical decisions

that would drive his musical divergence from the more orthodox compositional styles

of popular soul. Reflecting a commitment to difference, Brown’s music would

gravitate away from the lyricism of soul, and toward the minimalist beats and grooves

that would so greatly inform later musical movements. I will discuss in detail in

chapter 6, suggesting that Brown’s creativity is a result of the fact that his music was

of an “untimely”20 nature, and furthermore, that it would provide for a future by

imploring “a people to come”.21

This “people to come” might be observed among those generations that had to live

life in the wake of the soul era, that period of history subsequently theorised by

scholars such as Nelson George and Mark Anthony Neal as the “post-soul”

generation. This is a generation whose aesthetic values are marked by their indignant

perspective of the soul years. For, unlike their forebears, this generation was bereft of

the promises of social change and would instead have to contend with a state of

existential disarray. Despite this being an “intolerable” state of affairs, it would of

course stimulate change; a change that I believe would be reflected in a new

compositional orientation to time.

In this respect, my aesthetic ontology is informed by the theoretical model set out in

Deleuze’s Cinema books, in which the intolerable events of the Second World War

would create a crisis in a belief in action, and thus exacerbate the shift from

“movement-image” to “time-image” in the process. In my opinion, the decline in soul

experienced after the assassination of Martin Luther King offers a similar existential

crisis, one that might subsequently inform a break between the aesthetic orientations

of the soul and post-soul periods.

20 The “untimely” might be understood as a condition that enables a future. In the preface of Differenceand Repetition, “Following Nietzsche we discover, as more profound than time and eternity, theuntimely: philosophy is neither a philosophy of history, nor a philosophy of the eternal, but untimely,always and only untimely – that is to say, ‘acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our timeand, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come’” (Deleuze 1994: xxi).21 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 345)

7

In the middle of all this social upheaval experienced by the African-American

community, Brown was on the cutting edge of a musical style that would galvanise

the imminent existential forces of the time into musical form. For a decade spanning

the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, arguably Brown’s most artistically accomplished, he

would ‘prepare’ modern music in a similar way to that described by Deleuze in

relation to cinema directors such as Welles or Hitchcock, who Deleuze saw as having

“prepared” the modern cinema.22

I realise that my choice of methodology – the use of books on cinema to explain a

reworking of time in music – might appear odd. However, I hope to demonstrate that

Deleuze’s Cinema books might accommodate a discussion of time in popular music.

Whilst I will defend their utility in detail within the thesis, the point that needs to be

noted at this stage is that the Cinema books are primarily concerned with how certain

aesthetic formations might reflect “images of thought”, as well as the broader

existential/ontological concerns of their respective eras. Hence the attraction of the

Cinema books for this study is precisely their ontological approach. Instead of

attempting to “read” various films, Deleuze enquires of the cinema what it is,

precisely, that makes it work, in terms of its affecting our capacity to think about time

and space.

The structure of the thesis, then, attempts to reflect these theoretical concerns. In

chapter 1, I will outline some of the broader considerations of this concept of an

“apprehension of a minor temporality” and how it might be applied to Brown’s

musical expression. I will then use this idea of artistic apprehension to address my

assertion of funk’s compositional distillation of existential time. The “untimely”

appearance of funk, I argue, might be seen as a bifurcation point from which two

compositional orientations - of movement and time respectively - can be seen to

diverge. This divergence might be otherwise observed as the shift from the more

orthodox “movement-image” form of composition, which reflects logical, sequential

progression, to the more “time-image” infused grooves informed by the funk style.

This is a shift to a “time-image” oriented composition, one that takes on

22 (Deleuze 1986: x)

8

characteristics found in Deleuze’s cinematic concept of the time-image, including

“irrational cuts” and non-linear composition, rather than the more typical,

compositional characteristics of sequential and teleological melodic progression.

I will broach some of the artistic precursors to this catalysing of the duration of the

“minor” subject as found, for example, in the “stream of consciousness” literature at

the turn of the twentieth century. I argue that in common with these authors, Brown

has also enunciated his immanent existential circumstances, with the musical force of

“the one” reflecting a “minor” temporality.

Having canvassed this more general proposition of a “minor” temporality, it is in

chapter 2 that I turn my attention to its constitution. Drawing not only upon work

from Deleuze and Guattari, but also from fields of cultural studies and diaspora

theory, I attempt to formulate some of the immanent existential concerns of the minor

subject. I also attempt to assess Brown’s cultural position with reference to Paul

Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, to both discern the veracity of what has been written

about Brown’s music but also to qualify his often-complex relationship to Africa and

his apparent musical inheritance. However, rather than simply attribute Brown’s

music as a reiteration of African diasporic musical legacy, I am more concerned with

how African-American forms of music such as gospel and funk will look toward the

production of new forms of time. In particular, I examine the ways in which they

might represent an attempt to transcend hegemonic temporal constraints. I will then

discuss this idea in relation to an example of post-soul cinema such as Sweet

Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, arguing for it as an informative cinematic example of

an apprehension of minor temporality.

In chapter 3, I consider the effect of gospel music on the funk aesthetic. For it was

gospel, in particular, that informed funk’s composition, not only aesthetically but also

in its orientation to “time” rather than “movement”. Gospel would impress upon the

musical world a compositional sensibility that embraces groove, affecting in turn funk

and electronic dance musics. To examine Brown’s relationship to gospel I turn to

James Snead’s famous essay “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture”. Snead’s essay

is mandatory to any discussion of Brown’s music as it details how the gospel style

provided the compositional devices that would be taken up by Brown’s funk. Having

9

established the centrality of repetition to Brown’s work, I then examine repetition

itself from a philosophical point of view, with a particular emphasis on Deleuze’s

Difference and Repetition. I use Deleuze’s ideas to demonstrate repetition’s

relationship to time –a repetition that Brown would rechannel back into popular music

through funk.

In chapter 4, "The ‘I’ Becomes ‘We’: Contextualising the Soul Aesthetic”, I will

discuss the civil rights struggle on prevailing existential conditions. I will argue that

such conditions, whilst reflected lyrically in the composition of the soul aesthetic,

might be even more acutely felt though Brown’s experiments in rhythm. I will then

compare the shift in existential outlook between soul music and Brown’s music in

general and attempt to set up a framework for examining the ontological conditions

for Brown’s musical departure. Brown’s increasing use of repetition in his music, I

argue, appeals to a new conception of time, and one that would demonstrate the

beginning of funk’s break with the modernist regard of the telos. I will distinguish

Brown’s approach from the more progressive/virtuosic styles of jazz that have

emerged since World War II, arguing that the minimalist Funk aesthetic was more

concerned with collectivity rather than virtuosity.

Chapter 5, "Soul as Movement Image”, I conceptualise the inherent teleology of the

soul aesthetic as outlined in the previous chapter. I posit that the popular soul

composition might be understood as a reflection of the movement-image due to its

narrative-driven existential logic. Furthermore, I will discuss the impact of the British

Invasion on the burgeoning soul genre and assess the impact of this “invasion”,

discussing some of the differences between appropriation and becoming in the

process. Perhaps because of his increasingly idiosyncratic inclination, Brown’s music

was not subject to as much coverage by the groups of the British Invasion. I will

assert that this was partly because the more radically minimalist identity embraced by

funk encompassed a vital political will, directed toward a more expedient and

effective production of minor territory.

In chapter 6, I argue for Brown’s musical experimentation as an exhibition of

“thought without image” or that disbelief in convention which Deleuze contends

enables creative thought to transpire. Brown’s continued resolve in the face of

10

conventional criticism is at turns both humorous and admirable - in both cases

exemplary of the Deleuzean “Idiot”.

This is not least because Brown’s seminal funk experiments were often considered by

his own musicians as untenable. I will explore this tension through the recollections of

Brown’s ex-bandleader Fred Wesley, which appear in his recent book, Hit Me Fred:

Confessions of a Sideman (2003). As Wesley details, Brown’s personnel thought he

was a musical illiterate and Wesley himself held Brown in contempt for getting

Wesley to play such “silly music”.23 Yet whilst this “silly” music was establishing

Brown as the most successful African-American performer of all time,24 the jazz

heroes of his band members, such as Miles Davis, were also listening it to and taking

notes. I will suggest here that Brown’s musical radicality lay in the fact that his music

was addressing the future and a “people to come” rather than the present.

In chapter 7, I detail the break in soul’s “action-image” as symptomatic of a decline in

the belief in a narrative view of the world. It was with this decline that the funk

aesthetic would increasingly assert its presence through repetition, the groove and

more open-ended compositional forms. Soul’s discernibly linear trajectory and

melodic artifice would be usurped by an emphatic, and non-linear, beat driven music

indicative of the time-image style of music that would appear from the post-soul

generation.

I should add here that I do not consider Brown himself to be working solely within the

“time-image” tradition. Instead, I contend that Brown’s music set up the affordances

for the ensuing “time-image” styles that were capitalised upon by electronic dance

music cultures. I should also add here that the history of such genres is so complex as

to warrant their own historical accounts. Thus, I have elected to use only those

examples that will demonstrate my broader concerns with time, and the groove’s

increasing usurpation of the more orthodox linear pop song. I argue that the increasing

prevalence of the groove, particularly among some of the most disaffected

23 This is what James Brown bandleader Fred Wesley thought of funk (Wesley 2002: 158-159).24 According to the Billboard Chart (published on James Brown’s official site), Brown has had a totalof 104 Pop and 98 R&B hits (James Brown Official Site 2004). Brown not only maintains a recordnumber of R&B hits, but his pop chart success makes him the second most successful pop performer interms of pure chart hits and bettered only by Elvis Presley (Eliot 2005: 32).

11

populations, was due to the open ended nature of that form – the longer the groove,

the more they could put off having to re-enter the “real” world.

My assessment of such groove based styles then extends beyond my previous

concentration on African-American musical styles to include groups such as

Kraftwerk, who were also creating amidst their own post-war existential malaise. It is

in deference to Kraftwerk, that I refer to in the chapter’s title "From Cold Sweat to No

Sweat”. For their puritan sensibility would use electronic means to achieve the

rhythmic exactitude set by Brown’s bands, but “without sweating”.25 In general, the

emphasis on the groove, I argue, is reflective of the shift from broader narratives to

the micropolitical – the idea that a micro-liberation of desire might assist processes of

becoming and transformation.26 This is a change in the musical image of thought.

Such a change is reflected in the musical practices used by DJs and samplers of the

post-soul generation and beyond, providing a superlative demonstration of linear

causality making way for the more “irrational” breaks that inform the new aesthetic.

Having outlined the role of these musical styles as demonstrative of a more “time-

image” informed music, in Chapter 8 I will attempt a more stringent assessment of

this form of composition. Whilst much discussion in regard to recent musical

practices such as DJing and sampling continue to be framed through the perspective

of the Platonic model/copy distinction, I argue that such theoretical assessments

would perhaps be otherwise better served if discussed through the Deleuzean concept

of the “powers of the false”. Having qualified this theoretical distinction I will discuss

the use and misuse of Brown’s music and what this has meant for the aesthetics of

contemporary electronic dance musics.

Finally, a brief caveat. As a James Brown fan of many years standing, I am more than

aware that many of Brown’s long suffering band members and extended alumni are

often slighted in accounts of Brown’s work. I will say here that I am more than aware

of the symbiotic relationship that existed between Brown and the group, and thus

when I attribute all of this innovation to Brown in general I am more often than not

referring to the James Brown musical assemblage in a metonymic sense. As fans of

25 (Flur in Reiss 2001)26 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 213 )

12

Brown’s music are also more than aware, there is much dispute over the authorship of

Brown’s music and ex-members of the group have seen their contributions uncredited,

or unpaid for, by Brown.27 It is apparent, however, that even those who felt slighted

by Brown’s behaviour could still be positive about his achievements. See, for

example, the gracious assessment of Brown by Wesley:

Once you get away with something, you've set a precedent. And back

there in the '60s, James set a hell of a precedent. All music that we hear

today is influenced by James Brown. I stand on that - everybody today

who calls himself a creator of music has been influenced by James.28

It is accounting for what this music did that I will now address as Brown’s

“apprehension of a minor temporality”.

27 For example, his old friend and collaborator Bobby Byrd sued Brown in 2003 for unpaid royalties(Moody 2003)28 (Wesley in Cynthia Rose 1990: 37)

13

CHAPTER ONE

APPREHENSION OF A MINOR TEMPORALITY

“The One”

Any assessment of James Brown’s contribution to popular music usually begins with

a celebration of “the one”. This name is derived from Brown’s emphasis on the

downbeat, occurring on the first and third beat of each 4/4 bar, rather than

emphasising the more common second and fourth beats of the bar. What might

initially appear to be a rather slight musical gesture would affect a radical impact on

the musical styles to follow. For “the one” would instil within popular music an

unprecedented drive that would characterise not only the funk style, but also dance

music to the present-day. Brown is hardly sanguine about his contribution to popular

music and will freely remark, “…I moved the music from two and four, to one and

three with Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag, which means all the music since ‘65, 95

percent of it, was copied from me”. 29 Whilst Brown has never been one to shy from

such self-promotion, the importance of this rhythmic shift cannot be so easily written

off either. The enigmatic musical concept of “the one” has subsequently acquired a

mythology precisely because it appeared to emerge out of nowhere. As Peter

Guralnick recounts in Sweet Soul Music, Brown’s origination of the funk style was

derived of an almost mystical vision of purpose: “[h]ow Brown achieved this sense of

security and mission remains as much a mystery today as it was in 1964 and 1965,

when first Out of Sight and then Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag sprang as full-blown

new rhythm conceptions from their creator’s mind.30 This strange new

implementation of rhythm would mark Brown’s ten-year spell as the most popular

and cutting edge of any black artist. As Dom Foulsham was to remark in an article for

Blues and Soul magazine, “…[b]efore Brown, there was music with a beat. After

Brown music had found a groove”. 31 Much of Brown’s subsequent musical success

was predicated on the drawing out of this “groove”, which in turn was leveraged, on

“the one”.

29 James Brown the Godfather of Soul: A Portrait (1995). Brown was to also recount a similaraccusation on the recent BBC series on the history of Soul music, Soul Deep (2005).30 (Guralnick 1986: 221-222)31 (Foulsham 1993: 26)

14

Yet for all the discussion of the rhythmic innovations introduced into popular music

in his name, one of the most glaring oversights is the lack of a more significant

account of the historical timing of his signature emphasis on “the one”. If, as

McLuhan so famously suggested, that the medium is the message, then it would

appear a fair proposition to suggest that Brown’s change in rhythmic emphasis might

reflect the imminent existential circumstances of its emergence. Given “the one”

would appear in 1965, at the very apex of the soul movement, could it be that this

rhythmic shift was an apprehending of imminent social forces? Bearing this

proposition in mind, I will argue that the trademark rhythms that emerged through

Brown’s funk, might be otherwise understood as the aesthetic expression of a “minor

temporality”.

In order to more readily evaluate Brown’s music as a “minor temporality”, in this

chapter I will:

1. Begin to outline the importance of Brown's musical innovation and assemblages

to social life, and the social theory of minority becoming.

2. In doing so, differentiate this minor politics from

a) majoritarian politics

b) common senses

c) major events, in favour of a consideration of the intolerable conditions of

everyday life.

3. Discuss the relationship of such a politics to time, art and thought

4. Begin to outline the specific contexts of the thesis, namely the post-soul aesthetic,

and electronic dance music.

5. Begin to outline crucial theoretical approaches, such as that of ethology.

The theoretical framework of this thesis relies heavily on the theories of Deleuze and

Guattari. In particular, I turn to Deleuze’s books on cinema, Cinema 1: The

Movement-Image (1983) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989), to elaborate how

15

aesthetic change in musical “composition” 32 might reflect a shift in “mental”

orientation, as proposed in these texts. Whilst using cinematic theory to explain

musical composition may appear a strange proposition, I do believe that Deleuze’s

Cinema books can be instructive for thinking beyond cinema and about changes in

aesthetic direction in general.33 For one of the main philosophical points of these texts

is that, via the example of cinema, Deleuze will elucidate a Bergsonian questioning of

time. That ultimately it is time that forces one to think. To extrapolate this idea,

Deleuze turns to the cinema to provide an empirical example of this transcendental

form of time – or that concept proposed by Bergson as durée, “…whose reality is an

indivisible, ceaseless, and ever-changing flow”.34 As Deleuze argues in his Cinema

32 I should add here that by using the term “composition” that I am perpetuating a idea that might beconsidered problematic. For example in his essay, “Becoming-Music: The Rhizomatic Moment ofImprovisation” (2004), Jeremy Gilbert takes exception to the sense in which Deleuze and Guattari haveemployed the use of “composition” mainly because of the implicit hierarchical “…ordering whichplaces composition clearly above performance in terms of importance to the process of music-making”(Gilbert 2004a: 121). Furthermore that the way Deleuze and Guattari make use of the term“composition” tends to assimilate the idea as a manifestation of the Western classical tradition. AsGilbert argues, “when writing about ‘music’, [Deleuze and Guattari] almost invariably write aboutcomposers: music it is implied, is something that composers do” (Gilbert 2004a: 121). Thisdemarcation, says Gilbert is a vestige of the former division of labour in the Western classical traditionthat had for so many years maintained a hierarchical relationship between composer and performer.The most direct response I can give to this argument, is that I have not had a problem with the wayDeleuze and Guattari have used the terms “composition” and “improvisation” synonymously, althoughI am sympathetic to the way it is objected to by Gilbert(Gilbert 2004a: 121). I am aware, that this mayreflect on my part a more “relaxed” reading of the Deleuze-Guattarian concept of “composition”, andreflective of my reading into their use of the term as a reiteration of my own convictions. For beforemy encounter with the theory of Deleuze and Guattari, I had always believed that improvising wascomposing. In this sense I find myself in the strange position of being in accord with Gilbert’s pointthat the notion that “improvisation” should be considered differently from “composition” is based onthe point that improvisation as “…real-time composition-in-performance – is a practice which upsets[the distinction between ‘composers’ and ‘performers’]”(Gilbert 2004a: 121). Even though this is acriticism of Deleuze and Guattari. Gilbert’s point is given salience though his discussion of the“improvisation” at the core of the Indian raga tradition which he writes, provides, “…a strikingexample of a rhizomatic musical culture which has developed along quite contrary lines to that ofWestern modernity, acquiring and refining a whole conceptual framework and technical vocabulary, aswell as a system of training, designed to enable the transmission of a growing and developing body ofknowledge and tradition of skilled practice which, despite its traditionality, retains improvisation at itscore” (Gilbert 2004a: 133). I understand that this concern over the intent of the score versus the morecollective becoming that occurs through improvisation. Indeed the collective “body without organs”produced through collective improvisation is something that I see in gospel too. I guess I still do notsee a problem, and Gilbert is aware that other Deleuzean inspired discussions of music, such as thoseby Ronald Bogue, have also accepted this lack of distinction between the terms (Gilbert 2004a: 121). Insummation I will add that whilst I have not made this distinction myself, Gilbert’s point has given mefood for thought and something to consider in future discussion.33 It would appear that I am not alone in this assessment. In the essay, Affect and Individuation inPopular Electronic Music (2005) found in Deleuze and Music, author Drew Hemment writes, “[m]uchin the way that Deleuze found the time-image to provide a direct perception of time within cinema,timestretching and the scratch might be said to present a direct perception of time. We see theemergence of a temporality of multiplicity, time-affect” (Hemment 2005: 91). I, of course, can onlyagree.34 (Rodowick 1997: 122)

16

books, even if we can never truly make sense of the transcendental form of duration,

we might arrive at it intuitively, and, to this end, Deleuze endows cinema with an

ability to make us think about time in new ways.

Duration, Art and Thought

How does duration force one to think? This is perhaps the driving question behind

Deleuze’s Cinema books. For Deleuze, such duration might be expressed through two

discernible types of mental image, each of which might encompass different potential

relations to time. The first Cinema book is concerned with the “organic” cinema of

the movement-image, whose duration was considered a product of cumulative actions

in space, that is, movement. This is the form of time that is most familiar to us. The

time-image of the second Cinema book concerns the transcendental image of time.

This is the form of time that Bergson refers to as durée.35 Bergson’s concept refers to

a subjective form of time experienced as mental movement, rather than an “objective”

or quantifiable chronos, or chronological time, that we are perhaps most familiar with.

Bergson’s durée derives from an attempt to describe this direct experience of time,

such as in recollection. This understanding of time is unlike that of a simple “passing

present”. Instead, Bergson introduced the idea, subsequently taken up by Deleuze of a

passage of time that is continually forking between a past and future and that seem to

slip into each other.

Deleuze refers to this forking model of time as “…the most fundamental operation of

time”, 36 where every moment is constantly undergoing a bifurcation between the “…

present that passes and past which is preserved”.37 Here Laura Marks is helpful,

offering a concise summary of these operations and worthy of the lengthy quote:

35 The concept of durée was originally discussed in Bergson’s 1921 essay, Durée et simultanéité: essaisur la théorie de la relativité d'Einstein, the English translation of which appears in (Bergson, Durie, &Lewis 1999). The idea of Bergsonian duration has been dealt with in many texts, including Bergson(1989), (Lacey 1989) and also, Bergson: Key Writings (2002), (Bergson, Ansell-Pearson, & Mullarkey2002).36 (Deleuze 1989: 81)37 (Deleuze 1989: 82). As Deleuze says in this passage, “Bergson’s major theses on time are as follows:the past coexists with the present that it has been; the past is preserved in itself, as past in general (non-chronological); at each moment time splits itself into present and past, present that passes and pastwhich is preserved” (Deleuze 1989: 82).

17

Drawing on Bergson’s philosophy of duration, Deleuze proffers animage of time as always splitting into two parts: the time that movessmoothly forward, or the "present that passes"; and the time that isseized and represented (if only mentally), or the "past that ispreserved." What Deleuze, following Bergson, refers to as the actualimage and the virtual image are the two aspects of time as it splits, theactual image corresponding to the present that passes, the virtual imageto the past that is preserved. Thus we see that at the very moment thatthey diverge, the two types of image create two disjunctiverepresentations of the same moment. ("Image" in Bergson signifies notsimply the visual image, but the complex of all sense impressions thata perceived object conveys to a perceiver at a given moment.) Anexample may be found in home videos of family gatherings. At themoment that the video is shot, the two aspects of time look the same;but the present-that-passes can never be recalled (I feel ill; I am angryat my mother), while the past-that-is-preserved (we were gatheredaround the table, smiling) becomes the institutionalized representationof the moment. Virtual images tend to compete with recollection-images-the memory I have of the gathering that is not captured in thevideo - and, as we know, their power is such that they often come tostand in for our memories.38

In the final analysis then, the effect of the split of time is the production of a “…past-

that-is-preserved [which] has hegemony over the representation of the event”. 39 In

fact any moment of the past-preserved can be selectively recalled as the official

version of the former present, recalling, of course, the old cliché that history is written

by its victors. Thus, we might generally understand that to be in possession of

political power is having the capacity to maintain dominance over the images of

history, and to capitalise on the dynamism of the “past in the present”. I will further

discuss this struggle over the reclamation of memory in chapter 8, namely, how the

active recollection-image – or, the past in the present - has the power to falsify official

history, and also why “[v]irtual images tend to compete with recollection-images”. 40

The result of this complex splitting of time between actual and virtual makes it

impossible to distinguish time as simple linear flow. Furthermore, it is drawing upon

the creative power of these relative perspectives on time, that art forms such as music

or cinema are chiefly concerned.

38 (Laura U. Marks 2000: 40)39 (Laura U. Marks 2000: 40)40 (Laura U. Marks 2000: 40)

18

The work of art as an expression of temporal duration has conceptual precedents in

other fields, as examined in Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel (1962).

The author of this book, Shiv Kumar, analysed the influence of Bergsonian duration

on the emergence of the “stream of consciousness” style that had emerged relatively

contemporaneously with Bergsonian philosophy in the early 20th century. The “stream

of consciousness” style had counted among its practitioners authors such as Dorothy

Richardson, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf whose work would expose the effect of

Bergsonian durée on thought at this time. This notion of durée, or duration, can be

more simply understood as the subjective experience of time – a less simple, less

linear experience of time. For example, a ride in the bus that takes 40 minutes in

chronological, or “clock time”, might seem considerably longer (or shorter) in terms

of lived durational experience. The “stream of consciousness” approach emerged as a

method of bringing the expression of the transcendental durée to the fore. For

instance, instead of describing the action of characters as occurring within a

universalised notion of linear time and fixed space, the “stream of consciousness”

style would instead emphasise the explorations of the composition of time to the point

where it obscured the more predetermined time/space of the traditional narrative form.

As Kumar has argued, this “stream of consciousness” approach would capitalise upon

Bergson’s revised perspective on time.41 The writers engaged in this style would

proceed to capture these more existential notions of duration in their writing.

Taking my cue from the artistic depiction of time as illustrated by these “stream of

consciousness” authors, I will attempt to describe how various forms of musical

expression might further divulge the broader existential forces that lay behind

aesthetic change. Within a musical context, we might think of the shift in rhythm

instigated by Brown through his concept of “the one”, as a new apprehension – or

capture - of time. To discuss this idea of an artistic capture of temporality more fully,

I will turn to Deleuze’s Cinema books and his explication of the shift in cinematic

aesthetics from movement-image to time-image. This aesthetic shift provides a rather

neat correlation with the historical periods that I have elected to analyse, defined

respectively as the “soul” and “post-soul” eras.

41 (Kumar 1962: 5-10)

19

Soul and Post-Soul Aesthetics

It was writer Nelson George who coined the term “post-soul” aesthetic, in reference to

an African-American population trying to come to terms with life in the aftermath of

the civil-rights struggle. Studies of this “post-soul generation” have, in turn, been the

subject of books such as B-Boys, Baps, and Bohos: Notes on Post-Soul Black Culture

(1994, 2001) and the recent Post Soul Nation (2004). Mark Anthony Neal would give

George’s literary concept a more academic embellishment in Soul Babies: Black

Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002). For both authors, the post-soul

aesthetic reflects a retraction from the narratives of the soul aesthetic, and thus from

the values once subscribed to by African-Americans in the preceding civil rights era.

Building on the insights of commentators such as George and Neal, I will emphasise

how the failure of soul would lead to a change in perspective on history – and perhaps

a revised notion of temporality, where the latter will become intrinsic to musical

practices such as DJing and sampling. This idea, in turn, assumes what I will call a

new musical “image of thought”. Deleuze and Guattari describe this notion of the

“image of thought” in What is Philosophy? as “…the image thought gives itself of

what it means to think, to make use of thought, to find one’s bearings in thought”.42

I will argue that this new image of thought arose out of the “intolerable”

circumstances accompanying the decline of the civil rights era. As Deleuze and

Guattari write in What is Philosophy? the role of the artist is to respond to the

“intolerable” forces of a life otherwise imposed upon by the “common sense” of

thought. 43 To address this idea more fully, I will tease out the concept of the

“intolerable” and the way in which a “common sense” can create intolerable

conditions for the minor subject.

The Intolerable

42 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 37)43 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 171). It should perhaps be noted that this concept has beeninterchangeably translated as both the “intolerable” (Deleuze 1989: 169-170), in the case of Cinema 2or the “unbearable” (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 171) in What is Philosophy?

20

This intolerable condition might, in some cases, reflect the truly catastrophic, but it

may also just as readily refer to the banality of the everyday. 44 As Deleuze has

written in Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989):

For it is not in the name of a better or truer world that thought capturesthe intolerable in this world, but, on the contrary, it is because thisworld is intolerable that it can no longer think a world or think itself.The intolerable is no longer a serious injustice, but the permanent stateof a daily banality. Man is not himself a world other than the one inwhich he experiences the intolerable and feels himself trapped.45

Such intolerable, daily banality was perhaps characteristic of the experience of a

majority of African-Americans in the 1960s, who invested their hopes for social

change within the “grand narrative” 46 logic of the soul era (a logic that might be

found, for instance, in the teleological projection implicit to the refrains of “We Shall

Overcome”). Although, as I shall discuss in detail in chapter 7, the optimism of the

civil-rights era would be symbolically brought to a close with the assassination of Dr.

Martin Luther King, and give way to the pessimism surrounding the post-soul era.

An ongoing concern of this study is to further develop this relationship between the

soul and post-soul periods with those concepts of movement-image and time-image

proposed by Deleuze in his Cinema books. For the decline in the belief in the

narratives of soul reflect a similar loss of faith in teleology as that which Deleuze

finds so significant in the change in cinema after World War II. As Deleuze writes,

the war would exacerbate a loss of faith in a narrative depiction of the world, and this

change in existential circumstance would cause the cinema to undergo an “empiricist

conversion”:

…the problem that now concerns the one who believes in the world,and not even in the existence of the world but in its possibilities ofmovements and intensities, so as once again to give birth to new modesof existence… It may be that believing in this world, in this life,becomes our most difficult task, or the task of a mode of existence still

44 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 171)45 (Deleuze 1989: 169-170)46 This use of “grand narrative” is an allusion to the work of postmodern philosopher, Jean FrançoisLyotard and his idea of a teleological view of the world predicated upon such master narratives asdiscussed in his groundbreaking, The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge (Lyotard 1984)

21

to be discovered on our plane of immanence today. This is theempiricist conversion.47

In short, this “empiricist conversion” may be as simple as asking one’s self how best

to go on in the face of intolerable circumstances. To explain the type of belief

required to proceed in such intolerable circumstances, Jonathan Rajchman provides a

concise summation here of Deleuze’s idea of a belief in the immanent as the means

for this “empiricist conversion”:

Deleuze says that the role of belief in the “synthesis of time” geared tounknown futures, or to what is yet to come, was best formulated byreligious philosophers like Kierkegaard, Pascal and Péguy. For inrelation to their respective religions they replaced the question of beliefin God with a question of the mode of existence of the believer,pointing the way to another kind of conversion: a belief or trust placedin this world rather than in another, transcendent one. It is this kind of“empiricist conversion” that Deleuze then thinks the “time-images” incinema offered us, after Hitler and the war. The problem it worked outtogether with postwar philosophy was a whole crisis in “movement” –for example, in the “dialectical montage” and the movement of themasses to self-consciousness in which Eisenstein could still put histrust.48

The ensuing crisis in “movement” as it might be perceived within the context of the

soul era, will be discussed more explicitly in chapter 7. Presently, however, I want to

advance the idea that Brown himself will respond to these “intolerable” circumstances

through the creation of funk, demonstrative perhaps of a type of musical “empiricist

conversion”. For funk can be generally considered as the belief in the more imminent

idea of a “brand new bag” rather than reflect a faith in teleological change that, as

Sam Cooke would sing, “…was gonna come”.49 Brown’s music would emerge from

the trying circumstances of the civil-rights experience, to offer its audience a belief in

this world rather than a teleological projection. Furthermore, Brown’s music gave the

bodies of a disaffected minor population a resource to return to, to inspire belief in the

world in the face of the incommensurable sense of loss assumed in the aftermath of

the failed civil rights struggle.

47 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 75)48 (Rajchman 2000: 26)49 This is in reference to the Sam Cooke song, A Change is Gonna Come (1964) (Cooke 1986).

22

Within this context, Brown’s musical work might be conceivably imbued with the

power of belief in the world and similar to that which Deleuze attributes to the neo-

realist style of Roberto Rosselini.50 For Deleuze, Rosselini’s neo-realist style would

set in motion a style of cinema that would “…replace the model of knowledge with

belief'”.51 That is to say, this cinema will demonstrate the vital difference between a

belief in the world and the more subjective knowledge of the world. The belief in the

world is remaining open to the potential connections that might be discovered when

one relinquishes a more dogmatic image of the world. The intolerable results of such

“common sense” visions of this world, culminating in World War II, drove the crisis

in this adherence to the logic of action-image and instead, “…the link between man

and the world is broken”.52 Deleuze finds this crisis in the action-image reflected in

several periods of European cinema, in the Italian neo-realist cinema of the late

1940s, the French Nouvelle Vague of the late 1950s and 1960s, and in West German

cinema roughly a decade later.53 That these cinematic periods were working through

their own particular existential crises can be evidenced in the new methods sought to

depict time and space differently in their respective oeuvres. The more indeterminate

concepts of time and space facilitated through the voyages and any-space-whatevers

of these cinematic styles are provided as evidence of the break from the “organic”

notion of sensory-motor connection.54 From this decline in the logical flow of action

and chronological time, the resulting time-image aesthetic will interrupt these more

commonsense notions of time and space.

Following Deleuze’s cinematic model, my own proposition is that the post-soul

aesthetic might also reflect a similar type of artistic reaction to a crisis in action-

image. This breakdown of a simple linear form of time will emerge as the result of the

decline in soul’s belief in a teleological revelation of “truth”.

Restoring belief in the world

50 (Deleuze 1989: 171-172)51 (Deleuze 1989: 172)52 (Deleuze 1989: 171-172)53 Deleuze himself says “[t]he timing is something like: around 1948, Italy; about 1958, France; about1968, Germany” (Deleuze in Flaxman 2000: 34)54 These ideas are discussed in the first chapter of Cinema 2, “Beyond the Movement-Image” (Deleuze1989: 1-24).

23

In the midst of this break in soul’s action-image, I shall assume, following Deleuze

that Brown’s role as an artist is to restore “belief in the world”, in the way that

Deleuze might speak of a Rossellini or a Godard in the Cinema books. As Deleuze

says in this section of Cinema 2, “…the less human the world is, the more it is the

artist’s duty to believe and produce belief in a relation between man and the world,

because the world is made by men”.55 The artist must be able to look beyond a default

image of thought that espouses belief in a representation of the world, for as Deleuze

has written, “[t]he modern fact is that we no longer believe in this world”.56 This is

perhaps because the conditions for a belief in the world have become too difficult.

Therefore, it is up to the artist to restore belief in the world by presenting new

possibilities for thought.

Brown’s own artistic response to the intolerable, might be witnessed through the

musical expression of the funk style, a movement that would similarly effect a lasting

contribution to a change in the depiction of musical time, just in the way that the post-

War European cinemas would. Whilst the first reaction to this breakdown in the

hegemonically maintained ideas of time and space might be one of disconcert, I

believe that it was more than fitting given that the civil-rights era suffered such an

untimely blow in its aspirations.

As I shall discuss in chapter 4, Brown recreates one possibility for belief in the world

through his promotion of new connections between thought and the affective. Whilst I

will discuss the importance of affect more explicitly in that chapter, for present

purposes, affect might simply be understood as a bodily feeling derived from an

experience of an event. The body encounters these affects as forces, which are

subsequently translated (and reduced linguistically) into more general, but enunciable,

“emotions”. Perhaps the main point to bear in mind here is that for Deleuze and

Guattari, such affects, “…are becomings”57 and of specific interest to this study is

how such affects are mobilised into social possibilities.58

55 (Deleuze 1989: 171)56 (Deleuze 1989: 171)57 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 256)58 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 256)

24

It is true that any creative act is distinguished by its production of affects, yet these

affects will always come up against social limitations, or rather, be framed by those

limitations. The task of a more radical work of art is to re-activate affect, outside of

“the frame”. Distinguishing these affective relations is the basis of the Deleuze-

Guattarian concept of ethology.59 Whilst I will discuss this idea in more detail in the

next chapter, what concerns us here is giving due emphasis to the instigation of new

affective relations as a means toward a more immanent form of politics. This is a

more micro-political process based around experimenting with the capacities of a

body to affect new relations upon the world; relations that may hopefully move

beyond those imposed by a “common sense” image of thought. The artist, which

includes Brown himself, will have to mediate at this important juncture between

unrestrained affective possibility and “common sense”. As I will argue in detail in

chapter 6, it is only the artist who is sufficiently naïve to attempt to overturn the

majoritarian representation of events, and it is through their art that a minor politics is

given affective substance.

This is not always a completely intentional process on the part of the artist. Brown’s

approach to music becomes political through its accommodation of new bodily

expressions that will ultimately extend into alternative means for thought. This

“empiricist conversion” begins with a “belief in the body”, and this is why Deleuze

contends that a belief in the world is a belief in the body itself.60 To understand what

Deleuze means by “a body” here, I am referring to a non-referential sense of the body

rather than being a body of something, for instance, a predetermined, gendered or

racialised body. Becoming, then, might result from attempts to make that body work

for itself rather than be beholdened to the terms of its representation. Through a belief

in the world (and body) we might be able to connect people with the world again, and

perhaps restore the artificial divisions that we have created between the body and the

59 Deleuze provides the most concise definition of “ethology” in one of his course lectures. “…if I askmyself what is the most immediate sense of the word ethics, in what way is it already other thanmorality, well, ethics is better known to us today under another name, the word ethology…When onespeaks of an ethology in connection with animals, or in connection with man, what is it a matter of?Ethology in the most rudimentary sense is a practical science, of what? A practical science of themanners of being. The manner of being is precisely the state of beings (étants), of what exists(existants), from the point of view of a pure ontology” (Deleuze 1977/1998).60 (Deleuze 1989: 172)

25

“outside”. 61 From here we might begin to more readily embrace the unpredictable

results that will undoubtedly ensue:

We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in otherwords, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter intocomposition with other affects, with the affects of another body, eitherto destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actionsor passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerfulbody.62

If any performer has been synonymous with pushing the boundaries of what a body

could do, it is James Brown. This is an assessment based not only on the intensity of

Brown’s dance routines and performances, but also as a reflection of his idiosyncratic

approach to musical expression. Approaching Brown’s legacy this way may appear to

be precariously headed up some essentialist path, such as conferring “blackness” a

synonymous relationship with the “body”. This is most certainly not the case,

although it is true that the specificity of bodies matters. For a start, the question is one

of the body as always the mediator of affects and, as such, of what the body can

contribute to thought. If Brown brought hope to the African-American community at

the time when it was needed most, this was perhaps via the body. Brown was – via

affective expression - redefining what it meant to be human at a time when the

political processes of a world that appeared to be anything but human. This is

precisely why the artist must intervene, or in the words of neo-realist director,

Roberto Rosselini: “…the less human the world is, the more it is the artist’s duty to

believe and produce belief in a relation between man and the world”.63 Brown might

be seen as exemplary here as he tried to push the boundaries of what a body could do

“between man and the world”, at a time when there were so many of these boundaries

in a segregated American society.

James Brown as Political Figure

Yet Brown’s idiosyncratic approach to the more traditional forms of politics has

always clouded his legacy. Take for instance, the now oft-cited, Boston Garden

61 (Deleuze 1989: 172)62 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 257)63 (Deleuze 1989: 170)

26

performance that Brown performed on the 5th April 1968, the very day of Martin

Luther King’s assassination. Brown allowed the concert to be televised as a way of

“cooling down” the expected civil unrest in the city. 64 This apparent collusion with

“the man” would place some significant strain on the goodwill that had been extended

to Brown by African-American audiences. Thus began the recasting of Brown into

“Uncle Tom”65 a position that was further exacerbated when he personally requested

to play for the troops in Vietnam shortly after.66 Brown appeared to be taking the side

of the government during the very same period that the Black Panthers were setting

up neighbourhood chapters to defend themselves against the “man” and as

Muhammad Ali would declare that, “…no Vietcong ever called me nigger”. 67 In light

of that prevailing social climate, it is easy to see how Brown could be perceived as

being rather politically ill informed.

However, it would be unfair to attribute Brown’s famous riot quelling performances

on television as a simple collusion with the enemy. Undoubtedly, from the point of

view of a “visible” politics, there are real problems with these performances.

However, there are other aspects to politics. Brown was perhaps naively attempting to

address the African-American’s ultimate enemy, its lack of visibility. At least if

Brown was on stage addressing a televised audience he might demonstrate the

potential of African-American political power through what he considered a more

productive approach to the situation at hand. For as Nelson George would

subsequently comment in The Death of Rhythm and Blues (1989), the riots only had

the effect of devastating the little infrastructure that black communities had managed

to develop up to that point.68 One might contend that the communities of the cities in

question have never fully recovered. Brown was undoubtedly aware of the irony of

64 As Brown historians Harry Weinger & Cliff White explain in the Grammy award winning liner notesto the Star Time (1991) box set: “Brown stepped to the fore. The day after King’s assassination, hewas televised in concert at the Boston Garden to calm the rioting. He was flown to Washington, D.C. tospeak on the radio and urge brotherhood. Brown and his wife were also invited to a White Housedinner with President Johnson” (Weinger & White 1991: 34).65 “But the gestures to government didn’t endear him to black militants. To them, Soul Brother No. 1was siding with ‘the Man’” (Weinger & White 1991: 35). Gerri Hirshey provides a more detailedaccount of the ensuing fallout in Nowhere to Run see (Hirshey 1985: 281-282)66 An article dedicated to Brown’s Vietnam Tour, entitled “Death or Glory” can be found in the July2003 edition of Mojo magazine (Maycock 2003).67 Ali’s legendary comment, made to a reporter in 1966 is depicted in Michael Mann’s film, Ali (2001).68 (George 1988: 97-98)

27

this situation, 69 and for his part, attempted in his own way to contain the more

destructive effects of the civil-rights struggle, including the untimely deaths of some

of its most significant leaders - Medger Evers, Malcolm X and of course Dr. Martin

Luther King.

In general, it is the realm of the macropolitical that tends to be most commonly

accepted method of guaranteeing a political future, via Brown we might begin to think

in terms of a politics of the everyday. For it is the artist, rather than the State, who can

most expediently catalyse imminent affective concerns into a form collective

enunciation. If the teleology that drove the soul aesthetic was collapsing at this time,

alongside the failure of the civil rights trajectory, there is little that the State can do to

circumvent the demise of an existential relation to history. Within such disconcerting

circumstances, Brown would have to maintain the most important attribute of the

artist, the promotion of a belief in the world rather than merely succumbing to its

failures:

The whole relation of thought to action or agency had to change; theproblem of "representing the masses" would be rethought in relation tothe space and time of minorities in accordance with a new pragmatism,a new empiricism in relation to the world or to trust in the world.70

In this thesis I will credit Brown as helping to inspire the means towards a vital and

wholly necessary empiricist conversion; that his music could inspire a belief in the

world as imminent possibility when the bottom fell out of the “transcendent”

narratives of soul. I will contend that through innovations such as funk, Brown might

be seen as attempting to restore belief in a future reminiscent of the neo-realist

filmmakers who helped to usher in the modern “time-image” cinema. However in the

place of neo-realism, Brown gave the world funk. Through funk, Brown would create

“affordances” that would be subsequently capitalised upon in a creative evolution of

DJing and sampling culture. One of the most significant affordances of Brown’s funk

might be seen in the way that it has opened up compositional practice and the

expression of duration in new ways.

69 In the documentary, James Brown: Man To Man (1968), Brown can be seen ruminating on the plightof African-Americans living in the ghettos of Watts, Washington and Harlem.70 (Rajchman 2000: 26)

28

Funk, in effect takes on these new expressions of musical time as a “rendering

visible” of broader existential circumstances. As the social movement underpinning

the civil rights struggle began to collapse, Brown’s funk would present possibilities

for a body in the world. Rather than engage in the teleology of traditional politics,

Brown’s extrovert performances were indicative of an awareness that only a belief in

the body can provide as the means to “become”, and that “becoming” is ultimately the

only real political possibility for a “minor” people.

Deleuze and Guattari’s “Minor”

The “minor” thus proposed within this notion of a “minor temporality” is based on the

Deleuze-Guattarian concept originally appearing in Kafka: Toward a Minor

Literature (1975) and further elaborated in their subsequent works, most notably A

Thousand Plateaus (1980). It is important to note that Deleuze and Guattari do not

propose the categories of major and minor in terms of quantitative relations, but

instead posit they should be perceived as reflections of relative power:

The difference between minorities and majorities isn’t their size. Aminority may be bigger than a majority. What defines the majority is amodel you have to conform to: the average European adult malecity-dweller, for example . . . A minority, on the other hand, has nomodel, it’s a becoming, a process. One might say the majority isnobody. Everybody’s caught, one way or another, in a minoritybecoming that would lead them into unknown paths if they opted tofollow it through. When a minority creates models for itself, it’sbecause it wants to become a majority, and probably has to, to surviveor prosper (to have a state, be recognized, establish its rights, forexample). But its power comes from what it’s managed to create,which to some extent goes into the model, but doesn’t depend on it: Apeople is always a creative minority, and remains one even when itacquires a majority: it can be both at once, because the two thingsaren’t lived out on the same plane.71

For Deleuze and Guattari, the minor is always in a process of “becoming” in relation

to the majoritarian or dominant forces of “stratification” (as static framing). Quite

simply if the majoritarian is a conformity to the general state of things, then the

minority is becoming something else. The differences between the two can perhaps

71 (Deleuze 1995: 173-174)

29

be understood in the following way. The purpose of the majoritarian is to maintain

stasis via common sense, similitude, habit, banality and pretty much all of the other

methods of maintaining the apparent stability of everyday life. The majoritarian

culture must, by nature, embrace conformity as it tries to keep bodies moving in a

given space rather than allowing a shifting space to move through changing bodies.

The minor, then, can be perceived as the escape route from the dominant culture. In

this sense, given that life is change, the minor culture is always better oriented to

embrace this change compared to its major counterpart. Deleuze and Guattari have

summarised these opposing orientations in the following way: “…we must distinguish

between the majoritarian as a constant and homogenous system; minorities as

subsystems; and the minoritarian as a potential, creative and created, becoming”.72

As it is always becoming, the minor has no identity per se, and thus eludes a place in

the official truths of history. For this reason the minor will instead take up what might

be perceived as the “false” (from the point of view of “official truth” or “common

sense”). In this respect the minor is not faithful to a concept of identity so much as

one of becoming. Moreover, as a concept, the minor shows this potential to become,

an orientation made possible through an openness to the infinite dimensions of

coexistent alterities that might be used to oppose official (and rather more static)

versions of history:

History is made only by those who oppose history (not by those whoinsert themselves into it, or even reshape it). This is not done forprovocation but happens because the punctual system they foundready-made, or themselves invented, must have allowed this operation:free the line and the diagonal, draw the line instead of plotting a point,produce an imperceptible diagonal instead of clinging to an evenelaborated or reformed vertical or horizontal. When this is done italways goes down in History but never comes from it.73

As I will discuss in detail in chapter 7, funk’s emphasis of the groove might be

considered a musical expression of an opposition to the “punctual system” or the

“common sense” version of the linear flow of time. Or, perhaps rather more simply,

72 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 105-106)73 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 295-296)

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the groove of funk reinforces a sense of becoming-time rather than an ideologically

constructed one. In fact, from the minor point of view, the purpose of time is to throw

the “truths” that constitute official history into question.74 Thus, a revised orientation

to time can only be found through a falsification of such “truths” and a recognition

that such falsity virtually co-exists with the truth’s apparent actuality.

This is why I argue in chapter 8 that it is through the power of the “false”, the

eruption of the virtual, of possibilities of becoming, into the actual, that we can more

readily pursue Brown’s contribution. This is not to say that Brown should be valued

for falsifying history himself, but rather, for setting the affordances into place that

allowed a future people to do so. To provide for a future of DJ and sampling culture

that would make such decisive use of Brown’s refrains. The artists of future electronic

dance music cultures that would emerge in the wake of the soul, would set about

creating the instruments needed to challenge history in a way that evokes the time-

image’s challenge to a given, state-sanctioned recollection. In both, the minor

assumes a position oriented to a future rather than maintaining the identity of an

official past. This is why Deleuze and Guattari assert in A Thousand Plateaus, that

“[b]ecoming is an anti-memory”.75 To become, one must spend one’s life turning

one’s back on habit, and otherwise act in service of the new. Becoming is not tied to

history, because one can only transcend the shackles of one’s past by attempting to

forget it. The work of art, then, might intervene in the body’s relation to history as it

demands its audience to make sense of its chaos and thus challenges our more

habitual experiences of perception.

The work of art is predisposed to this opening up of the “past-preserved” – to

undermine the represented past upon which official histories are dependent. The

minor will thus embrace art as the means to overturn this dominant form of historical

time. For this reason, art’s minor status, established through the production of affects

or becomings will be understood in contradistinction to the concept of opinion as the

organisational property of the majority.76 As Deleuze and Guattari write in What is

Philosophy? “[t]he essence of opinion is will to majority and already speaks in the

74 (Deleuze 1989: 130)75 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 294)76 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 146)

31

name of majority” 77 and they explain this through the example of the competition

which asks its audience to provide its opinion but where you can only “win”, “…if

you say the same as the majority of those participating”. 78 To break from this

stultifying majoritarian world of opinion we require that character who is not out to

win any such competitions, the character that Deleuze refers to as the “seer”.79 For the

seer’s innocence of the dominant constructions of truth thus subverts its perpetuation.

The “seer” or the “idiot”, are Deleuzean characters of naïve difference who play a

vital role in the overturning of orthodoxy.80 As I will argue in chapter 6, Brown too

might be seen as an “idiot”, as his music would make possible alternative means of

expression for a “minor” people who have no place in a dominant history, or as Laura

Marks has offered in her discussion of post-colonial cinema the “…violent histories to

which its dominant population is blind”.81

“Minor” Literature, “Minor” Music

Through the example of Brown’s funk, we might also demonstrate how the concept of

minority is one synonymous with collectivity.82 In regard to this idea of collectivity, I

will discuss in chapter 6, how Brown’s ensemble approach to composition might be

seen to resist the type of “mastery” or virtuosity that characterised the compositional

practices occurring concurrently in fields such as rock and jazz. This might be a

provocative assertion, but it makes sense if contextualised through Deleuze and

Guattari’s concept of a “minor literature”. The post-war styles of jazz from bebop to

“cool” to “free jazz” styles shared correlations with a majoritarian idea of authorship,

where the author/genius expounds some great insight about the world. In this respect

77 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 146)78 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 146)79 The “seer” is a figure that Deleuze will ascribe to the films of Rossellini namely, “a cinema of theseer and no longer of the agent” (Deleuze 1989: 126). Deleuze will contend that the characters of filmssuch as Rosselini’s (and other Neorealist auteurs) might “see” but this does not necessarily providethem with an accompanying capacity to act. Just like the cinema audience itself, the characters of theneorealist films are able to see situations but are unable to act or react to them (Deleuze 1989: 126).80 See (Deleuze 1994: 130-131) and also (Deleuze 1989: 128). As Deleuze writes in Cinema 2,‘Sensory-motor situations have given way to pure optical and sound situations to which characters,who have become seers, cannot or will not react, so great is the Dostoevskian condition as taken up byKurosawa: in the most pressing situations, The Idiot feels the need to see the terms of a problem whichis more profound than the situation, and even more pressing” (Deleuze 1989: 128).81 (Laura U. Marks 2000: 27-28)82 (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 17)

32

the rather more populist outlook of the funk style would eschew the values of

virtuosity, and as I will recount in detail in chapter 5, Brown’s more general shift to

an idea of “don’t do no soloing brother, just keep what you got”, 83 as articulated in

his 1970 track, Funky Drummer (1970). The maintenance of the groove, as the vehicle

of collective experience and its promotion of a minor becoming, presents some

similarities with Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the “minor literature”. For instead of

expounding the virtuosity of the author/genius, the “minor literature” is instead

directed towards the formation of a collective. Deleuze and Guattari find such

collective formation in the “minor literature” of Franz Kafka, who they say, does not

define or write on behalf of any current people in particular, for a “minor literature”

refers to no subject, but rather appeals for future “collective assemblages of

enunciation”.84

To explain how a minor literature might mobilise such collective assemblages of

enunciation, Deleuze and Guattari explain how Kafka as a Czech Jew, would express

his minority by assuming a writing style that would utilise a variety of languages - the

Czech vernacular, Hebrew (what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the mythic

language), Yiddish, which itself is a “…nomadic movement of deterritorialization that

reworks German”, 85 as well as the literature of his milieu, Prague German. Prague

German itself, Deleuze and Guattari add, “…is a deterritorialized language,

appropriate for strange and minor uses. (This can be compared in another context to

what blacks in America today are able to do with the English language)”.86

Kafka’s literature will thus produce a new assemblage of enunciation in relation to

this specific minority circumstance.87 Working between these languages, Kafka

becomes “a sort of stranger within his own language”.88The result is a “minor

literature” which makes use of a plurilingualism that reflects the writer’s

83 (Brown 1970a)84 (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 18)85 (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 25)86 (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 17)87 (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 18-19)As Deleuze and Guattari write the “…minor no longer designatesspecific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is calledgreat (or established) literature” (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 18) . The “minor literature” then, is a“revolutionary force for all literature” and uses“dryness” and its “poverty” whereby it will push“…deterritorialization to such an extreme that nothing remains but intensities” (Deleuze & Guattari1986: 19).88 (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 26)

33

environmental assemblage. This is why Deleuze and Guattari argue that a minor

literature should not be understood as the product of an individual subject, but rather

as a collective enunciation of “a people” and an expression of a “revolutionary

machine-to-come”.89 Deleuze and Guattari write further on this idea in A Thousand

Plateaus, offering that the form of this revolutionary machine-to-come is manifest,

“…as seeds, crystals of becoming whose value is to trigger uncontrollable movements

and deterritorializations of the mean or majority”. 90 Here I shall argue that

Brown’s/funk’s shifting of rhythmic emphasis to “the one” evokes a similar minor

becoming, a method of re-assembling duration in a way that would allow for new and

increasingly radical affective relations and associations between bodies.

Brown’s music will receive this inordinate amount of attention by the generations of

dance music producers “to come”, because of certain rhythmic “affordances” that

beckon the music to be re-assembled again at a later time. Such “affordances” might

be considered in the following way: when the early hip-hop DJ’s such as Kool Herc

decided to take two turntables and synthesise James Brown records into new

compositions, the components of Brown’s music must have indicated something of

this future utility. This is what I mean when I argue that Brown helped to virtualise

the conditions for a future electronic dance music.

The Literature on James Brown

One must assume that it is testament to Brown’s minor status that when compared to

other popular music contemporaries such as The Beatles or Bob Dylan, there is a

relative dearth of investigative literature compared to the scale of his musical

impact.91 Perhaps as a way of counteracting this shortfall, Brown involved himself in

not one, but two separate autobiographies. The first of these was The Godfather of

89 (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 18 )90 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 106)91 Just days before I finalise this thesis, an article entitled, “Being James Brown” is published in theJune 2006 edition of Rolling Stone magazine (Lethem 2006). The authors Jonathan Lethem andDouglas Wolk write, “Someday, someone will write a great biography of James Brown. It will, bynecessity, though, be more than a biography. It will be a history of a half-century of the contradictionsand tragedies embodied in the fate of African-Americans in the New World; it will be a parable, even,of the contradictions of the individual in the capitalist society, portentous as that may sound. For JamesBrown is both a willing and conscious embodiment of his race, of its strivings toward self-respect in aracist world, and a consummate self-made man, an entrepreneur of the impossible” (Lethem 2006).

34

Soul (1986) written with Bruce Tucker (and timed to coincide with Brown’s induction

into the Rock’n’roll hall of fame), and more recently Brown has seen fit to tell all

again in another account titled, I Feel Good (2005) with Marc Eliot. Whilst the latter

title is full of factual errors and inconsistencies, 92 Brown’s lack of fidelity to his very

public past is further testament to the arbitrary nature of historical facts, and perhaps

how little they explain about a life at all. Indeed, if Brown is so used to becoming,

why stop creating now?

To get closer to understanding what might have driven Brown’s musical

experimentation, one might turn to former Brown bandleader Fred Wesley, whose Hit

Me Fred: Confessions of a Side Man (2002) has provided an illuminating addition to

the still comparatively slim body of Brown scholarship. Wesley’s book provided the

first detailed descriptions of what it was like to operate as part of the James Brown

machine. Wesley’s book does not disappoint, providing an insider account of the

arduous and mostly unnecessary, band rehearsals, and rather more surprisingly, an

expression of the contempt that Brown’s band members felt for their leader and his

music.

By their very nature, biographical accounts are limited in regard to a more rigorous

accounting of the ontological considerations of their subject’s work, the process of

how things become rather than simply recounting what a particular personality did.

Much of the shortfall might be found in articulating decisive links between Brown’s

work and the DJ culture that embraced it so emphatically. Whilst the late 1980s and

early 1990s were watershed years for the sampling of James Brown’s music, there

was a relative drought in terms of its more theoretical documentation. The only book

92 This latest “memoir” was almost certainly ghost written by co-author, Marc Eliot. Music writer andJames Brown aficionado, Douglas Wolk writes in his review of the book, that instead of updatingBrown’s previous autobiography, the latter merely not only offers a tired re-tread but one filled witherrors to boot. Wolk writes, “ I Feel Good—with an introduction credited to Marc Eliot, who prettyobviously ghost-wrote the rest—starts from the beginning and ignores The Godfather of Soulaltogether. That's a curious decision, since it results in passages like this one, about the group hebrought with him to perform for American soldiers in Vietnam in 1968: "Sadly, with the exception ofDanny Ray, my so-called 'Cape Man,' they've all passed on. There were Waymon Reed on guitar,Clyde Shubble on drums, and Tim Drummond on bass." Clyde Stubblefield, possibly the most famousfunk drummer ever, would probably be very surprised to hear that Brown thinks he's dead (and thinksthat his name's "Shubble"); so would singer Marva Whitney, who was in that group, too. WaymondReed has indeed passed away, but he was the Vietnam crew's trumpeter; the late Jimmy Nolen was theguitarist. If, for some reason, Eliot was unclear about this stuff, he could have checked it by looking atthe older book—or the liner notes of any number of James Brown CDs”(Wolk 2005).

35

to appear at that time is the excellent, and now difficult to find, Living in America:

The Soul Saga of James Brown (1990) by Cynthia Rose. Rose’s account was the first

attempt to illustrate Brown’s ongoing effect on contemporary music and the then

burgeoning sampling culture. In addition, the book also provided some of the first

insider accounts of working with Brown to be had at the time. Rose draws on

interviews with Brown and his former band members, in an attempt to unearth the

roots of what she refers to as Brown’s “surrealistic” musical outlook.93 Rose’s

enticing proposition of Brown as “surrealist” is unfortunately never extrapolated

explicitly. This does not detract from my enthusiasm for the book, and its engaging

critically informed profile of Brown.

Inspired perhaps by the wave of sampling of Brown’s music in the preceding decade,

by the mid-1990s, more titles did begin to appear, and in relatively close proximity.

One was Geoff Brown’s James Brown: Doin’ It to Death (1996). Geoff Brown’s book

provided the most encompassing biographical profile yet, based as it was on decades

of research undertaken by world-renowned Brown scholar (and confidante), Cliff

White. The other, equally illuminating title was Rickey Vincent’s award-winning

Funk (1996). The latter, however, attempts a broader overview of the funk genre in

general, and as such, Brown’s contribution to the genesis of the style was condensed

into the space of a chapter.

Prior to Rickey Vincent’s publication, the funk genre had been subject to relative

theoretical neglect, and as Vincent himself pointed out, his book attempted the first

dedicated text on the genre.94 In terms of tracing the evolution of Brown’s “One” into

an aesthetic, Vincent’s book attempted to provide an erudite genealogical account that

previously had to be gleaned from a myriad of sources, for the specificity of the funk

genre tended to become subsumed by more general accounts of the soul aesthetic. Of

these titles, an early and perhaps more esoteric title, was Michael Haralambos’ Right

On: From Blues to Soul in Black America (1974). Haralambos discusses the

emergence of soul and its impact and decline through chart statistics. Whilst

Haralambos’ work is overtly empirical in nature, Gerri Hirshey’s Nowhere To Run

(1983) on the other hand, would proffer a series of contemporary portraits of the

93 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 38-39)94 (Vincent 1996: xvii)

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major artists to emerge in the soul period. At the time of writing, in the early 1980s,

many of Hirshey’s subjects, were considered as “washed up” as the soul aesthetic they

espoused. Hirshey’s detailed portraits expertly capture much of the pathos to be

drawn from the performers’ experience of life after soul. With the benefit of

retrospect, and knowing that sampling culture was waiting around the corner,

Hirshey’s text captures an interesting time, appearing as it does just prior to the

sampling culture that would change the fortunes of many of these artists in an

inconceivable way. Having spent significant time on the road with Brown, Hirshey

succinctly captures the Godfather during one of his least successful periods, and is

rendered in the exquisite detail that such levels of access might potentially bring.

Following Hirshey’s book was another equally noteworthy entry in the field, Peter

Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music (1986). Guralnick’s book provided a comprehensive

historical account of the rise of the soul music style. Just as one would expect, Soul

Brother No. 1,95 is inordinately represented throughout Guralnick’s account, although

given the scale of his task, the Brown story is mostly confined to a lengthy chapter.96

However, with the exception of Cynthia Rose’s book, which makes the odd reference

to postmodernism and critical theory, none of these books is what you might call a

sustained academic account of Brown’s work. In fact, with their focus more resolutely

cast on the vagaries of biographical detail, these types of books are aimed specifically

at accounting for the past, rather than addressing how Brown’s music would affect the

future. In this regard, one would hope that academia would perhaps pick up the slack.

However, this has not yet been the case.97

Musicology and Essentialism

Musicology for instance, has, by and large seemed to have failed Brown’s work. The

available texts tend to invest too heavily in the idea that funk was something of a

95 (Weinger & White 1991: 41)96 I have deliberately left out titles such as Dave Thompson’s book Funk (2001) which is subtitled “alistening companion” and is mostly a compendium of record reviews (David Thompson 2001).97 Unavailable at the time of writing and to be released by Wesleyan University Press in late 2006 is anew text by Anne Danielsen entitled, Presence and Pleasure: The Funk Grooves of James Brown andParliament.

37

rekindling of African diasporic history98 without accounting for the more imminent

(and immanent) circumstances that produced it. For instance, in one of the few

academic discussions of Brown’s music, David Brackett’s “James Brown’s Superbad

and the Double-voiced Utterance” (1992/1995)99 we are ultimately presented with an

analysis of James Brown’s Superbad (1970), that rather underwhelmingly concludes

with the observation that the song is significant of the “critical difference” that exists

between African-American and Euro-American compositional approaches.100

Brackett’s approach is obviously well intentioned, and it would appear that his study

is an attempt to restore interest in Brown’s musical contribution in light of the legal

difficulties of the late eighties, which “…made him a frequent subject of caricature

and derision”.101 Yet Brackett’s legitimisation of Brown’s compositional approach is

based on its apparent adherence to the European derived mathematical proportions of

the so-called Golden Section, (of which Brackett asserts that James Brown's

"Superbad" conforms to aesthetically by maintaining a ratio of 0.618 to 1).102 This

will lead to Brackett’s observation that Brown’s “naturalness” allows him to achieve

the same results as the “calculated” composition of European art musics.103 Targeting

such “essentialisation of ethnic characteristics in music”, 104 noted musicologist Philip

Tagg singles out Brackett’s essay for criticism. In particular, Tagg takes offence at

Brackett’s ascription of Brown into a generally unspecified “Africanness”, declaring

that: “…Brackett knows there is a problem but seems sometimes to be trapped within

it. The terms of reference defining this problem need to be criticised and widened to

make real historical sense”.105

98 From Werner’s A Change is Gonna Come, “…there’s no doubt that once the Godfather of Soul tookhis rhythm stick to ‘the one," American music became something different, blacker, and more Africanthan it had ever been before”(Werner 2000: 25).99 First published in (David Brackett 1992) and reprinted in collection (David Brackett 1995) the text towhich this thesis refers.100 (David Brackett 1995: 156)101 (David Brackett 1995: 155)102 (David Brackett 1995: 152)103 (David Brackett 1995: 154)104 (Tagg 1998)105 Tagg’s problems with Brackett’s essay include the following, - “…the essentialist risk of projectionthat I think comes to the surface in the Billie Holiday and James Brown sections of the book. Similarly,it seems to me that these traces of ethnic essentialism are compounded by the author’s implicitacceptance of the common US-centric assumption that by “Africa” is meant only those regions of WestAfrica from which humans were deported as slaves to end up in what is now the USA. It is as thoughmusic from Central or East Africa, not to mention music from the Khoi-San and Arabic areas of thesame continent was in some sense not equally African. In short, Brackett knows there is a problem butseems sometimes to be trapped within it. The terms of reference defining this problem need to becriticised and widened to make real historical sense” (Tagg 1998).

38

Perhaps the problem of such musicological analysis is that it attempts to “interpret”

composition in terms of identity, a presupposition that forever pushes it precariously

into essentialism no matter how valiantly it tries to avoid it. Whilst the predisposition

to identify will probably remain with us, the point is that it should not be the crux of

musical analysis, because the intention of music itself is otherwise. Always otherwise,

as imperceptible becoming, or as Deleuze and Guattari write in A Thousand Plateaus,

a becoming that requires a “… forgetting as opposed to memory”.106 The most radical

musical composition is not concerned in the least about its identity but rather, its

forgetting.

I am aware, however, that such apparent indifference to identity and inherent to a

minor temporality, might be seen as my own anti-essentialist denial of important

cultural legacies. This, however, is not the case. As I will discuss in detail in the next

chapter, my own perspective on the matter of cultural identity is informed by Paul

Gilroy’s idea of an “anti-anti essentialism” 107 - that is, neither an essentialist appeal

to authenticity nor a denial of identity, but rather a commitment to articulating the

complexity of hybridity. Approaching any attribution of identity with caution can only

mitigate the genealogical approaches that reify Brown’s identity, for example, into

more general “African” characteristics: “the Real Thing was James Brown…Brown

was proof that black people were different. Rhythmically and tonally blacks had to be

from somewhere else. Proof that Africa was really over there for those of us who had

never seen it - it was in that voice ...”108

The only problem with this idea, as I will address in detail in chapter 4, is that Brown

professed to have little idea as to why his music was compared to with African

musical forms: “I went over there and I heard their thing, and I felt their thing. But I

honestly hadn’t heard their thing in mine”.109 Bearing the admonitions against the

more simplistic appeals to identity, as delivered for example via Paul Gilroy’s Black

Atlantic, firmly in mind, I will attempt to endow Brown’s music with the complexity

it deserves.

106 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 296)107 (Gilroy 1993: 101)108 (Davis in Guralnick: 243)109 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 126)

39

A complexity that not only dispenses with proselytising Brown’s African pedigree,

but one that might circumvent the other popular essentialist trap; the disturbing

inclination to perpetuate a false dichotomy that attributes an “authenticity” to funk

that is judged against the “artificiality” of electronic music practices, evident in the

following excerpt from Rickey Vincent’s book Funk (1996):

Funk returned to the ideals of the African ensemble just as technologybegan to push American music toward artificiality. Just as the electricFender Rhodes piano, the Moog synthesizer, Hohner clavinet, andARP ensemble synthesizer were introduced into black popular music,the conga player, percussion section, Kalimba, and the extended jamwere also incorporated. Funk became the medium by which electronicsound effects never before heard on synthesizers of the future could bechannelled through a black aesthetic, complemented by traditionalsounds of the past, creating a better understanding of the present. Fromthe extremes of a simple drumbeat, to orchestrated polyphonicarrangements played by multiple musicians in unison, to a celebrationof deep individual expression, funk music was arranged to bring “soul”to the people through the new formulas of popular music.110

Perhaps it would be more reasonable to argue, that it was black music forms, and funk

in particular, that introduced many of the compositional elements that were

subsequently capitalised upon by electronic music. For rather than dichotomising funk

and the electronic, the most pertinent gesture would be to bring them closer together.

For Brown’s music, in particular, proposed no less than a new compositional

mentality, which, as John Cale confirms below, would bring an unprecedented, almost

clockwork, exactitude and precision to popular music:

…it was a search for perfection…He would say, "If you play thewrong note I’m going to dock your pay one hundred dollars!" Therewas a kind of mentality of absolute exactitude. The electric metronomecame in and it would not change by one iota. It was rigid all the waythrough”.111

Despite such evidence, there has been a relative lack of attention to the direct

contribution of black music forms to contemporary electronic music styles, a criticism

110 (Vincent 1996: 19-20)111 (Cale in Gilbert & Pearson 1999: 123)

40

made by Tricia Rose in her book, Black Noise (1994). Responding to an otherwise

well received essay, Andrew Goodwin’s “Sample and Hold: Pop Music in the Age of

Digital Reproduction” (1990), Rose takes exception to the fact that whilst Goodwin

can proclaim that, “[w]e have grown used to connecting machines and funkiness”, 112

he offers no further discussion of the black music practitioners who created this

funkiness:

[Goodwin] refers to four major contemporary black dance forms-disco,hip hop, Hi-NRG, and house-as the bases for his argument regardingthe way in which technology is made funky and the community-basednature of these forms without one reference to black cultural priorities,black musical traditions, or black people. He makes no mention ofblack practitioners and the possibility that these dance artists are usingsampling technology to articulate black approaches to sound, rhythm,timbre, motion, and community.113

This study hopes to elucidate some of the connections that need to be made between

this apparently symbiotic relationship between funkiness and technology. The use of

“technology” should not be limited to just music expressed through an electronic

medium, rather, machines should be seen as being necessary in order to take up the

affordances provided by these “…black approaches to sound, rhythm, timbre, motion,

and community” that Rose refers to. This requires a precise study of the conditions of

the emergence of all of these together.

Brown’s subjection to an unconscious dichotomizing, illustrated by Vincent’s

opposition of soul to the “artificiality” of machines, has only served to “other” Brown

from his own history of experimental, even “avant-garde” musicianship. Whilst

Brown was not necessarily a pioneer in utilising electronic instruments in the way that

one might think of Stockhausen or Schaeffer, 114 his approach to rhythm was equally

experimental. This commitment to experimentation was precisely the attribute that

would set Brown apart from performers that emerged from similar circumstances,

artists such as Ray Charles or Al Green for example. Unlike these performers,

112 (Goodwin 1990: 263)113 (Tricia Rose 1994: 84)114 I refer here to the German composer associated with the European serialist movement, KarlheinzStockhausen and French sound technician/composer Pierre Schaeffer associated with “musiqueconcrète” movement. Both of these composers are given pride of place in a post-war history ofelectronic music, Stockhausen for his work in electronic synthesis and Schaeffer for pioneering the tapemanipulation of the “musique concrète” style. See (Morgan 1991: 463-467).

41

however, Brown would maintain an authority in future electronic dance musics and

the emergence of minor genres - from Afrobeat to hip-hop – to a degree not readily

enjoyed by his peers.115

Funk was so stylistically radical, that in its audacity alone, a challenge was sent out to

the more “common sense” methods of composition. Funk expressed a commitment to

difference over an adherence to identity. This commitment to difference, rather than

identity, would enable Brown to transform such “common sense” even outside the

musical field. Brown’s iconic status among the more minor populations of the world

was perhaps testament to his audacity.

As I will discuss in the next chapter, Brown’s enduring popularity among African-

Americans, is a result of his ability to catalyse the inner experience of the hybrid

subject in musical form. I will attempt to articulate this idea of a “minor” sense of

duration through Paul Gilroy’s concept of the Black Atlantic subject and thus propose

that the musical composition might capture something of the experience of the split

subjectivity or “double consciousness” of the hybridity of the diasporic subject.

However in my efforts to maintain a theoretical fidelity with the concepts of the

Cinema books, I will also attempt to marry the notion of the Black Atlantic with that

of Marc Augé’s concept of the any-space-whatever, for the perpetual transitional

subjectivity of the Black Atlantic subject, is perhaps characteristic of a more enduring

embodiment of this any-space-whatever, a circumstance that I will describe as

significant of the “intolerable” conditions that African-Americans have had to endure.

Accordingly, Brown’s funk might be understood as an apprehension of the intolerable

forces of this existence and the style gives tangibility to the experience of “double

consciousness”, or the inherent split subjectivity, of the Black Atlantic subject.

115 Evidence of Brown’s pre-eminent position of the “most sampled artist ever” is given in footnote 5

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CHAPTER TWO

CREATING RHYTHMS IN THE “ANY-SPACE-WHATEVER”

In the previous chapter, I proposed that radical changes in musical composition might

be conceived as an expression of an apprehension of a minor temporality. This

chapter will, then, attempt to account for the existential conditions that might

constitute the complex inner time of the minor subject. The first of these is the

condition Paul Gilroy has referred to, after African-American scholar W.E.B. DuBois,

as the “double consciousness” of the Black Atlantic subject. It is this idea that I

attempt to bring into correspondence with Deleuze’s any-space-whatever, as

discussed in his Cinema books. Using these concepts in tandem, I will analyse how

the arduous of an existence of enforced and constant transition might be rendered

visible through artistic creativity. Having established some the existential tensions

inherent to the minor subject, I will then outline some of the attempts made to

articulate an aesthetic that might more accurately reflect the intolerable conditions a

of “black” subjectivity, an observation that became more apparent to me after seeing

Melvin Van Peebles’ film, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Van Peebles’ film is

considered by Neal in Soul Babies as an exemplary post-soul text, and whilst he

provides a detailed reading of the film in terms of a newfound “empowerment” of the

black male, he says nothing about the film’s pioneering temporal composition.116 I

will make use of this example to illustrate how a revised notion of time might be at

the heart of the post-soul aesthetic, and that Van Peebles’ film should be considered

alongside of the work of James Brown as an enticing example of an artist attempting

to apprehend a minor temporality.

The Black Atlantic

Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) has deservedly assumed an esteemed place in

diasporic theory. The Black Atlantic is a concept used by Gilroy to denote the

continual process of the transcultural becoming that emerges from this region as a

116 (Neal 2002: 24-27)

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result of African migration - enforced or otherwise.117 Rather than engage in

discussion built around notions of Eurocentrism or Afrocentrism, Gilroy has instead

conceived the Black Atlantic as an attempt to provide a theoretical vehicle for "…an

explicitly transnational and intercultural" approach.118 This approach utilises the

concept of the Black Atlantic subject as making sense of an ongoing transcultural

exchange between Africa and the West. The appeal of Gilroy’s work is that it

emphasises the flows constitutive of the fluidity of becoming, rather than attempting

to reduce this emergent subjectivity to a nominal identity. Gilroy’s perspective

provides an analysis of “routes” rather than one of “roots”. 119

This focus on “routes” allows Gilroy to present the complexity of the pan-continental

becoming of the Black Atlantic subject, rather than approach its theorisation through a

more simplistic, linear migratory pattern leading from Africa into the West. Instead,

Gilroy emphasises the ongoing becoming of both Africa and the new world as a result

of the transcultural passages of the Black Atlantic subject. Gilroy argues that the best

approach to theorising the intellectual and artistic expressions of this ongoing cultural

becoming is through an “anti-anti-essentialism”. 120

Gilroy argues for a third way – an anti-anti-essentialist approach that might be

employed to otherwise overcome the rigid perspectives of essentialism and anti-

essentialism, both of which he writes have, “…become an obstacle to critical

theorising”. 121 Whilst the problem of essentialism might seem self-evident, manifest

in “... the idea that an untouched, pristine Africanity resides inside these forms,

working a powerful magic of alterity in order to trigger repeatedly the perception of

absolute identity”,122 Gilroy also contends that an anti-essentialist perspective might

dismiss completely the necessary relation between race and musical/intellectual

production.123 Broadly defining these polarities between essentialist and non-

essentialist as, “…the relationship between racial identity and racial non-identity,

117 As discussed in Paul Gilroy’s first chapter, "The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity,"in The Black Atlantic, (Gilroy 1993: 1-40).118 (Gilroy 1993: 15)119 (Gilroy 2004: 87). This play on words is the work of cultural studies theorist, Iain Chambers andappears in the text Border Dialogues (New York: Routledge, 1990).120 (Gilroy 1993: 101)121 (Gilroy 1993: 101)122 (Gilroy 1993: 101)123 (Gilroy 1993: 101)

44

between folk cultural authenticity and pop cultural betrayal”, 124 Gilroy looks to an

anti-anti-essentialism as a position flexible enough to take into account the concerns

of both theoretical positions, to stress the importance of connection without

fetishizing “authenticity”:

The preeminence of music within the diverse black communities of theAtlantic diaspora is itself an important element in their essentialconnectedness. But the histories of borrowing, displacement,transformation, and continual reinscription that the musical cultureencloses are a living legacy that should not be reified in the primarysymbol of the diaspora and then employed as an alternative to therecurrent appeal of fixity and rootedness.125

Thus Gilroy’s appeal to an anti-anti-essentialist approach allows for a discussion of a

concept of a “black music” without it being unduly hampered by the meta-

commentary on the ethicality of such a description, yet at the same time being aware

enough to maintain a vigilant resistance against the more essentialist appeals to

authenticity.126

Gilroy looks to musical examples that are creations of the Black Atlantic and exhibit

“the syncretic complexity of black expressive cultures”127 that emerge from the space.

To demonstrate the Gilroy solicits examples as diverse as The Fisk Jubilee Singers,

Jimi Hendrix and The Impressions128 as those Black Atlantic subjects that might

reflect its complex “circulatory systems”. 129 Yet I would argue that James Brown’s

music is also representative of a Black Atlantic syncreticism. Whilst Gilroy does in

fact mention James Brown’s music, it is only in passing.130 I will of course attempt to

examine Brown’s relationship to the Black Atlantic in more detail within this chapter.

124 (Gilroy 1993: 99) To quote the passage in full, “My point here is that the unashamedly hybridcharacter of these black Atlantic cultures continually confounds any simplistic (essentialist or anti-essentialist) understanding of the relationship between racial identity and racial non-identity, betweenfolk cultural authenticity and pop cultural betrayal. Here the idea of the racial community as a familyhas been invoked and appealed to as a means to signify connectedness and experiential continuity thatis everywhere denied by the profane realities of black life amid the debris of de-industrialisation”(Gilroy 1993: 99).125 (Gilroy 1993: 102)126 (Gilroy 1993: 100)127 (Gilroy 1993: 101)128 (Gilroy 1993: 89-96)129 (Gilroy 1993: 88)130 (Gilroy 1993: 104-105) In this section of the Black Atlantic, Gilroy discusses the appearance of asample of the Average White Band’s Pick Up the Pieces, which Gilroy refers to as “…a Scottishpastiche of James Brown’s JBs” (Gilroy 1993: 104-105).

45

Whilst Brown does not have the same Black Atlantic pedigree as say a peer such as

Jimi Hendrix, 131 Brown is still very much a product of this conceptual space.

Evidence of this might be perceived on the most general level in terms of his attempts

to reconnect with Africa – I will cover details of his visits there in chapter 5.

Whilst Brown was by all accounts exceedingly popular in Africa, 132 his popularity

was also problematic, in the sense that it would negatively impact upon the local

musicians.133 The reason that I will introduce Brown’s problematic relationship with

Africa here, is to foreground the often conflicting existential conditions that might

constitute the complex hybridity of the minor subject. For in common with many

other Black Atlantic subjects, Brown would also have to contend with what African-

American scholar, W.E.B. DuBois, has attributed to the African diaspora as the

condition of “double consciousness”.134

131(Gilroy 1993: 93-94). Hendrix becomes a prime candidate for the Black Atlantic treatment as hewould find fame in England after going unnoticed in his native United States. Hendrix would thenreconquer the world via his newly adopted base. As Gilroy adds Jimi was implicated in many of thepolitics of the time. “Jimi’s shifting relationship to black cultural forms and political movementscaused substantial problems when he returned to play in the United States and was denounced as a“white nigger” by some of the Black Power activists who could not fathom his choices in opting tocultivate an almost exclusively white, pop audience” (Gilroy 1993: 93)132 Long time friend and colleague, Leon Austin, describes Brown’s popularity in Africa to GerriHirshey: “You should see him in Africa. Somebody says, ‘James Brown.’ Even whisper, ‘JamesBrown.’ Every corner you pass, it’s like an echo, even out in the bush. And by the time you get to thecorner you see them in thousands. Like bees. Come out of mud shacks with James Brown albums,don’t never play them, no electricity, for sure no Victrola. But they know who is JamesBrown”(Hirshey 1984: 282)133 Kuti is quoted in Werner (1998) as saying how difficult it was in his home country of Nigeria tryingto compete with Brown, “Brown’s popularity in Africa reached such heights that Nigerian superstarFela complained that Brown had taken over African music entirely: ‘The attack was heavy, soul musiccoming in the country left and right. Man, at one point I was playing James Brown tunes among theinnovative things because everybody was demanding it and we had to eat"(Kuti in Werner 2000: 138).Although I should also add that during my research I came across an interview with Fela Kuti’s son,Femi Kuti (now a star in his own right) entitled, “Here Comes the Son” (2000). The interviewer, KelefaSanneh speaks to Kuti about the James Brown factor “KS: What about your father's influences?Everybody talks about how James Brown impressed your father in 1969, inspiring him to start playingAfro-beat. Was James Brown important to you? FK: Actually, I never really heard my dad talk aboutJames Brown. He talked more about the jazz scene in America, and the Black Panthers. But he musthave heard James Brown. I think James Brown made him think, ‘Oh, I need my own kind of music. Ineed to do my own stuff’ (Femi Kuti in Sanneh 2000).134 The concept of “double consciousness” derives from W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk(1903). It appears in the following passage from the opening chapter “After the Egyptian and Indian,the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil,and gifted with second-sight in this American world, - a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiarsensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes ofothers, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. Oneever feels his two-ness, —an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings;two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being tornasunder”(Du Bois 1903).

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Paul Gilroy considers DuBois’ notion of “double consciousness” as an inherent

existential condition of the Black Atlantic subject. This is a condition symptomatic of

the postcolonial subject, who is thrown into an assimilation of multiple worlds, yet

lacks any physical territory to which they can wholly belong. As Gilroy says, "[a]

preoccupation with the striking doubleness that results from this unique position-- in

an expanded West but not completely of it-- is a definitive characteristic of the

intellectual history of the black Atlantic".135

This “double consciousness” inherent in the hybridity of the Black Atlantic will

exacerbate a split subjectivity, a condition that many African-Americans, including

Brown himself, would have to negotiate. Whilst I will further discuss the problems

Brown had to contend with more fully in chapter 5, his identification with ‘the Man’

would be one of the more overt manifestations of having to mediate “between”

cultures. Although I should add that it is not the hybridity itself that is the problem –

in fact hybridity is something that is common to us all – the problem is that it affects

us in different ways in relation to imminent social circumstances. The Black

Atlantic/minor subject has to endure the constant becoming of hybridity, yet is also

denied the means to express that difference in an overtly political fashion. For this

reason a minor people including this Black Atlantic subject, might be regarded as a

“people who are missing” . This is the people that is produced through the work of art

and might emerge in the future, as Deleuze has contended in relation to his own

example of a cinematic becoming.136 What I propose here is that musical artistry,

whether jazz, blues, funk and beyond might be seen to contribute to this necessary

“…invention of a people”.137

It is in this facilitating of an invention of a people that the arts come into their own.

Within intolerable circumstances, the artwork will facilitate an expression of the

coexistent temporalities of “double consciousness” into durable existential territory.

The successful artist, then, might be the one who attempts to express the inner

temporality of the minority situation through a creative synthesis of time that allows

an existential territory to come into being. The artwork provides an appropriate

135 (Gilroy 1993: 58)136 (Deleuze 1989: 217)137 (Deleuze 1989: 217)

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catalyst for these new syntheses of time and space, creating a patch of relatively stable

territory within a broader state of existential flux. This returns us to the importance of

music as a territorialising force, for it expresses time in a new way, often reconceiving

relations to broader social movements in the process. This is why I shall argue in this

thesis for the importance of music as something that enables social movements to

“become”, and to assemble new territories through time. The creation of territory is a

vital need in the minor existence of “nomadic space” of the Black Atlantic. I shall

now discuss the nature of this “nomadic space” as possessing the characteristics of the

any-space-whatever.

Augé’s “Non-Places” and Deleuze’s Any-Space-Whatever

In Cinema 1, Deleuze introduces the concept of the any-space-whatever (espace

quelconque).138 This would appear to be Deleuze’s interpretation of the “non-places”

originally theorised by Marc Augé.139 For Augé, these “non-places” are “…spaces

which are not of themselves anthropological places”140 but are instead, “…spaces

formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure)…”141 These

transitory spaces are mediated only through the signifiers of commerce and exist only

for commodification. Augé’s examples of these “non-places” include airport transit

lounges, supermarket checkouts, fast food restaurants and even road signs. 142 Vast

numbers of individuals move anonymously through these abstract spaces mediated

only for the purposes of fulfilling commercial contracts.143 The “non-place” thus

differs from the organic, “anthropological space” for the very reason that

“…anthropological places create the organically social” in distinction to these “non-

places” that “…create solitary contractuality”. 144

138 (Deleuze 1986: 109)139 There has been some confusion as to the attribution of authorship. For Deleuze will refer to MarcAugé as “Pascal” Augé. Given that the concept of the “any-space-whatever” whilst similar, is not adirect translation of “non-lieux" which as Charles Stivale notes whilst authors such as Reda Bensmaiawill draw “…extensively from Marc Augé in his essay…it is not clear at all that Marc Augé uses theactual term "espace quelconque" itself” (Stivale 2005).140 (Augé 1995: 78)141 (Augé 1995: 94)142 (Augé 1995: 96-101)143 (Augé 1995: 101-102)144 (Augé 1995: 94)

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As Jeffrey A. Bell discusses in his essay “Thinking with Cinema: Deleuze and Film

Theory” (1997), Deleuze takes up Augé’s concept of the “any-space-whatever” as

“…a nomadic space, a point of transit between places of “importance”, such as the

metro, which is merely the space one passes through between home and work”. 145The

Deleuzean any-space-whatevers are those spaces where, “… individuals become

depersonalized. No one notes or concerns themselves with one another. The place is

crowded but everyone is alone. It is for this reason, that Augé’s “any space

whatsoever” is a homogenous, de-singularizing space”.146

I think there is an enlightening theoretical juxtaposition to be had by aligning the any-

space-whatever and Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic. For example, slavery may well be

the most deplorable example of the breakdown of anthropological space. The slave

emerges from the Black Atlantic as a token of capital exchange and identified only as

commodity. Hence this historical precondition of the Black Atlantic subject might

present a pertinent correlation to the Deleuzean analysis of Augé’s any-space-

whatever.

It is the lack of determination of the Black Atlantic and the any-space-whatever which

might be the basis of their relationship and a situation that may well be traced right

into the present, although in bringing the conceptual considerations of Gilroy and

Deleuze together, I am not attempting to deny the vast cultural legacy of the Black

Atlantic. If anything the opposite is the case. The creative opportunities of the any-

space-whatever are perhaps more readily grasped through the more optimistic

Deleuzean version of the concept than the dystopian, spiritually bereft, “non-place”.

This is why I believe it might be more suited to the Black Atlantic condition.

Deleuze himself contends that the subject of the any-space-whatever lacks the sense

of belonging in these spaces. Yet, in distinction to Augé’s more dystopian vision of

the proliferation of “non-places”, this lack of identity might also offer infinite

possibility for connection. 147 Whilst I will return to this more productive concept of

the any-space-whatever later in the chapter, for present purposes we need only to

145 (Bell 1997)146 (Bell 1997)147 (Deleuze, 1986:109)

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understand that this productivity is a result of the inherent chaos of these any-space-

whatevers pushing their inhabitants into a creation of territory. This territorial creation

is what constitutes the artistic process, to signify presence in this space, even if its

subject will never really fully belong to such territories. This situation explains the

emergence of the “elements” of hip-hop culture, DJing, MCing breakdancing and

graffiti – as territorial reactions to their any-space-whatever existence. There is

perhaps much to gain theoretically by conceiving of the Black Atlantic as one of the

most encompassing of any-space-whatevers. Using Deleuze’s concept, this space can

retain its vast cultural legacy and at the same time as enduring, becomes potential.

Indeed, the creativity of the minor in these any-space-whatevers is perhaps due to

being thrown into the chaos of an intolerable position. This might be understood as

the ongoing “pain” that Gilroy has argued that the Black Atlantic subject continues to

endure, 148 a pain that has required a sustained campaign of territorial creation ever

since.

As such, we can approach musical composition as an “apprehension of a minor

temporality”, as one arrived at in the hope of co-opting a sense of rhythmic order from

within the chaos of the social. Taking this musical apprehension of an existential

temporality as central to the Black Atlantic subject requires an extrapolation of how

this subject might be composed through a complex interplay of the forces of time.

Hybridity, by nature, is always precariously balanced between coexistent forms of

time. As a result, the apprehension of a minor temporality is “minor” precisely

because it opens up the possibility of a becoming-time appropriate to the minor, one

that will provide a reworking of the state of a “double consciousness” of the hybrid

subject.

I should also add here that by extending the type of becoming spaces discussed by

Gilroy and Deleuze/Augé into a more holistic idea of the “apprehension of a minor

temporality”, we might overcome some of the criticisms that have been directed at the

ascription of such “double consciousness”. For example postcolonial scholar,

Annabelle Sreberny says that Gilroy’s model does not adequately account for the

148 (Gilroy 2004: 207)

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complexity of contemporary diasporic consciousness.149 Whilst she generally speaks

admiringly of Gilroy’s work she says that “double consciousness”, “…remains too

bipolar to adequately capture the complexity and richness of some contemporary

diasporic consciousness: we seem to need even more than simply ‘here’ and

‘there’”.150 Sreberny proffers Brah’s idea of “diaspora space” as offering this

complexity as it “…is precisely the contradictions of and between location and

dislocation, the ‘border crossings’ and the ‘diasporic identities’ that need to be

explored in their complexity: “diaspora space is the intersectionality of diaspora,

border and dis/location as a point of confluence of economic, political, cultural and

psychic processes, of peoples, cultures, capital, commodities”. 151 Taking the ideas of

Gilroy and Brah into account, Sreberny contends that “[a] further shift seems to be

needed, to examine the movements across space and time that lead to novel hybrid,

complex ‘third spaces’ of cultural practice and identification. Global diasporic

consciousness may be a particular vivid example of this imaginary third space of

identification”. 152 Her rationale being that “such a construction supports the

conceptual move from identity viewed as ‘either/or’ to a sense of identifications as

‘and/and’ [which] seems preferable to the claim of identity as ‘hybridity’ [and] a new

mixing which seems to simply highlight some putative pristine original states”. 153

Sreberny’s argument against identity, diasporic or otherwise is hardly a novel concept

and if anything resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’s own concerns about

identification which is behind their own conceptualisation of the more encompassing

notion of the minor.

Deleuze and Guattari’s “minor” is far more accommodating to a more general

assimilation of becoming and it allows for infinite complexity. The concept of the

“minor” also encompasses an inherent sense of creativity in the sense that the minor

must find ways of escaping majoritarian temporal domination. Hence, the artistic

creativity of the minor subject might be found in the tensions between the official

forms of limited and regulated recollection granted by the majoritarian “image of

thought” on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fuller virtuality or potential of

149 (Sreberny 2000: 181)150 (Sreberny 2000: 181)151 (Brah in Sreberny 2000: 181)152 (Sreberny 2000: 181)153 (Sreberny 2000: 181)

51

the complete past-preserved, as a reservoir for the creation of alternatives. This is a

tension identified that might be identified as the “minor” nature of the time-image in

comparison to the more majoritarian aims of the movement-image cinema. I contend

that these tensions will provide a source of creative agitation as both the compulsion

behind the formulation of a new cinema, or similarly, a new music, at the hands of an

artist such as James Brown.

Brown’s music operates on a similar existential basis to minor cinema, an artistic

engagement with the potential of becoming, achieved through attempts at a form of

recollection more dynamic than that provided by majoritarian images of thought and

culture. However, it should be noted, that despite this achievement, upon such

recollection the subject is still caught up in the inherent doubling of senses of time

and this process leads to a split subjectivity even if with a different political

constitution to that aligned with majoritarian culture. The precariousness of this

situation, considering the intolerable circumstances of the minor, might also be

foundational to those described as the post-soul generation.

Recollection, Virtuality and the Post-Soul Aesthetic

As discussed in chapter 1, Nelson George would develop the concept of a “post-soul”

generation as a general description of the generation that followed the decline of the

soul aesthetic of the preceding civil-rights generation. Mark Anthony Neal further

builds on this concept in his Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul

Aesthetic (2002), giving the concept further theoretical rigour through postmodern

critical thinking. Neal’s proposed “post-soul aesthetic” provides a concept that

attempts to demonstrate how the aesthetic practices of the post-soul generation were

marked by a cynicism toward the narratives of the preceding soul generation. To this

end, “…components of post-soul strategies…willingly ‘bastardize’ black history and

culture to create alternative meanings, a process that was largely introduced to the

post-soul generation via the blaxploitation films of the 1970s”.154

154 (Neal 2002: 22)

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Neal quite reasonably interprets the post-soul aesthetic through postmodern theory,

although he is very much aware of the cultural problems that continue to surround this

type of analysis:155

Many have described the contemporary American experience,including the experiences of the black diaspora within it, as an exampleof postmodernity, a term that is at best foreign within the African-American community and contentious among some traditional blackintellectual circles…Much of the criticism directed at the use ofpostmodern theory by black intellectuals has sprung from discomfortwith the import of decidedly European-based theories to exploreAfrican-American life.156

Whilst there is much to be gained from Neal’s insightful postmodern analysis, my

own appropriation of this notion of an inherent “bastardisation” of the post-soul

aesthetic will not be understood as a form of negation of previous African-American

cultures, but one of the working of a creative difference through a revising of them. I

make this point, because the framing of electronic dance musics, central to the

expression of the post-soul generation, is often understood through negative, rather

than positive difference.157 Such negativity is evident in the following example,

recounted by Nelson George, as producer and songwriter Mtume launches into a

155 Neal writes, “Much of the criticism directed at the use of postmodern theory by black intellectualshas sprung from discomfort with the import of decidedly European-based theories to explore African-American life. As bell hooks relates, postmodern thinking is ‘dominated primarily by the voices ofwhite male intellectuals and/or academic elites who speak to and about one another in codedfamiliarity’” (Neal 2002: 1). Although Neal writes in the preface that as his work has been described as“postmodern” he has come to accept his fate (Neal 2002: x).156 (Neal 2002: 1)157 As stated in the thesis there are some theoretical similarities between Deleuze’s Cinema books andpostmodernism. Whilst Deleuze and Guattari have never referred to themselves as postmodernists (infact Guattari hated the term), their broader project often has much in common. For a more detaileddiscussion see, Ronald Bogue’s essay, “Is Deleuze a Postmodern Philosopher?” in his book Deleuze’sWake (2004) (Bogue 2004). Whilst commenting in detail on the similarities and differences would takea thesis in itself, I will just add that Deleuze’s Cinema books, as I have indicated in the thesis, sharesome distinct similarities with the postmodern project. For example Deleuze’s concept of a new “imageof thought” in cinema that occurs in the wake of World War II has some similarities to Lyotard’s ideaof the war’s impact on “grand narratives” (and for Deleuze cinematic narrative). However it is in thetranslating of this position where Deleuze’s work differs from the card-carrying postmodernists, inparticular to what it might mean for “affective” relations in the social. For instance, according toFrederic Jameson’s understanding of postmodernism and contained in his famous text Postmodernism,Or, The Cultural Logic Of Late Capitalism (1991) – the era is defined by its “waning of affect” and an“effacement of history”(Jameson 1991). These ideas are much distinguished from of Deleuze, forwhom there is never any such “waning of affect” - affect is a constant and is not historical in this way.Furthermore, the Jamesonian notion of an “effacement of history” apparently robs us of knowing wherewe are situated in time, which again might share some surface resonances with the time-image,although Deleuze’s theory of time is never considered in such a linear, causal fashion.

53

tirade against the unauthorised sampling of his hit “Juicy Fruit” in the Notorious

BIG’s, Juicy:

Mtume spent much of this particular Sunday morning blasting hip hoprecord production for its slavish reliance on record sampling. Hebarged that ‘this is the first generation of African-Americans not to beextending the range of the music’ and that the resulting recordings‘were nothing but Memorex music.’158

Here I will suggest that there must be a more fruitful way of examining the practices

of the post-soul aesthetic, within which electronic dance musics play such a decisive

role. Whilst the preceding generation of musicians might perceive this new generation

of artists as impostors, a more pertinent examination might ask exactly why and how

the practices of these impostors emerged. Such an analysis of sampling practices

would require an interrogation of the existential circumstances of the sample’s return

as offering a far more interesting proposition than simply castigating it as

appropriation.

To this end, we might further accommodate the concept of “bastardisation” as a

practice inherently concerned with drawing out the alterity of any official history.

Proposing an alternative perspective on time will allow a minor people to draw out

one of many possible futures. In later chapters this idea will be demonstrated through

the way sampling culture will reassemble “sheets of past” as a means of creating new

temporal juxtapositions within the composition, for a new future is always virtually

contained in the present, although to draw it out, requires what Deleuze describes in

Cinema 2 as a “shock to thought”.159 Conceived in terms of the example of the post-

soul aesthetic, this “shock to thought” might have been produced by the “intolerable”

decline of the preceding soul aesthetic.

An Aesthetic Expression of “Blackness” - Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song

The attempt at fashioning an aesthetic that would more effectively express the

sensibility of the minor subject aesthetically was precisely the impetus for Melvin

158 (George 1999: 99)159 (Deleuze 1989: 156)

54

Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971). Van Peebles comments

here on his attempts to portray cinematically a more specific temporal expression of

“blackness”:

“All of the films about black people up to now,” director Melvin VanPeebles told Newsweek in 1971, “have been told through the eyes ofthe Anglo-Saxon majority-in their rhythms and speech and pace. In myfilm, the black audience finally gets a chance to see some of their ownfantasies acted out…rising out of the mud and kicking ass”. 160

The radical form of composition employed in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is

predicated on this new approach to the depiction of time. For Van Peebles’ attempts

to express this new black cinematic aesthetic would provide inspiration for his

disjunctive approach to temporality that would resist the more “common sense” linear

narrative of the typical Hollywood film. The compositional aesthetic employed in his

film elicits a more serial, rather than sequential, aesthetic, in which time and space

would appear to become dislocated from the more common form of narrative

causality. There are at least a couple of reasons why Van Peebles was likely to have

strayed from convention. The first was that he undertook his film education in

France,161 the home of experimental cinema, and secondly, some of his cinematic

composition was perhaps influenced by approaches to musical composition, as he was

also a musician.162

Many of the characteristics that Deleuze ascribes to the “time-image” are clearly

discernible in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. One such characteristic, and a

vital one to this thesis, is the use of irrational cuts. For example, the movie depicts

shots of Sweetback running from the law, which are then jarringly intercut with

images of black people at work, or of shots of machinery or industrial spaces of all

kinds. In addition, various excerpts of dialogue are deliberately, serially, repeated

throughout.163 Other sounds are presented non-diegetically, such as the Greek chorus

160 (Van Peebles 1996)161 Van Peebles’ background is recounted by him in the documentary, Classified X (1997).162 Melvin Van Peebles has released albums from the late 1960s. A select discography includes thealbums, Brer Soul (1969), Ain't Supposed To Die A Natural Death (1970), Sweet Sweetback'sBaadasssss Song OST (1971), What the…You Mean I Can't Sing? (1974) and Ghetto Gothic (1995).163 : “…I may have had a Leroy…but I don’t rightly remember” (Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song).

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style chanting of the refrains164 that accompany the cuts of Sweetback running

through various nondescript locations within the urban landscape. Central to all of this

is the characteristic funk driven soundtrack. This was so revolutionary at the time but

soon to become a staple of the emerging genre of the blaxploitation film (for which

Brown himself would compose two soundtracks).165

However, whilst Van Peebles’ film has been credited with inspiring the blaxploitation

genre, it was a connection that he was not at all happy about.166 Indeed the only real

similarity between his film and the ensuing blaxploitation genre was that the lead

characters of the respective films were black. In fact, rather than approach anything

like an adequate example of time-image cinema, the blaxploitation genre that

followed Van Peebles’ film was typical of what Deleuze would describe as the action-

image film. For instance, there was no attempt to engage a non-narrative form of

composition like Van Peebles had developed in Sweetback. Furthermore, the ensuing

films were referred to as blaxploitation precisely because they would merely reduce

“blackness” to the shallowest form of identity – the stereotype. Yet, the innovative

aesthetics championed by Van Peebles in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song were

never really built upon by Hollywood in any meaningful way, this was perhaps

because it was almost impossible for a black writer/director to raise the necessary

funds.167 It is true that Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song was a revelation to the

studio bosses because prior to its very successful cinematic release, an African-

American market was not even perceived to exist. When it was proven with Sweet

Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, however, Hollywood responded with blaxploitation.168

Whilst Van Peebles’ film is offered here as a seminal example of an “apprehension of

a minor temporality”, I should add that this is hardly an exclusively African-American

phenomenon. Rather, it is a strategy for becoming minor within any imposed order of

a hegemonic temporality. Yet, it is also true that black music is nearly always on the

164 For example, the audience will encounter chants such as, “you bled my mama, you bled mypapa…but you won’t bleed me…” and “…come on feet”, which serve as reflections of Sweetback’sinner dialogue and is repeated throughout the film, (Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song).165 Brown contributed the soundtracks for the films Black Caesar (Brown 1973a) and Slaughters BigRip-Off (Brown 1973b)166 Baadasssss (2003)167 Baadasssss (2003)168 This can be seen in the film made by Melvin Van Peebles’ son Mario, about the making of SweetSweetback’s Baadasssss Song, entitled Baadasssss (2003).

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vanguard of creativity. “Double consciousness” contributed to a perception of

constant “chaosmos” described by Deleuze and Guattari as a “consistent chaos”,169 an

aggravation and perhaps often painful, but forces one to come up with concepts to

make sense of it. 170 Hence this forced assimilation of co-existent minor temporalities

calls forth artistic expression as a means to provide structure to existential conditions.

Parallels to the cinematic example of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song can be

found in the ongoing sampling of James Brown. In the hands of DJs and sampling

culture, the “bastardisation” of James Brown’s music has assisted in the assembling of

new territories and cultures out of the any-spaces-whatever and the intolerable

situations of the any-spaces-whatever. The brilliance of DJs in their use of Brown’s

refrains offers a challenge to the more institutionally established recollection - in

favour of instituting difference. Examples of this creativity might include the

emergence of electronic dance music genres to emerge from the any-space-whatevers

of ghettos and warehouses. As I have begun to explain, the development of these new

forms of composition reflect characteristics similar to those that Deleuze has

attributed to the evolution of cinematic composition, and its shift from movement-

image to time-image. In particular we are concerned with how this shift might reflect

a different set of ontological relations - Deleuze describes these as “becomings rather

than stories”.171 These becomings arise as the culmination of the breakdown in the

action-image, and therefore the breakdown in the “natural”, given, orders of

movement and time. This break in common sense relations to time and space, which

governs the workings of the sensory-motor links of habit, throws a clear sense of

simple chronological time and space into disarray.172 Simple narrative logic, once

expressed cinematically through rational forms of montage, will instead assume the

productive disarray of the “irrational cut”.173 Whilst I will deal with the latter concept

in detail in chapter 7, the main concern for us here is a process whereby the “…the

sensory-motor scheme breaks down to leave disorientated and discordant movements,

169 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 208)170 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 208)171 (Deleuze 1995: 59)172 (Deleuze 1989: 3-6) and (Deleuze 1989: 20)173 (Deleuze 1989: xi). In the “Preface to the English Edition” of Cinema 2, Deleuze discusses the“…importance of false continuity in modern cinema: the images are no longer linked by rational cutsand continuity, but are relinked by means of false continuity and irrational cuts. Even the body is nolonger exactly what moves; subject of movement or the instrument of action, it becomes rather thedeveloper of time, it shows time through its tiredness and waiting” (Deleuze 1989: xi).

57

[where] you get other patterns, becomings rather than stories”.174Yet in order to give

an account of how such a decisive aesthetic shift might occur, I must give an account

of the accompanying existential conditions. This account will involve a consideration

of the conditions that might have forced the DJs and samplers into the process of

remaking one’s self in the face of “official” history.

The Body

Other expressions of alterity might also be witnessed in the close relationship of

African-American culture and musical invention. It is no accident that the production

of dance music should mobilise such a dramatic reappraisal of compositional methods

and processes. The obvious point is that music and dancing provide a superlative

means for overcoming the banality of the everyday, whilst simultaneously challenging

the limits of what a body can do. Bodily movement is always the first act in any

political change, and dance musics will always be crucial to minor cultures for this

very reason. We only have to look at the musical innovations to have emerged from

minor cultures, for example, the black or gay communities discussed in the following

example by Timothy D. Taylor from his book, Strange Sounds (2001). In the

following example, Taylor expresses some concern that the minor cultures that

contributed so much to the production, and ongoing evolution, of these electronic

dance musics, are also often marginalised in their subsequent historical accounts:

Contemporary musicians have cultivated interest in [older electronic]musics for a variety of reasons, reasons that would be difficult totheorize adequately under the rubric of some kind of postmodernnostalgia or a pure aesthetic appreciation. Instead, it seems as thoughtoday’s DJs and remixers seek out these earlier musics as a way ofattempting, in part, to discover a musical past for themselves, or to joina preexisting tradition, effectively resuscitating a residual tradition (inRaymond William’s conceptualization) of which they can be thecontemporary heirs…[t]his history, however, usually omits theAfrican-American and gay musicians who are more demonstrably thereal precursors of techno music, for it is mainly being championed byheterosexual suburban white men. For them, a lineage going back tothe European avant-garde is more compelling than a more historicallyaccurate one that traces their music to African Americans and gays. As

174 (Deleuze 1995: 59)

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such, these latter groups are almost wholly exscripted as techno ischampioned as an intellectual music to be listened to, not danced to.175

Whilst I cannot completely concur with Taylor’s criticism - as there have, for

instance, been many accounts of DJ culture that have detailed the contributions of the

minor cultures in question176 - it is true that music history often does suffer from a

conveniently rearticulated genealogy. The seminal importance of affectively inspired

connections has become obfuscated through popular music histories that have (over)

emphasised the aesthetic impact of European fine music practitioners on its

emergence. A more judicious account of electronic dance music should perhaps

concentrate more fully on the modulation of specific affective and social relations.

This might allow a more equitable account of the contributions of minor cultures,

such as the African-American/gay populations that Taylor cites in his example.

Perhaps any commentary on an evolution of electronic dance musics should be more

dedicated to making the body and affect central to its discussion. It is for this reason

that I will dedicate the next chapter to emphasising the role of the gospel genre in the

emergence, not only on Brown’s work, but also by extension, the broader evolution of

electronic dance musics. For gospel would play a significant role in shaping the hyper

affectivity of the music to which African-American culture would make such a

considerable contribution.

Ethology - Brown as Linking Different Minority becomings

To understand how music’s hyper-affectivity connects bodies will require then what

Deleuze and Guattari term an appropriate “ethology”. Ethology is normally

understood as the science of animal behaviour. However, Deleuze and Guattari derive

their concept of ethology from the philosophy of Spinoza. Here ethology attempts to

consider how a body functions in relation to behavioural connections rather than

classification via form within particular phyla. Deleuze and Guattari give the example

that “[a] racehorse is more different from a workhorse than a workhorse is from an

175 (Taylor 2001: 67)176 Such accounts are developed in texts such as, DJ Culture (Poschardt 1998), Techno Rebels (Sicko1999), Last Night A DJ Saved My Life (Brewster & Broughton 1999), Discographies: Dance Music,Culture, And The Politics Of Sound (Gilbert & Pearson 1999), Modulations (Shapiro 2000)

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ox”.177 At the core of this ethological approach is the role of the body and its affective

encounters in the world. As Deleuze and Guattari would say: “…in Ethics the organic

characteristics derive from longitude and its relations, from latitude and its

degrees”.178 That is to say, that a body is inseparable from its composition with the

world, and our propensity to subject bodies to discursive classifications of the subject

or species is precisely what negates the vital connections between body and world that

might otherwise be made. Attending only to a formal categorical explanation of things

will never be as enlightening as giving attention to the connections made, however

differently such formed objects and processes may have appeared from each other at

the outset.

Proceeding via an ethology, I will contend in this thesis that Brown played a distinct

role in the creative evolution of electronic dance music by mobilising new relations or

connections between bodies and existential conditions. Tracks such as Papa’s Got a

Brand New Bag (1965), Cold Sweat (1967) or even perhaps Sex Machine (1970), will

set up a pattern of relations for future electronic dance musics. In terms of relations

between bodies and existential conditions, Brown’s tracks are far more important than

compositions such as Max Matthews digital rendition of Bicycle Built for Two (1961)

or Pierre Schaeffer’s Etude Aux Chemins De Fur (1948), as interesting as those pieces

are. In terms of relative capacity to inspire an ongoing minority culture, Brown is in a

class of his own. Brown’s refrains express new minor temporalities in an ongoing

way. For instance, we might cite a fairly recent and particularly interesting example,

the track Learn Chinese (2004)179 by Chinese-American hip-hop artist Jin. Learn

Chinese is propelled by a 30-year-old sample of a James Brown break beat from the

1973 track Blind Man Can See It.180 In general the number of producers who have

sampled Brown runs to at least the tens of thousands.181 Whilst a brief search online

will uncover much support by young Asian-American Hip-Hop fans for

177 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 257)178 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 257)179 (Jin 2004)180 (Brown 1973a)181 For those inclined to check out some of these many thousands of samples of Brown’s workreconstituted into new works, a great web site dedicated to the purpose of sample “trainspotting” isThe-Breaks.com(The-Breaks.Com 2005).

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“representing” on their behalf, why did Jin, like so many before him, feel the need to

“represent”182 through Brown’s music?

The most obvious answer might be that to use a Brown sample is to expediently

appropriate a creditable position within the cultural relations of hip-hop. In this

respect, Jin achieves “credibility” through the inclusion of the Brown sample. This

transformation is further evidenced in the accompanying video, as Jin’s hip-hop skills

allow him to transcend his banal existence as a take-away delivery boy, and is able to

metamorphose into a Triad-like gangster figure.183 Whilst hardly transforming any

stereotypes, there is a complex cultural assemblage taking place, one made

increasingly complex by the use of the Brown sample in the musical text. Although

making use of a James Brown sample might be significant in terms of its

“authenticity”, the interesting question may be “authentic” in relation to what?

Perhaps we can say that the use of Brown’s music guarantees a broader reception,

enables one to participate in a new set of relations, also indicating its performer’s

possession of the requisite knowledge of the powers of the culture he’s apparently

embracing. The culture that samples Brown has had a long and distinguished history.

To take a different example, Tricia Rose proposes that the use of a sample of James

Brown’s 1962 recording of Night Train in Kool Moe Dee’s How Ya Like Me Now

(1987): 184

… not only verifies Brown as the author, it paradoxically underminesany fixed link his sound has to the label on which it was "originally"recorded. Brown’s exclamation in the context of Moe Dee’s piece isemployed as a communal resource that functions in opposition to therecording industry’s fixation with ownership. In the opening momentof How Ya Like Me Now, James Brown is affirmed and valorized, KoolMoe Dee is situated within an African-American music tradition, and aself-constructed affirmative and resistive history is sounded.185

Yet, as might be gleaned from the example of Learn Chinese, it is fair to say that

emergence of new minorities through the use of Brown’s refrains has long

transcended a purely African-American tradition. This is perhaps also why Sreberny

182 Used in the Hip-Hop slang sense.183 As seen in the accompanying video. An interesting discussion of the images that appear in Jin’svideo have been by musician and writer, Oliver Wang, on his blog site (Wang 2003).184 (Kool Moe Dee 1987)185 (Tricia Rose 1994: 89)

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has argued that Gilroy’s work has limits when it comes to more recent examples of

diasporic consciousness. There are many apprehensions of a minor temporality that

might be less exclusive, and could be more encompassing of the vast diasporic

populations who now engage with Brown’s music. These often lie outside the Black

Atlantic diaspora.

Further evidence of dance cultures outside of the Black Atlantic is to be found in this

Time magazine profile on British producer Bally Sagoo, the New Delhi-born and

Birmingham-bred, Anglo-Indian dance music producer. Sagoo extols the virtues of

Brown samples in his production work. To quote Sagoo:

“Indian songs normally have a loud vocal, with a very loud string,” hesays. “Something had to give, and what gave was the heavy Easternflavor. Basically, you have to give them a bit of tablas, a bit of theIndian sound. But bring on the basslines, bring on the funky-drummerbeat, bring on the James Brown samples”.186

It might be argued that Brown’s music is so generally attractive due to its ability to

hint at a transcendental duration that offers an escape from a more hegemonic form of

temporality. As dance music, Brown’s superlative grooves inspire a becoming linked

to a series of minor expressions. Brown allows the creation of new spaces of affect

within the any-space-whatever circumstances of the minor.

Histories Major and Minor

As I have already mentioned, the apprehension of a minor temporality expressed

through music might counteract a majoritarian temporality. For minor cultures, the

latter is enforced through the time of everyday life, leading to a more oppressive sense

of majoritarian imposed duration in the intolerable banality of the everyday, as

described by Deleuze in the Cinema books. This is an intolerable that has existed

from enforced slavery to the continuing imposition of enforced economic uncertainty.

In regards to the latter, we only have to think of the pilgrimages by African-

Americans from the 1940s onward to the North of the US to find work. The African-

Americans who fled the South had to take on menial jobs out of economic necessity,

186 (Sagoo in Hajari 1997)

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along with the disconnection that continual migration requires. Neal informs us in

Soul Babies:

…that for many blacks, whose families migrated to cities like Chicagoand Detroit after World War II in pursuit of better job opportunities,the promised land was just that, only a promise. As witnessed by thedire living conditions that the Evans family faced, black migrants wereoften forced into economic conditions arguably worse than those in theSouth.187

This economically driven state of enforced transition continues to impose itself upon

diasporic communities. Indeed, the lyrics of the black popular music tradition have

long referenced such nomadism, enforced or otherwise. Such expression constitutes

the whole genre of blues alone, and is also to be found in gospel, work and folk

songs.188 Indeed as Brown’s songs often reworked, covered, or merely appropriated

this legacy, his music would continue in this tradition. The development of these

styles would be significant of an attempt to create a musically articulated territory for

lives often lived in a state of flux. As such, many of Brown’s songs capture a sense of

a (often enforced) nomadism that was common to the experience of many African-

Americans. This is an experience articulated through tracks such as 1961’s Night

Train, in which Brown sings out the major stops of the “Chitlin Circuit”, or 1967’s

There Was a Time in which the audience is invited to chant the praises of his

hometown, “…Augusta GA” from all points across North America.189

Indeed James Brown’s fondness for mythologising the South might be perceived as

the epitome of a nostalgia for a virtual time and space that is itself an “apprehension

of a minor temporality”. The South provides a source of common cultural association

and is about as close to home, existential or otherwise, for many African-Americans

as they can plausibly lay claim to. We only have to think about the use of the term

“down home”, as many African-Americans have referred to the South, as an example

187 (Neal 2002: 63)188 By way of example, one need only to point to the repertoire of an artist such as Robert Johnson,whose songs include paeans to nomadism such as Drifting Blues, Hellhound on my Trail, WalkingBlues, and Terraplane Blues. In fact there is a whole other work than could conceivably be addressedin regard to the often-enforced nomadism of the African-American subject, which is why of coursesuch existential angst has figured so prominently within the idiom. This was not resigned to African-Americans only, but to other sections of the community forcibly dispersed, a sentiment expressed forinstance by Woody Guthrie in I Ain’t Got No Home.189 (Brown 1967b)

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of this attempt to create a sense of home for a people made nomadic due to their

economic position.

Remaining “down home” requires maintenance of loyalty to one’s roots, which for

most of Brown’s band members could be traced to the Southern states of America.190

In Escape-ism (1971),191 for instance, Brown launches into a comic interrogation of

the authenticity of his band members’ origins in the South.192 A Southern origin is

seemingly synonymous here with both musical and personal credibility. The Escape-

ism routine was later to be reiterated as a vital part of Brown’s live show, where a

black audience conversant in its protocols would cheer in empathy.193 Sometimes the

climax of the dialogue would occur when bandleader Fred Wesley would proclaim

that he was from “L.A.”, rather than expose his Southern origins like the rest of the

group. With further interrogation by Brown the audience subsequently learns that

“L.A.” actually stands for “Lower Alabama”. We could even take this virtual

territoriality as a subtext of Brown’s well-documented arrest in 1988, when the

arresting officers were treated to an uncalled for rendition of “Georgia on My Mind”

as they tried to corral Brown into handcuffs.194

I contend that the utility of such parochial refrains is of particular importance in the

unification of a minor people of disparate backgrounds into a more tangible existential

relation, and perhaps in lieu of a physical territory that has been otherwise denied

them. Given the nature of the disparate circumstances of any diasporic community,

they cannot fully possess a shared collective memory of the past together, but only

perhaps a future. At this point the artist must intervene to bring together these

190 Brown’s playful interrogation of his band members as to their origins in the South can be heard onthe 1971 single, Escape-ism (Brown 1971a). A twenty minute unexpurgated version can also be foundon the re-released, remastered version of the album Hot Pants (1971) (Brown 1971/1991).191 (Brown 1971a)192 Whilst most of Brown’s band members of this period come from the Deep South such as Georgia(Brown and his long time saxophonist St. Clair Pinckney in fact hail from the very same section ofAugusta, Georgia known as ‘The Terry’) - and Alabama, such as drummer John “Jabo” Starks. Brownmakes jokes about the members of the group who are trying to “pass” and deny their Southern origins,such as trumpeter “Jasaan” who as Brown tells us “…claims he is from Ohius…ain’t no such placename as Ohius” and Fred Wesley who of course claims he is from L.A. – which the audience will findout means “Lower Alabama” (Brown 1971a). This impromptu studio jam not only provides Brownwith a hit single but provides the basis of a standard routine as heard on Live at the Apollo 3 –Revolution of the Mind album (Brown 1971e).193 (Brown 1971d)194 (Geoff Brown 1996: 221)

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disparate populations, a concept referred to in A Thousand Plateaus as the “problem

of the people”:

…the artist opens up to the Cosmos in order to harness forces in a"work" (without which the opening onto the Cosmos would only be areverie incapable of enlarging the limits of the earth); this workrequires very simple, pure, almost childish means, but also the forcesof a people, which is what is still lacking” "We still lack the ultimateforce ...We seek a people.195

This is why Deleuze and Guattari contend that the artwork seeks a people, that is, it

creates its audience: “[w]hen Klee says that the people is missing, what is at stake is

the mode of individuation of a people, which should be that of a becoming, a

multiplicity that is irreducible to the terms of the one and the Many”.196

Post-Soul Recollection

Within the African-American community, Brown’s music would also “seek a people”.

Perhaps one of the most overt examples can be found in his song Say it Loud! I'm

Black and I'm Proud (1968) where Brown would attempt to gather together a

collective of so-called “coloureds” and “negroes” and perhaps even enable them to

“become-black” under his direction.197 Of course, this “blackness” is in reality always

a becoming, a static position only in relation to the majoritarian world. For a people

attempting to become in the face of majoritarian oppression there was an obvious

need for a consistent form of expression. Brown’s music helped to crystallise this

"minor" position and make it more tangible.

In general, the fundamental difference between major and minor aspects of

populations is founded on their respective orientation to time. Of course, these

orientations begin with differences as to how able they are to "recollect" a dominant

195 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 337-338)196 (Bogue 2003: 42)197 “Chuck D: James Brown had such an impact not only my music but my life. Say It Loud: I’m Blackand I’m Proud when I was 8 years old, was such a part of the fabric of my understanding of where wewas at in 1967 and 1968. Before that, we were called "colored" and before that "Negroes." If you saidyou was black, people thought you were crazy. Then there was the groove. James Brown’s bandmaintained that riff, that vamp, that loop to make you dance hard for a long time instead of just givingyou that small break. Sometimes cats don’t understand that without James Brown, there would be norap” (Chuck D in VH1 2001).

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history, or how able they are to recollect history in another way. One way this

difference gets played out is in the different constitutions of rhythmic expression,

which is why I contend that funk’s “One” apprehended a minor temporality. It

enabled a deterritorialisation from the intolerable circumstances of its emergence, and

from the dominant history that attempted to maintain a particular set of repressive

forms of expression, affects and existential conditions.

It could be argued that all truly new music can only come from those who lack access

to majoritarian history. This lack leads them into a re-mining of the general past,

which far exceeds narrow and official histories. This will always come back to the

expression of life as difference: a people of new bodies, postures, languages, and

identities. For instance, pioneering Hip-Hop DJ Afrika Bambaataa’s Planet Rock

would synthesise the music of Kraftwerk with local musical forms to deliberately set

a new becoming in motion. As I shall argue later in this thesis, these musicians appeal

to a falsification of, and play with, set identity, and in the process will remake

themselves contrary to official history. Music that speaks in a minor language instils

new logics within common sense relations to history, the body and the general state of

things.

For all of this talk about music’s minor function, however what might a music of a

major language be? This would be a music that appeals to the reiteration of territory

on behalf of the State, that supports the maintenance of the sovereignty of official

history, or that type of “recollection” – that enforces a form of actuality that will

dominate all other virtual possibilities. This is the purpose of uniform national

anthems; they work against the promotion of deterritorialisation and the enticement of

the new. At the same time, the distinction between major and minor musics is always

a question of context, rather than content. It is in their specific contexts that the

bastardisation described by Neal, or the falsity described by Deleuze, can set up new

processes of repetition that allow new becomings to emerge.

A complex example that Neal discusses is the TV sitcom Good Times. He argues that

Good Times is representative of the post-soul text as it conveys the loss of the dream

of prosperity after migration to the North. Neal analyses the program’s citation within

a 1998 track by the hip-hop group Outkast, whose SpottieOttieDopalicious (1998)

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presents a recurrent reference of “…the phrase "damn, damn, damn, James," which

was repeated throughout the song by background vocalist Patrick Brown and group

members Andre and Big Boi. This phrase, Neal tells us, is a direct quote from the

second part of a two-part episode entitled “the Move" from Good Times.198 In that

show, the Evans family became symbolic of so many African-Americans who were

now no better off economically than when they originally fled from the South. The

sitcom’s use in the Outkast track provides a glimpse of the value of the show for the

collective psyche of the African-American population.199

It can be seen that both Good Times and its use in the Outkast track are directed at

undoing official stories about American “progress” so that minor existences can find

new expressive forms. In this thesis I contend that emergent electronic music

practices often undo the “ official story” until a minor becoming transpires. In

particular I will suggest that the catalyst for a particular interrogation of the musical

past is the collapse of the given habits of the sensory-motor-link - the clear easy link

between perceptions and actions - in the decline of soul. I will discuss this break in

more detail throughout the thesis, along with its correlation to Deleuze’s account of a

similar situation in the cinema.

For now we can say that these breaks emerge from the encounter with the intolerable.

This situation becomes so overwhelming – a situation exemplified by the type of

political inertia experienced by the post-soul generation in the wake of the optimism

of the civil rights struggles - that one cannot react as one normally would through

action. The result is that a neat scheme of action-reaction breaks down. Another way

of looking at this is that the social immobility inherent to the any-spaces-whatever

will render meaningful action impossible. For Deleuze, such circumstances and

spaces would begin to open up in the immediate post-war period:

…after the war, a proliferation of such spaces could be seen both infilm sets and in exteriors, under various influences. The first,independent of cinema, was the post-war situation with its towns

198 (Neal 2002: 62)199 This sense of association with the Evans family continues and in 2001 for instance, GhostfaceKillah released his “Good Times” where the rap was laid over a foundation of samples from the gospelflavoured title song from the series. Unreleased on the album Bulletproof Wallets (Ghostface Killah2001) because of sample clearance issues.

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demolished or being reconstructed, its waste grounds, its shanty towns,and even in places where the war had not penetrated, itsundifferentiated urban tissue, its vast unused places, docks,warehouses, heaps of girders and scrap iron. Another, more specific tothe cinema as we shall see, arose from a crisis of the action-image: thecharacters were found less and less in sensory-motor “motivating”situations, but rather in a state of strolling, of sauntering or of ramblingwhich defined pure optical and sound situations.200

Whilst the effect of such “pure optical and sound situations” in the puncturing of

narratological flow might have more relevance in relation to audiovisual concerns of

the cinema, I am more concerned with making reference to the any-space-whatevers

that Deleuze ascribes as “independent of cinema”. These are the spaces of destruction

and dislocation so prevalent in the post-war situation, but also prevalent, to provide an

example more relevant to this study, to the riot torn cities of the United States that

would so visibly remind its citizens of the failure of civil rights action. These any-

space-whatevers thus exacerbate a sensory-motor-schema slackened to the point that

it cannot “naturally” extend into action, and we thus find that “[t]he sensory-motor

break makes man a seer who finds himself struck by something intolerable in the

world, and confronted by something unthinkable in thought…”.201

The post-war crisis of the action-image has an obvious resonance with the challenge

of diasporic existence. This resonance has been discussed in Laura U. Marks” The

Skin of the Film (2000), where she posits the importance of the any-space-whatever

within post-colonial cinema. Any-spaces-whatever,

…are not simply the disjunctive spaces of postmodernism, but also thedisruptive spaces of postcolonialism, where non-Western cultures eruptinto Western metropolises, and repressed cultural memories return todestabilize national histories.202

There is every reason to consider this any-space-whatever existence as having as

significant an effect on new musical aesthetics, as it had on the cinematic image. This

is why I think that the emergence of Brown’s music can be considered in these terms.

200 (Deleuze 1986: 120-121)201 (Deleuze 1989: 169-170)202 (Laura U. Marks 2000: 27)

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Creative Responses in Intolerable Circumstances

The territorialising of, and in, these any-space-whatevers is crucial to the development

of funk, and later, electronic dance musics. It is here that Deleuze’s work on the

concept of the any-space-whatevers is useful. Deleuze’s transformation of Augé’s

concept of the “non-place” into the any-space-whatever allows it to become a catalyst

for productivity.203 Jeffrey Bell refers to the work of Reda Bensmaia who has written

on Deleuze’s transformation of this concept, which, “[i]n contrast to Augé…rather

than being an homogenizing and de-singularizing force…shows that for Deleuze the

“any space whatsoever” is a condition for the emergence of uniqueness and

singularities”.204For Deleuze, the any-space-whatever, divorced from given contexts,

is transformed into one full of potential. The any-space-whatever becomes, “…a

space of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible”. 205 Ever the

optimist, Deleuze prizes this non-place for its unique becoming-potential, from which

a vibrant time-image cinema will emerge. This is a cinema that will reveal a

transcendental time and restore belief in the world. As Brian Massumi, inspired by

Deleuze-Guattarian theory writes: “Cherish derelict spaces. They are holes in habit,

what cracks in the existing order appear to be from the molar perspective…The

derelict space is a zone of indeterminacy that bodies-in-becoming may make their

own”.206

So in spite of the great adversity that was beset them, the various strands of African-

American artistic endeavour to evolve from the post-soul experience would perhaps

unsurprisingly, flourish from the desolate spaces of any-space-whatevers. Around the

very same time as the residents of devastated areas, such as the Bronx, for example,

were being affronted by the erosion of community, its young residents set about a

strategic reterritorialising undertaken in the name of collectivity and one that would

manifest the oft-cited “elements” of Hip-hop culture - graffiti, breaking, DJing and

MCing.

203 (Bell 1997)204 (Bell, 1997). In this piece Bell is referring to an essay by Reda Bensmaia, “L’espace QuelconqueComme ‘Personnage Conceptuel’”' which appeared in a special “Gilles Deleuze, Philosopher ofCinema” issue of Iris, no. 23, Spring 1997.205 (Deleuze, 1986:109)206 (Massumi 1992: 104)

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Of course, the Bronx is only one example of the many such derelict spaces that have

accounted for a musically driven “belief in the world” through bodily becomings,

there are many other notable examples – Kingston Jamaica, Dusseldorf Germany,

Detroit and Chicago. These hotbeds of electronic dance music cultures all emerged

from such “derelict” spaces, and would in their own unique ways, "falsify" history to

overcome their circumstances. For example, christening themselves with new

monikers, and mythologies, these minor subjects were not so much deliberately

repudiating history, as letting popular culture take up the slack where the relevant

points were missing from the history books. For example, Cheryl Keyes discusses the

profound effect of the popular television series Roots on the hip-hop generation. She

recounts how Roots opened up African history to African-Americans and, “…it would

not be far-fetched to presume that among the audiences of these performances were

rappers, who recognized rap’s strong link to an old African practice, a practice whose

influence they may have unconsciously adopted from their families, churches, and

cultures…”207

207 (Keyes 2002: 18). To quote this section more broadly, Keyes recounts in her book, Rap Music AndStreet Consciousness (2002), “When I occasionally mentioned to academics how rappers would locateAfrica as the foundation of the rappin style, some of them immediately marvelled at this whilesimultaneously wondering, ‘Who told them that?’ Despite some queries by academicians about artists”knowledge of the rap music-African nexus, Bambaataa and Carson’s statements suggest, nonetheless,that rappin is similar to the West African bardic tradition. Beyond whatever traditions and history mayhave been passed down to African Americans through the oral traditions of their families andcommunities, the impact of a particular book published in the 1970s gave those who did have access tooral history a new means by which to understand their contemporary culture and practices throughexamining their heritage. The considerable contributions of this book may underlie the strongassertions that rhymin MCs make about the bard-rap continuum. The comparative literature scholarThomas A. Hale notes that the West African bard’s rise in popularity in the United States can beattributed to the 1976 publication of Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family. Thetelevised version of Roots, which was produced as a miniseries in 1977, "drew the largest audience inthe history of U.S. television" (Hale 1998:2). The series retold the story of Haley’s African ancestor,Kunte Kinte, who is said to have come from the Gambia. Roots also stimulated African Americans”interest in genealogy. Roots was followed by its miniseries sequel, Roots: The Next Generations(1979). An autobiographical sketch of Haley’s life as a journalist and novelist, the sequel revealed howhe embarked upon his research on Kunte Kinte. In the last episode, Haley, played by the actor JamesEarl Jones, travels to the Gambia where he is directed by the Ministry of Culture officials to a keeper oforal history, a griot, who would probably know the story of Kunte Kinte. Undoubtedly Roots informedviewers about the role African bards played as purveyors of the past, recorders and guardians ofhistory, and scholars of African culture. Thomas A. Hale best summarizes the impact of Roots: ‘thanksto the continuing impact of Roots, West African griots have dramatically expanded their performancecontexts. They have appeared on the stages of university auditoriums, in churches, and in televisionand recording studios in Paris, London, New York, and Tokyo" (1998:2). It would not be farfetched topresume that among the audiences of these performances were rappers, who recognized rap’s stronglink to an old African practice, a practice whose influence they may have unconsciously adopted fromtheir families, churches, and cultures” (Keyes 2002: 18).

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The post-soul generation’s creative appropriation of history would indeed become a

mainstay of hip-hop culture, rather famously inspiring the formation of Afrika

Bambaataa’s Zulu Nation. The collective was founded in 1975 and named after the

film Zulu (1964) starring Michael Caine.208 Upon its formation, one of Bambaataa’s

first projects would be the “First Annual Universal Zulu Tribute to James Brown, Sly

and the Family Stone and the Pioneers of Hip-Hop” based around these new art forms

of the ghetto such as breakdancing.209 Bambaataa’s appropriation of “Africa” presents

a classic case of the virtual image standing in for history - by which, I mean that it is

an attempt to cultivate a history differently, when an official one was denied them.

Such early forays into what can be described via concepts such as Afrocentricity210

would re-emerge in the hip-hop of the late 80s and early 90s, when groups such as

Public Enemy, X-Clan, the Jungle Brothers and the Native Tongues collective

dominated hip-hop of the day. The creative relations to history implicit in movements

such as Afrocentrism and Afrofuturism211 would inspire a creative "falsity" mobilised

as an alternative to official history.

208 (Toop 2000b: 57)209 (George in Poschardt 1998: 177) As Poschardt details, ‘twenty years later, the Zulu Nation had“embassies” and “consulates” in every large city in America, and in many countries in Europe, Asiaand Africa” (Poschardt 1998: 177)210 Hip-hop’s Afrocentric years lasted from about 1986 to about 1991-92. This movement wouldreclaim African iconography and make prominent use of it in clothes, lyrics and album artwork assignificance of historical “consciousness”.211 Afro-Futurism might be understood in the following way, “African-American strategies toovercome racial and social classification by means of technology and futuristic mythology” (ChristianZemsauer 2002). It is believed that the term Afro-Futurism first appeared in Mark Dery’s article FlameWars (1993). Afrofuturism is described by Dery in that article “Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th centurytechnoculture—and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images oftechnology and a prosthetically enhanced future—might, for want of a better term, be calledAfrofuturism. The notion of Afrofuturism gives rise to a troubling antinomy: Can a community whosepast has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by thesearch for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures (Dery 1993)”? Here are some examples“But African-American voices have other stories to tell about culture, technology, and things to come.If there is an Afrofuturism, it must be sought in unlikely places, constellated from far-flung points. Wecatch a glimpse of it in the opening pages of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, where the proto-cyberpunkprotagonist—a techno-bricoleur "in the great American tradition of tinkerers"—taps illegal juice from aline owned by the rapacious Monopolated Light & Power, gloating, ‘Oh, they suspect that their poweris being drained off, but they don't know where’. One day, perhaps, he'll indulge his fantasy of playingfive recordings of Louis Armstrong's version of What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue at once, in asonic Romare Bearden collage (an unwittingly prescient vision, on Ellison's part, of that 1981masterpiece of deconstructionist deejaying, The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels ofSteel). Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings such as Molasses, which features a pie-eyed, snaggletoothedrobot, adequately earn the term "Afrofuturist," as do movies like John Sayles's The Brother FromAnother Planet and Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames. Jimi Hendrix's Electric Ladyland is Afrofuturist;so, too, is the techno-tribal global village music of Miles Davis's On the Corner and Herbie Hancock's

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To defer once again to Brian Massumi, we might perceive such “derelict spaces” as

the any-space-whatevers of the ghettos from where this art would flourish as

“autonomous zones”, which:

…may be thought of in temporal terms, as shreds of futurity. Like“outside,” “future” is only an approximation: there are any number ofpotential futures in the cracks of the present order, but only a few willactually unfold. Think of autonomous zones in terms of time, buttenseless: time out of joint, in an immanent outside (Nietzsche’suntimely).212

I contend that such derelict spaces have directly facilitated the transformative

potential that was intrinsic to the emergence of the post-soul aesthetic. Furthermore,

as I will argue in detail in chapter 8, the bastardisation of the post-soul aesthetic is

perhaps founded upon a “powers of the false”. These powers of the false make use a

creative appropriation of the simulacrum that might be utilised in a productive

falsification, in order to take things elsewhere. Of course, a rather simple example

might be found in the way that DJ culture takes a piece of music and manipulates it to

the point that it begins to become something else. It is all about building a territorial

Headhunters, as well as the fusion-jazz cyberfunk of Hancock's Future Shock and Bernie Worrell'sBlacktronic Science, whose liner notes herald "reports and manifestoes from the nether regions of themodern Afrikan American music/speculative fiction universe." Afrofuturism manifests itself, too, inearly '80s electro-boogie releases such as Planet Patrol's Play at Your Own Risk, Warp 9's Nunk,George Clinton's Computer Games, and of course Afrika Bambaataa's classic Planet Rock, recordssteeped in "imagery drawn from computer games, video, cartoons, sci-fi and hip-hop slanguage," notesDavid Toop, who calls them "a soundtrack for vidkids to live out fantasies born of a science-fictionrevival courtesy of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind)(Dery 1994)”. As Dery writes onhis website, the term appeared in his article “Black to the Future” which “…first appeared in theNovember 1994 issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly, an academic journal published by DukeUniversity and overseen, at that time, by Frank Lentricchia). Arguably, this essay, which in FlameWars serves as an introduction to my interviews with Samuel Delany and Tricia Rose, launched thediscourse of Afrofuturism at a time when Wired magazine was lambasted for featuring nothing butwhite guys on its covers. As Mark Rockeymoore notes in his essay on the subject, ‘Mark Dery was thefirst to use the term 'afrofuturism' in his edited collection Flame Wars’. Likewise, the cultural criticKodwo Eshun, who has written extensively about race and technology, credits me as the originator ofthe term, although he traces the discourse back to the British journalist Mark Sinker’. (Dery 2005) Seealso (Eshun 1998). Dery also discusses the ongoing currency of the term, “Intellectual genealogiesaside, none will debate that Afrofuturism—the buzzword and the discourse—has grown legs. At lastcount, a Google search for the term racked up 1900 hits. A burgeoning field of study, it has inspired awebsite, a members-only Yahoo discussion group, a Hypertext project, and critical anthologies such asRace in Cyberspace, Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life, and a special issue of thejournal, Social Text, titled, simply, Afrofuturism (Dery 2005). Scholars that have written about thesubject include Mark Dery (1993), Kodwo Eshun (1998), Paul D. Miller (1999) Alondra Nelson (2002)and Kevin Holm-Hudson (2003)). Discussion of Afro-Futurism is recounted throughout KodwoEshun's More Brilliant Than The Sun (1998) see (Eshun 1998). For an exhaustive Who's Who list see(afrofuturism.net)212 (Massumi 1992: 105)

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structure that might allow the potential of a future from the undifferentiated chaos of

the past.

In general, Deleuze and Guattari propose that the disciplines of philosophy, science

and art will find their own methods of confronting chaos “…in order to rediscover, to

restore the infinite”. 213 Whilst each discipline goes about this in different ways, art

restores this notion of the infinite to the plane of composition.214 Deleuze and Guattari

will ascribe to art the ability to plunge its audience into the “chaosmos”. The

philosophers borrow the concept of “chaosmos” from the writing of James Joyce.215 It

is used to describe the how the work of art will effect a productive disruption in the

sensibilities of its audience. We might think of the role of the artist as, “...[opening]

up to the Cosmos in order to harness forces in a "work" (without which the opening

onto the Cosmos would only be a reverie incapable of enlarging the limits of the

earth).”216Art’s power is derived from this rediscovery of the infinite as it opens up

the possibility of eternal difference. There is a constant movement from “chaos to

composition”217 derived from this discovery of an infinite. This draws attention to the

importance of a perpetual “falsification” of truth, at least with regard to the narrow

perspectives of official history and accepted recollection.

Deleuze and Popular Music

Having staked so much on a Deleuzean inspired ontology, it is perhaps prudent to

address what I perceive as the (mistaken) belief that Deleuze (and Guattari) are hostile

to popular music.218 This perception derives from the musical examples they employ

in texts such as A Thousand Plateaus, where they are given to discuss philosophical

213 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 197)214 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 197)215 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 6)216 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 337)217 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 203)218 Whilst the charges against Deleuze and Guattari’s entrenched modernism were attempted to be laidto rest in Smith and Murphy’s “What I Hear is Thinking Too: Deleuze and Guattari Go Pop”(Murphy& Smith 2001), Ian Buchanan would argue once again for Deleuze’s modernist outlook see “Deleuzeand Popular Music” essay in his Deleuzism: A Metacommentary (Buchanan 2000) or Greg Hainge’s “IsPop Music?” to be found in the edited collection, Deleuze and Music (2004)(Hainge 2004).

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concepts with reference to composers such as Debussy, Messiaen and Varèse.219 To

add further weight to this contention, Guattari has been quoted as saying that popular

music is mostly reterritorialisations, 220 which might be more simply understood as a

territorialisation based on cliché. On the other hand, there is just as much evidence to

the contrary, 221 and this very debate has been the subject of an entire essay, “What I

Hear Is Thinking Too: Deleuze and Guattari Go Pop” (2001) by Timothy S. Murphy

and Daniel W. Smith.222 Whilst opinion may remain forever divided, I personally

subscribe to the same opinion as Murphy and Smith, who come out in favour of a pro-

pop Deleuze and Guattari. As testament to their influence on popular music, I can

only indicate how far the philosopher’s influence has spread in regard to

reconceptualising popular music discussion. Deleuze and Guattari feature in the work

of popular music scholars such as Simon Reynolds, Kodwo Eshun and Paul D. Miller,

not to mention that the philosophers have been an inspiration behind German techno

label, Mille Plateaux.223 My own feeling here is that Deleuze and Guattari were, like

us all, products of their time and the musical examples they use - which tend not to be

those of popular music - reflect their own tastes and socio-cultural background.

The burgeoning field of Deleuzean inspired popular music inquiry requires

consideration of the early adopters who pointed the way. One of the first scholarly

works - and still perhaps the most extended discussion - to use Deleuze and Guattari

in relation to popular music was the 1994 essay, “‘Spaces of Affect’: Versions and

219 Discussion of these composers occur in several instances throughout A Thousand Plateaus,including, (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 270-271), (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 316-317) and (Deleuze &Guattari 1988: 343-344)220 As Guattari says to interviewer Charles Stivale, “I don't see why you want me to give examples ofpopular music which are generally reterritorializations” (Guattari & Stivale 1995).221 Guattari tells Stivale of the popular music that is interesting to him, “However, there is one[example of popular music] that immediately occurs to me, it's break dancing and music, all thesedances which are both hyper-territorialized and hyper-corporal, but that, at the same time, make usdiscover spectrums of possible utilization, completely unforeseen traits of corporality, and that invent anew grace of entirely unheard-of possibilities of corporality. I've also been fascinated -- but this isn'tpopular music either -- by Chicago blues, the Chicago school, because these monstrous, elephantineinstruments like the bass, they begin to fly with unheard-of lightness and richness . . .Here's anotheramazing work of composition, a record by Bonzo Goes to Washington entitled "Five Minutes," a CCCClub Mix…”(Guattari & Stivale 1995).222 (Smith and Murphy 2001)223 As Murphy and Smith explain in their essay, “What I Hear Is Music Too: Deleuze and Guattari GoPop”, the Mille Plateaux label, based in Frankfurt, Germany “specializes in dense techno dance/trancemixes and electronica” (Murphy & Smith 2001). They quote the founder Achim Szepanski who“…describes the work of the artists on his label as ‘Becoming, so that the music goes beyond itself; thisis the search for the forces of the minoritarian that the label Mille Plateaux is part of. In a letter GillesDeleuze welcomed the existence of such a label’” (Murphy & Smith 2001).

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Visions of Cajun Cultural History” by Charles J. Stivale.224 Stivale has written several

instructive articles on Deleuze-Guattarian inspired analysis of Cajun music, including

“Of Heccéités and Ritournelles: Movement and Affect in the Cajun Dance Arena”

(1997) and “Becoming Cajun” (2000) culminating in the first full length Deleuzean-

Guattarian inspired music text, Disenchanting Les Bons Temps (2004). In addition to

his work on Cajun culture, Stivale warrants appropriate extolment for his prising from

Félix Guattari some important qualifications on the subject of popular music, as found

in the interview with the philosopher, entitled “Pragmatic/Machinic”.225 The essay has

not only served me well in the deflection of criticisms of Deleuze and Guattari’s

perceived “high modernist” contempt of the popular, but provided me with some

valuable insights in regard to Guattari’s demonstrated appreciation of dance music

and breakdancing.226

Other notable Deleuzean musical studies include, Andrew Murphie’s “Sound at the

End of the World as We Know it” (1996) which remains a seminal introductory text

on the relationship between popular music and the refrain. More generally we might

also add the musical scholarship of the prodigious Simon Reynolds, whose early

adoption of Deleuze and Guattari for the analysis of popular music was discussed in a

recent essay, “Becoming-Music: The Rhizomatic Moment of Improvisation” by

Jeremy Gilbert (2004).227 The enthusiasm for a Deleuzean inspired musical analysis

has culminated in the recently published Deleuze and Music (2005) collection in

which Gilbert’s article appears.

However, it probably bears reiteration that, unlike the fields of literature, cinema and

the visual arts, music was the only art form to which Deleuze did not dedicate a single

volume. That is not to say that Deleuze and Guattari did not entertain an intense

224 The three-volume set, Deleuze And Guattari: Critical Assessments Of Leading Philosophers (2001)conveniently gathers together a large numbers of essays on the work of Deleuze and Guattari that hadotherwise appeared across a disparate array of journals. In the first volume of the text, the editor, GaryGenosko provides a chronological table of all of the essays on Deleuze and Guattari that appear in thetext (Genosko 2001: xxiii-xxxi). Included in the first volume are two separate pieces on Stivale’s work,“‘Spaces of Affect’: Versions and Visions of Cajun Cultural History” (1994) (Stivale 1994) and also“Of Heccéités and Ritournelles: Movement and Affect in the Cajun Dance Arena” (1997) (Stivale1997). Appearing in between Stivale’s publications is Andrew Murphie’s “Sound at the End of theWorld as We Know it” (1996) (Murphie 1996).225 (Guattari & Stivale 1995)226 (Guattari & Stivale 1995)227(Gilbert 2004a)

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interest in music, inspiring concepts such as the refrain as well as providing the

context for innumerable examples of composition. In fact it would be fair to say that

music is sometimes central to the philosophical thought of Deleuze and Guattari. 228

This thesis makes use of these more decisively “musical” concepts but focuses more

intently on the slightly less musical territory of Deleuze’s Cinema books, if only

because they provide the most pertinent resource to aiding the philosophical task at

hand. Deleuze himself makes the connection in the Cinema books, remarking that

sound and music are always of the time-image as “[t]he only direct presentation of

time appears in music”.229 This conclusion may be prompted by the fact that music’s

territorialising properties and serial structures are never tied down to space in the

same way as the visual image, and as such are less sullied by the constraints of

representation.

Perhaps their most pertinent musical concept, the refrain is discussed by Deleuze and

as the “crystal of time”.230 Refrains are “crystalline” because they act upon the

musical in a similar manner to the way light is refracted through the crystal and re-

dispersed upon its surroundings. 231As Deleuze and Guattari write in A Thousand

Plateaus:

…the refrain is a prism, a crystal of space-time. It acts upon that whichsurrounds it, sound or light, extracting from it various vibrations, ordecompositions, projections, or transformations. The refrain also has acatalytic function: not only to increase the speed of the exchanges andreactions in that which surrounds it, but also to assure indirectinteractions between elements devoid of so-called natural affinity, andthereby to form organized masses. 232

228 The most obvious example would be the discussion of the refrain, in plateau 11 “1837: Of theRefrain” in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari 1988). In A Thousand Plateaus alone Deleuze &Guattari refer to the work of composers such as Ravel - in terms of the machinic assemblage - (Deleuze& Guattari 1988: 304), and also Olivier Messiaen (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 304), and Gustav Mahler(Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 339) - in terms of the refrain. Also very recently made available in English(and thus too late for me to be able to incorporate into this thesis) are several essays by Deleuze onmusic in the collection, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995 (2006). Essays inthis collection include, “How Philosophy is Useful to Mathematicians or Musicians” and “MakingAudible Forces Inaudible” (Deleuze, 2006).229 (Deleuze, 1989: 271)230 (Deleuze 1989: 92)231 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 348) Also ‘the refrain is therefore of the crystal or protein type. Theseed, or internal structure, then has two essential aspects: augmentations and diminutions, additions andwithdrawals, amplifications and eliminations by unequal values…”(Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 348-349)232 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 348)

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For the philosophers, music itself is an instrumentation of this crystal/refrain.

Although we may think of the refrain as part of the structure of music, for them it

actually precedes music. As Deleuze and Guattari have advised us, then, the refrain is

not music, but rather, music takes up the refrain as a territorialising strategy that

draws together music with memory. Rather than being perceived as operating within

time, the refrain territorialises and constitutes space/time in the process. The musical

refrain in this sense is a vehicle to translate affects and percepts and to render them

tangible. This is why Deleuze and Guattari say that the refrain is a priori of time,

“[t]ime is not an a priori form; rather, the refrain is the a priori form of time, which in

each case fabricates different times”.233 Music subsequently takes hold of the refrain

as the “…block of content proper to music”. 234 Refrains pre-exist the forms of music

that they are taken up by.

The usefulness of this concept of refrain is in relation to territorialisation, especially in

a place where territory has been thrown into disarray (a condition which I will

examine in relation to the existential flux of the minor subject throughout the thesis).

For a minor culture, this form of musical territorialising is always transient an attempt

to establish territory through their own particular rhythms - even if the majoritarian

culture might attempt to standardise such refrains.

How does one set about finding rhythms of becoming within the constraints of a

hegemonically constituted temporality? It is in setting out this idea that Deleuze and

Guattari’s attention to rhythm in their philosophy is so important, and my interest in

their philosophy is due to the attention they have paid to the ontological

considerations of rhythm. I should add that it bears mentioning that the role of rhythm

in the constitution of time and territory, beside that already discussed by myself

through the work of Deleuze and Guattari, has also been discussed by theorists such

as Henri Lefebvre235 and more recently, Paul Miller (2004),236 Michel S. Laguerre

(2004)237 Stamatia Portanova (2006).238 Common to all of these authors is a

consideration of the role of rhythms in a constitution of the social. Lefebvre’s

233 (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988:349)234 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 299)235 See (Lefebvre 2004)236 See (Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid) 2004)237 See (Laguerre 2004)238 See (Portanova 2005)

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Rhythmanalysis (2004)239 however, has only recently become available in English

translation, and as a result of my belated acquaintance with his work, my own

discussion tends to reflect a more Deleuze-Guattarian inspired theory of rhythm.

However, the increasing interest in rhythmic based theories of the social allows us to

look forward to an increased theoretical emphasis on the field in the future.

Perhaps there might also be further consideration given to the relationship of such

rhythms in relation to compositional forms of movement-image and time-image in

popular musical styles. In conceiving of these compositional orientations within a

broad notion of “popular music”, an important caveat should be made. I make no

claim that all popular music can now be located completely within a “time-image”

regime. If anything it is quite the opposite. Deleuze writes that most Hollywood

narratives still tend to push the action-image/movement-image as if life was still like

that, and that “…the greatest commercial successes always take that route, but the

soul of the cinema no longer does. The soul of the cinema demands increasing

thought, even if thought begins by undoing the system of actions, perceptions and

affections on which the cinema had fed up to that point”.240

It would perhaps be fair to say that most popular music would still follow the

equivalent to a "movement-image" convention, just as Hollywood cinema does.

However this should not necessarily lead us to fetishise an alternative time-image type

of music over a more conventional movement-image style pop track. The point is that

they offer very different approaches to thought. This is perhaps why Deleuze remarks

in the introduction to Cinema 1 that the emergence of television and “the electronic

image” has, “…not caused a crisis in cinema” because they have merely capitalised

on the prevailing compositional “images of thought” initiated by the cinema. Here

Deleuze himself uses a musical example: “…rather like Varèse in music, they lay

claim to the new materials and means that the future makes possible”.241 Our task at

239 (Lefebvre 2004)240 (Deleuze 1986: 206)241 (Deleuze 1986: x). Ronald Bogue also examines the work of Edgard Varèse in Deleuze on Music,Painting, and the Arts (2003) (Bogue 2003: 44-47)

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hand, then, is to show how Brown would lay claim to his own “materials and means”,

which I will discuss in chapter 3, owe much to the gospel music tradition.

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CHAPTER THREE

THE RAPTURE AND THE RUPTURE

In this chapter, I will argue that one of the under-theorised attributes of gospel music

is the way it has allowed its participants to engage in new orientations to time. Some

of the more inextricable links between Brown’s music and the gospel tradition will be

evaluated through James A. Snead’s essay, “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture”

(1981). Indeed one of the main concerns of this chapter is to show how Brown would

court some of the more imminent relations to time as construed through the gospel

style, which he would develop as part of the funk aesthetic.

For singing gospel was one of Brown’s most enduring passions since a young man. It

was Brown’s gospel singing abilities that literally liberated him from jail. Having

been incarcerated for most of his teenage years, 242 Brown’s musical talents were not

lost on the Byrd family, who sought custody of the young man. 243 Whilst Brown’s

future musical collaborator, Bobby Byrd, had his sights set on having the newly

paroled Brown join his singing group, The Avons, the young Brown seemed to have

been far more interested in singing gospel in the local community choir, The Ever

Ready Gospel Singers.244 After some persuasion, Byrd would eventually encourage

Brown to take up a more secular musical vocation.245 Despite this new vocation,

Brown’s affections were never far from the music of the church, and its compositional

devices provide the key ingredients to his musical approach, even if he were to

subsequently transform them beyond recognition.

Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture - Please, Please, Please

Even from Brown’s initial release, Please, Please, Please (1956) the influence of

gospel on his music was overwhelmingly apparent. Brown’s first single246was

noteworthy not only for its sheer compositional audacity, but also for its gospel

inspired characteristics. Furthermore, the release of Please Please Please, a record

242 (Geoff Brown 1996: 30-31)243 (Geoff Brown 1996: 31)244 (Geoff Brown 1996: 39)245 (Geoff Brown 1996: 41)246 The record was officially attributed to “James Brown and His Famous Flames” (Brown 1956).

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that would be considered repetitious even by the standards of the then emergent

rock’n’roll composition, is an early testament to Brown’s remarkable tenacity in

getting a record released at all. As the story goes, Syd Nathan, then boss of King

Records, thought so little of his A&R man’s latest discovery, that Ralph Bass was

almost fired when the boss listened to Brown’s first disc: “I get Syd on the phone.

He’s yelling: “Bass what kind of shit you on?!” I don’t know what he is talking about.

‘that’s the worst piece of shit I’ve ever heard! He’s just singing one word”247.

Startling stuff considering that the King label housed other formidable gospel artists

on their roster including Little Willie John, Hank Ballard, and Joe Tex. Despite the

adversity that surrounded his initial release, Brown would, of course, prevail, and

Please, Please, Please would go on to become Brown’s first million seller,248 and the

foundation for one of the longest running popular music careers ever.

However, given the precarious circumstances surrounding its release, Please, Please,

Please, could have remained a one off. The more interesting point is that it was not.

For rather than succumbing to record company pressures, Brown would continue to

nurture the repetition of the gospel form in future releases, eventually transforming its

composition into the discernible foundations of the funk aesthetic. Whilst the

emergence of funk is still a decade away, retrospect regards Brown as a figure willing

to embrace radical alternatives to popular music composition.

Please Please Please was an overt reflection of Brown’s gospel roots and this

reflected its predilection for incessant, repetitive incantation of often a single phrase.

As Cynthia Rose writes:

Brown’s repetition and circularity - clearly transferred from sacred tosecular musics and performance - are something much larger than apersonal eccentricity. They denote a black culture with Afrocentricvalues, values distinctly separate from white European systems ofthought about the physical world…The Afrocentric world view towhich repetitions like James Brown’s allude, then, consciously or asreceived patterns, is not one of linear progression.249

247 (Bass in Geoff Brown 1996: 56)248 (Cliff White 1989)249 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 121)

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The all-important conceptual development to seize upon here is the shift away from

linear progression and into the more non-linear approach that guaranteed its ongoing

separation from the compositional values of the “white European systems” to which

Rose refers.

To further extrapolate upon this relative difference in compositional value, Cynthia

Rose turns to James A. Snead’s well-regarded essay, “Repetition as a Figure of Black

Culture” (1981). As Snead contends in that piece, repetition has been historically

undermined in European culture.250 As he argues, from the perspective of a black

musical aesthetic, repetition is central to a compositional value concerned with

circulation.251 Black music’s emphasis on circulation will find itself in opposition to

the European compositional values of accumulation and growth252 that are more

concerned with building the composition in a different way, one that might be

perceived as a more closed compositional “totality”.

Snead argues that at the heart of European composition is the teleological “goal” and

just as “…in European culture, the “goal” is always clear: that which is being worked

towards”. 253 Furthermore, this “goal” “…is reached only when culture ‘plays out’ its

history. Such a culture is never ‘immediate’ but ‘mediated’ and separated from the

present tense by its own future-orientation”. 254 Snead makes assertions of the

differences in value between a teleological compositional form, as a sum of

movement, and a form of repetition that has other, more intricate, aesthetic

developments in mind. Thus, Snead also argues that black music’s conscious

celebration of repetition compels an awareness “…that repetition takes place not on a

level of musical development or progression, but on the purest tonal and timbral

level”.255

250 (Snead 1998: 67-69)251 (Snead 1998: 69)252 (Snead 1998: 69)253 (Snead 1998: 69)254 (Snead 1998: 69)255 (Snead 1998: 69)

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However, it is due perhaps to repetition’s seemingly simple reiteration of form, that it

would be criticised by the European scholar, 256 who would unfairly designate it as

“primitive” in nature.257 To overcome these theoretical limitations, Snead will propose

a more encompassing framework to understand the relative value of repetition in

relation to African/European cultures respectively:

In black culture, the thing (the ritual, the dance, the beat) is ‘there foryou to pick it up when you come back to it.’ If there is a goal in such aculture, it is always deferred; it continually “cuts” back to the start, inthe musical meaning of “cut” as an abrupt, seemingly unmotivatedbreak (an accidental da capo) with a series already in progress and awilled return to a prior series”.258

As might be understood from this passage, central to repetition is an inherent coupling

with “…the prominence of the ‘cut’”, 259 where this musical device, “…overtly insists

on the repetitive nature of the music”.260

Snead goes on to cite the music of James Brown as exemplary of the use of the “cut”,261 which he will propose is a device that might be found in Brown’s trademark,

punctuating grunts and groans. Such devices correlative with, “…the preacher [who]

may cut himself off with phrases such as “praise God”.262 The music of the church,

and as we shall see later, funk, will court such repetition in the most overt fashion.

The importance of “the cut” in black music is perhaps a conscious invocation of

indeterminacy promoting an uncertainty that might create a sense of anticipation.

Hence much of the dramatic impact of repetition derives from the introduction of the

256 As Richard Middleton comments on Snead’s take on Hegel, “Snead fixes Hegel's critique of Africansociety in his sights and then inverts it. Hegel, Snead points out, defines historical Europe throughopposition to its Other — historyless Africa. For Hegel, 'The Negro represents the Natural Man...Whatwe actually understand by "Africa" is that which is without history and resolution, which is still fullycaught up in the natural spirit', with all its cyclical rhythms. Inevitably, then, Europe is Master, Africacondemned to be Slave, in Hegel's notorious dialectical figure. But Snead argues that Hegel'sdescription is right, and only his valuation wrong. The awareness and acceptance of the unavoidablerepetitiveness of life is a wisdom: 'everything that goes around comes around'. This enables him todescribe the cultivation of repetition in black music, from Africa to James Brown, as a positive, and towelcome its influence on a twentieth-century West gradually releasing repetition from previousrepression” (Middleton 1996)257 As discussed for example in musicologist Bruno Nettl’s article, “Unifying Factors in Folk andPrimitive Music” (Nettl 1956).258 (Snead 1998: 69)259 (Snead 1998: 69)260 (Snead 1998: 71)261 (Snead 1998: 71)262 (Snead 1998: 72)

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“cut” as a way to provoke a deliberate sense of anxiety around its destabilising effect

on the certainty of repetition. This anxiety is an effect of the arbitrary deployment of

“the cut” during the preacher’s ritual. The “cut” might be seen to provide an

affirmation of the chance and unpredictability of the production of time, and perhaps

one significant of the unpredictability of a “God” itself.

Black music’s use of repetition and cut allows for an intricate interplay between

preacher and congregation. The indeterminacy of the compositional trajectory

employed by black music forms will incite a more collective form of composition, an

outcome much distinguished from the predetermined structure or “goal” as adhered to

in the European compositional tradition. The gospel form in turn, might thus be seen

to implore a deliberate tension that threatens the stability of the music’s continuity

and will instead render the composition into an indeterminate state of becoming.

The palpable sense of tension milked by this arrangement inspires a suitably intensive

reaction from its audience. These compositional approaches to gospel and funk share

correlations with the more “irrational” approaches to time to be found, for instance, in

that of a time-image cinema, a relationship that I will expand in detail in chapter 5.

The irrational nature of the “cut” differs markedly from the more causal logic of the

popular music composition. The teleological “goal” oriented compositional style

would maintain precedence within a European tradition until such times as it was

challenged by the pervasive nature of black popular music forms.

The influence of gospel, either directly, or through popular music forms such as

Brown’s, has helped to effect a change in compositional values. If we look at the way

the congregation might approach a gospel track, each repetition of the phrase in

question will build upon an element from the previous one in the series. Such

repetition will begin to introduce difference to each of its subsequent iterations,

however slight this difference might appear on the surface. In fact, the difference of

each repetition might also be understood as an expression of the underlying group

dynamic. Each small differentiation of the repeated phrase is thus always that much

closer to being subverted by the more irrational “cut”. This might, for instance, take

the form of an interjection from the preacher whose “cut” will undermine the

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familiarity of the sequential motion of time and thus destabilise the equilibrium of the

compositional trajectory at any given moment.

Snead comments that Brown’s music like the gospel characteristic is demonstrative of

a form deeply rooted in African culture. 263 Whilst I have harboured some previous

grievances about some commentators all too simply calling Brown’s music “African”,

I think it less troublesome if we discuss the important mediational role that the church

will play in celebrating musical strategies based around repetition and cut. Indeed it is

Brown’s adoption of such practices, gleaned from gospel tradition that connects his

work back to a discernibly African lineage. Like the preacher, Brown will invoke

such arbitrary cuts in his music, most demonstrably in the exhortations to the band to

“hit me”, or “take me to the bridge”, driving the music into a new section at will:

The format of the Brown ”cut” and repetition is similar to that ofAfrican drumming after the band has been “cookin'” in a given key andtempo, a cue, either verbal (“Get down”…) or musical (a brief series ofrapid, percussive drum and horn accents), then directs the music to anew level, where it stays with more “cookin'” or perhaps a solo-until arepetition of cues then “cuts” back to the primary tempo. The essentialpattern, then, in the typical Brown sequence is recurrent: “ABA” or“ABCBA” or “ABC (B) A,” with each new pattern set off (i.e.,introduced and interrupted) by the random, brief hiatus of the “cut” .264

The purpose of this “cut” then, might be seen as one of deliberate disruption,

somewhat like a gearshift that will turn the intensity up a notch on Brown’s

command. This process of intensification might be explained in the following way:

Brown’s group will channel the uncertainty (and consequently, the latent anxiety

created by this uncertainty) of the precise placement of these “cuts” into a sheer raw

energy. As Snead argues: “[t]he ensuing rupture does not cause dissolution of the

rhythm; quite to the contrary, it strengthens it, given that it is already incorporated

into the format of the rhythm”.265 This is why Snead is prompted to attribute this

complementary role of repetition and “cut” as one that “…must be placed at the center

263 (Snead 1998: 71)264 (Snead 1998: 71)265 (Snead 1998: 71)

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of the manifestations of repetition in black culture, at the junction of music and

language”.266

Embracing such uncertainty, rather than espousing control of the trajectory or “goal”

of the composition is perhaps the reason that Snead will contend that, “[a] culture

based on the idea of the “cut” will always suffer in a society whose dominant idea is

material progress”.267

Difference and Repetition

Snead’s essay provides further indication as to the need for a more encompassing

understanding of repetition. For repetition is, of course, a complex concept, so much

so that Deleuze would make it one of his central concerns of attention. Deleuze’s

Difference and Repetition, for example, is dedicated to counteracting such generalised

preconceptions of repetition and attempts to restore its conceptual complexity. The

main point to understand here is that repetition does not produce two identical

examples, but rather, that each repetition of the object in question creates its own

unique time and space assemblage with each subsequent iteration. As Deleuze might

remind us, “[r]epetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but does change

something in the mind that contemplates it”.268 Deleuze thus attempts to set straight

the misunderstandings of repetition perceived within a synonymous relationship with

similitude, and hence undervaluing what repetition might introduce to thought.

To my mind, the relationship between repetition and cut that Snead discusses as

characteristic of black music indicates new ways of thinking through this relationship

of difference and repetition. For instance, if we were to perceive the musical

composition in terms of a totality that we move through, and perhaps strictly adhere

to, such as an orchestra playing a score, then we are closing off a relationship to

chance and the very differences that create life itself. Hence, at the heart of Deleuze’s

philosophy is the desire, “…to make chance an object of affirmation”.269

266 (Snead 1998: 72)267 (Snead 1998: 69)268 (Deleuze 1994: 70)269 (Deleuze 1994: 198)

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Deleuze will attempt to achieve this affirmation of chance through his complex

“syntheses of time” proposed in his Difference and Repetition. Whilst a full

examination of the “syntheses of time” is too encompassing to extrapolate in great

detail here, I will, however, broadly outline this section of Difference and Repetition,

to contextualise the idea that the affirmation of chance provides the means for a

future. We might begin by simply thinking about the future as always being the

product of difference and Deleuze will thus take up Nietzsche’s “eternal return” as

providing that synthesis of time that might affirm this notion. However, it must also

be said that the futural form of eternal return can only be properly understood in

reference to the previous syntheses of time that govern the product of present and

past.

The first synthesis of time is the passive synthesis of habit, or the time with which we

tend to be most readily concerned. For it is habit that is most fundamental to the

constitution of the time of the present. Whilst we might perceive habit as the product

of banal repetition, habit too involves difference as “…habit draws something new

from repetition”.270 That is, even habitual behaviour will produce differences in the

time/space assemblages that it is connected to.

Habit also brings further difference to the present because it must account for the past

as a necessary part of its own constitution. For without a concept of past we would

have no indication that the present has passed on.271 Although, whilst Deleuze will tell

us that there is no actual memory involved in habit272 it induces a repression of

conscious recognition of that which is repeated.273 Through this operation the co-

existent past allows us to know that the present passes.

This in turn, requires what Deleuze refers to as the second synthesis of time, or

memory, as an active synthesis of past. To return to the notion of the forking model of

time as discussed in the first chapter, the present can be seen as constantly undergoing

a bifurcation between a co-existent present and past. Within the present, we are either

270 (Deleuze 1994: 73)271 (Deleuze 1994: 81). “No present would ever pass were it not past ‘at the same time’ as it is present;no past would ever be constituted unless it were first constituted ‘at the same time as it was present”(Deleuze 1994: 81).272 (Deleuze 1994: 70)273 (Deleuze 1994: 93-110)

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maintaining the actuality of the living present, or producing an idea that resides in a

virtual past. Whilst the facility to create the past may be accessed either voluntarily or

involuntarily, it should be noted that it is always a production of a memory that did

not exist in our present.274

These syntheses of habit and memory thus work together to reaffirm a preordained

notion of identity, and it is in the everyday maintenance of this identity that we

usually resolve our common sense notion of time. However, as thought is always a

creative act, this notion of monumental time will always inspire a retraction into

similitude (rather than difference) as a way of maintaining identity over time. This is

why Deleuze is opposed to the maintenance of identity, precisely because it privileges

similitude over difference.

Therefore, to think the future, rather than maintain the identity contained in the past,

requires the futural form of time - the “eternal return”.275 Deleuze goes on to

investigate this futural form of time through Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return of

the same. The importance of this futural form of time for Deleuze is that the

production of a future requires alleviating time from its subordinate role as the

temporal continuum that resides throughout the maintenance of identity. Discussing

this notion of eternal return, Deleuze will argue that truly philosophical thought must

involve a time of the future, which will effectively open up time as a way of

maintaining this test of its consistency.276

Deleuze’s idiosyncratic reading of Nietzsche’s eternal return thus provides the

foundation for the future. I should perhaps also add, that Deleuze’s eternal return does

appear to differ somewhat from a Nietzschean view of eternal return, for whom a life

of eternal recurrence would provide a foundation for ethics. A particularly brief

outline of the Nietzschean eternal return might be understood as follows: if we were

to live each moment in perpetuity, then we would not only have to get our personal

priorities in order, but, in doing so, we would orient ourselves to maintaining a world

worth living in, in the process. A Deleuzean approach, on the other hand, gives the

274 (Deleuze 1994: 81)275 (Deleuze 1994: 88-89)276 (Deleuze 1994: 88)

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concept a more ontological capacity. For Deleuze, what returns is not a repetition of

identical time as the consequence of individual agency.277 Deleuze is more keen on

emphasising the process of affirmation itself, which returns us to that notion that only

through an affirmation of chance do we get the necessary production of difference to

give us a time of the future in the first place.

In this respect I will argue that the repetition displayed in both the music of the gospel

tradition, and by extension, James Brown’s work is a form of composition oriented

toward an affirmation of the eternal return of difference. This requires a more open

concept of time rather than subordinating time to merely the sum of musical content.

More simply, the repetition of gospel will simultaneously affirm and produce time

through improvisation rather than maintain a preconceived musical trajectory.

I should add here that the indeterminate nature of the improvised musical work

beckons an uncertain becoming, described by Jeremy Gilbert as the product of the

“rhizomatic moment” of improvisation.278 Gilbert has argued that the indeterminacy

of the becoming-musical results in a break with the more deterministic impetus

behind the composition.

Of course, even the improvising musician will fall back on preconceived refrains.279

Whilst I am, however, sympathetic to this idea of the “rhizomatic moment” of

improvisation it is the uncertain mobilisation of the refrain, that is the more pertinent

point of interest to this study. The musical composition is an important vehicle to

show such productive difference in flight and is demonstrative of the proposition that

the production of a future is untenable if we are restricted to the reiteration of identity.

The eternal return needs the encounter with that which cannot be anticipated, which is

the affirmation of difference rather than similitude.280 This is why I will argue that

the gospel form is more predisposed to an affirmation of imminent change, rather than

277 (Deleuze 1994: 77)278 (Gilbert 2004a: 118-137). In my own defence, and one perhaps incognisant rather antagonistic ofGilbert’s assertion, (Gilbert 2004a: 121) I, like many Deleuzean inspired scholars have discussed“composition” and “improvisation” synonymously.279 As Deleuze and Guattari write in A Thousand Plateaus, that the musicians uses the refrain as aspringboard and “…that a musician requires a first type of refrain, a territorial or assemblage refrain, inorder to transform it from within, deterritorialized, producing a refrain of the second type as the finalend of music: the cosmic refrain of the sound machine”(Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 349)280 (Deleuze 1994: 90)

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to an active synthesis of its past, and by extension this affirmation is more involved in

the emphasis of an unfolding present.

As the affirmation of repetition is primary to the gospel aesthetic, this music would

thus maintain an important compositional distinction to the traditional compositional

values. As we learned via Snead, earlier in this chapter, the popularity of the gospel

form was yet another assault upon the long held aesthetic biases set in place by the

more hegemonic refrains of the ‘fine music’ tradition that had marginalised repetition.

Repetition did, of course, exist in some form in European music as well; leitmotifs

and refrains were always central to its fine music tradition of course, so perhaps it was

really a matter of degree. It was just a matter of pushing the possibility of repetition

further, which is precisely what Brown would do. Of course, adherents of the

“logical” linear conception of time would be obviously horrified by any challenge to

the dominance of its structure. Hence we find Brown locking horns with a resistant

record company much concerned over the seeming lack of compositional logic

exhibited in a track such as Please Please Please. 281

It is worth pointing out that Brown struggled to follow up the success of Please

Please Please, otherwise unable to dent the charts for another two years.282 His career

was literally saved by another gospel inspired hit wrested out of the ether, Try Me

(1958).283 These two seminal gospel based recordings bookend an array of otherwise

undistinguished nods to the popular styles of the day. As Cliff White writes, “By

Brown’s own admission, Chonnie-On-Chon was a deliberate attempt to rock’n’roll in

the style of Little Richard, and Begging, Begging an attempt to emulate the slower of

Hank Ballad & the Midnighters’ two basic styles”.284 For the most part, the records of

281 Whilst unrelated to this point, it is amazing that Brown made any records for King, let alone emergeas its most successful artist. King boss Syd Nathan seemed to undermine the idiosyncratic vocal stylethat made Brown so successful. One can listen for example to the exchange between Nathan andBrown prior to the recording of “Love Don’t Love Nobody” (Brown 1989) where Nathan criticisesBrown for “singing too hard” (Brown 1989). Brown recounts the words of King boss Syd Nathan, whosaid that Brown couldn’t sing ballads, "…all you can do is holler"(Brown and Tucker, 1986, 138). Thisprocess of continually proving Nathan wrong perhaps further inspired Brown.282 (Weinger & White 1991: 19)283 Despite the writers credit that Brown gave to himself on the record, Bobby Byrd says to GeoffBrown that, “‘The lyrics James had, he got from this boy down at The Palms in Hollandale, Florida…Itwas something like the way we got Please, Please, an adaptation from something else. This boy wassinging the song around and he gave James the lyric. But it was originally more complicated” (GeoffBrown 1996: 70).284 (Cliff White 1989)

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Brown’s early period (1956-1963) were fairly orthodox affairs in terms of their

composition, and the most gospel inflected tunes would be hard pressed to ensure the

desired crossover success. In fact, the inertia of the civil rights movement gave the

gospel sounds the right existential conditions so that they could re-emerge in their

next guise as soul. For it was gospel’s musical galvanising of broader existential

circumstances that would prove so instructive to the latter musical movement.

The Gospel Years

The gospel genre boomed from the 1940s to the 1960s 285 and this boom was perhaps

due to the style’s spiritual aspirations that would reflect those of the civil rights

struggle.

Seminal to the development of the gospel genre are the compositions of Professor

Thomas Dorsey, who has been credited with popularising the gospel form in Chicago

in the late 1920s-30s.286 As Gerri Hirshey will explain in Nowhere to Run, that while

the commercial potential of recorded gospel was evident as far back as the late 1930s

when the guitar slinging Sister Rosetta Tharpe had a hit with the Dorsey -composed,

Rock Me,287 the hits were isolated. The uplifting gospel sounds would have some

resonance in the Depression of the 1930s, and performers such as Marion Williams,

Sallie Martin, and Willie Mae Ford Smith would develop significant followings, but

the success was not sustained. That was until Mahalia Jackson who emerged at the

height of the civil rights turmoil and would thus give gospel its real commercial

breakthrough. This rather belated acceptance of the form came about through these

more encompassing existential circumstances:

"We tried the gospel songs in the twenties," [Dorsey] said, "but thetime was not ripe for it. In the Depression, the time was ripe. Peoplewanted to turn to something. The time is right for what these youngfellows are trying to do. It’s the age, the Atomic Age. People arescared. They want something to turn to. They’re ready for it".288

285 (Dorsey in Hirshey 1985: 27)286 (LeRoi Jones 1967: 192)287 (Hirshey 1985: 27)288 (Dorsey in Hirshey 1985: 27)

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Dorsey’s observation was prescient, given the fact that the folk boom was also just

emerging at a similar time and perhaps indicative of a general retraction into “roots”

music during this period of political upheaval. The uncertainty of this particular time

in the late 1950s and early 1960s was conducive of a general rekindling of “roots”

music even if the genres subsequently spawned were more actively producing new

futures rather than merely replicating their respective pasts. Performers such as James

Brown (gospel) or Bob Dylan (folk) would affirm these pasts for their creative

difference, albeit without banally repeating them.

There is always a price to pay for difference, though, and both of these performers

faced much criticism from the more orthodox practitioners of their respective musical

styles, 289 perhaps because their detractors were perhaps too stuck in their respective

dogmas to be more embracing of a future. It was precisely their ability to embrace

difference over orthodoxy that made performers such as Brown, and Dylan,

revolutionary musical artists. They were figures with sights set on a future, rather than

a rekindling of the past.

In the more “progressive” world of jazz, it was future at the expense of the past. The

progressive forms of jazz, from the post-war to the early sixties, a period that saw the

rise of styles such as bebop, “cool jazz” and “hard bop” styles would place its

aesthetic ideals at odds with its apparently “primitive” musical past. For instance as

Atlantic Records head and jazz aficionado, Ahmet Ertegun recalls, “…in the forties,

even as far back as the thirties, black jazz musicians would twist themselves in knots

to avoid using blues changes in their work. Or if they did use them, they would try to

disguise them by dropping camouflage half notes here and there. “‘They were,’ he

says, ‘extremely cautious to avoid what might be considered retrogression.’”.290

Whilst jazz did become more embracing of roots, its sophistication had probably

already alienated the mainstream, to become increasingly detached from the vanguard

289 In chapter six of this thesis, I recount in detail the way Brown’s musicians were contemptuous ofboth funk and his idiosyncratic musicianship. Bob Dylan has been criticised throughout his career,from being a “poor singer”, to being “booed’ from the stage for playing electric at the 1965 NewportFolk Festival, to a 1966 World Tour of such booing for same. This is the beginning of a career thatmanaged to annoy large sections of his fan base at will, through gestures such as the album SelfPortrait (1970), the movie Renaldo and Clara (1978), or a conversion to Christianity (c.1979-1981) toname but a very few such examples.290 (Hirshey 1985: 76)

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of popular music. The exceptions were few, and only the bravest of performers, Miles

Davis is perhaps the best known example, were willing to embrace a future that might

require transforming their music beyond recognition.

That the battle over an essential jazz aesthetic was so hotly contested may have been

due to its esteemed position as the epitome of black artistic invention,291 a status

conferred upon it by some select musical commentators. As I will discuss in detail in

the next chapter, this was a view that was shared by many of Brown’s most prominent

band members, who were only playing the populist funk style for the money.292 Jazz’s

modernist spirit has been discussed in detail in Guthrie Ramsay’s Race Music: Black

Cultures From Bebop to Hip-Hop (2003).293 Ramsey correlates the rise of modern

jazz styles such as be-bop with the sense of accompanying Afro-modernism with its

aesthetic orientation predicated on the spirit coursing through the social. The free

improvisation of the be-boppers equates to the freedom “that will come”:

For African Americans, the thrust of Afro-modernism has always been,in my view, defined primarily within the socio-political arena: as thequest for liberation, freedom, and literacy as well as the seeking ofupward mobility and enlarged possibilities within the Americancapitalist system. Literary critic Houston Baker has talked about theAfro-modernist project as "renaissancism" -a "productive set oftactics" and not simply the ‘success" and influence of black literary

291 This is the neo-classical/neo-conservative vision of jazz espoused by trumpeter Wynton Marsalisand noted writer Stanley Crouch both of whom contribute commentary to Ken Burns’ Jazz (2001).Crouch has been spokesman for Marsalis since the 1980s and also writes the liner notes for his CDs(The History Makers 2005). In the Black Atlantic, Gilroy writes of the battle between the “progressive”position Miles Davis and the more retroactive, neo-classicist position held by Marsalis (Gilroy 1993:97) Davis made plain his hostility toward the New Orleans trumpeter for his embrace of a conservativeand dogmatic ideal of the genre. This feud has been the subject of much commentary, such as thatmade by Professor Paul Gilroy in his book The Black Atlantic. Gilroy uses Marsalis’ anachronistic andessentialist position on the genre as a point of critique (Gilroy 1993: 97).292 This is discussed in more detail in chapter six, for example, saxophonist Alfred “Pee Wee” Ellis hadpreviously worked with Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins but left after a lucrative proposition to joinBrown.293 Outlining some of the general tenets of the modernist impulse, Ramsey says, ““I should stress here,however, that Afro-modernism has similarities to classic (or canonical) modernism, the otherexperimental developments in music, literature, and art that emerged in European and Americanmetropolitan centers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries”. These artisticexpressions articulated how the culture of modernity-the transformed character of economic, social,and cultural life associated with the rise of capitalism, industrialization, and urbanization-wasexperienced by many. A few of the discourses that emerged from the state of modernity include anantagonistic relationship between "high art" and mass culture, rejection of the norms and values ofbourgeois culture, and, in some cases, an alignment with progressive cultural politics” (Ramsey 2003:106)

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and black "classical" music such as those from movements like theHarlem Renaissance.294

However, this “set of tactics” had appeared to run its course, in a pragmatic sense

anyway. The modernist platitudes ascribed to jazz as the high point of African-

American artistry are still entrenched in African-American commentary

today,295although jazz as a genre has arguably long moved on.296 Indeed if such a

broad generic distinction can be conceivably used to umbrella such a sustained

musical becoming, jazz was still grappled over as an indicator of the livelihood of

African-American artistry.

For instance, in The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy discusses the feud that erupted

between Miles Davis and the neo-classicist style of Wynton Marsalis. 297 According to

this anecdote, it would appear that Davis maintained a long-term feud with Marsalis

because of the latter’s adherence to an image of jazz. Davis would, for instance, mock

Marsalis’ adherence to the anachronistic jazz aesthetic something that the latter would

emulate right down to its dress code.298 Meanwhile jazz traditionalists greeted Davis’

experimentation with an indignant reproach as if the music had represented some sort

of backward step by succumbing to electricity.299Whilst one could understand

Marsalis’ pride in this most influential African-American art form and his celebration

of it, it also says something about the nature of art - Davis is an “artist” because he

would never live in the past at the expense of the present. Paul Gilroy will also

criticise Marsalis’ essentialism as indicative of, “[t]he fragmentation and subdivision

294 (Ramsey 2003: 106)

295 For a criticism of jazz revisionism see “Repertory Jazz, Fusion, Marsalis, and Crouch” (Bowden2001). Bowden writes about Marsalis and Crouch’s neo-conservative view of jazz, their criticism offusion, Miles Davis’ “electronic” period and Marsalis’ general belief “…that popular music hasbecome increasingly infantile over the years, and that this was not always the case…” (Bowden 2001).296 See Electric Miles: A Different Kind of Blue (2004). As James Mtume says in the Electric Milesdocumentary, what Miles Davis was playing in his “electric period” could not be conceivably viewedas what jazz once was, "The problem was...no one wanted to accept the fact that he was no longerplaying jazz...so why are you asking jazz critics about this music that they don't have a palatefor...Miles never called it anything...but it was no longer jazz...they keep wanting to call it jazz...but itwasn't"(Mtume in Electric Miles: A Different Kind of Blue)297 (Gilroy 1993: 97)298 (Gilroy 1993: 97)299 This is discussed for instance in the documentary Electric Miles: A Different Kind of Blue (2004)(Lerner 2004).

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of black music into an ever increasing proliferation of styles and genres which makes

a nonsense of this polar opposition between progress and dilution”.300

Like a form of musical biodiversity, generic plurality kept African-American music at

the forefront of popular music innovations. Where art is concerned, appealing to a

historical model is an appeal to conceptual stasis. The problem of many artistic

traditions is that history can be an anathema, and it is wondering how to deal with this

history that makes one an artist: “Extremists on the subject turned so far away from

blues roots that they seemed closer to European conservatories. This music, cool jazz,

as opposed to hot jazz, sounded very abstract to a lot of people. Factions developed

around the issue of avoiding or embracing the blues".301 As we shall discuss in the

next chapter, a truly representative form of music does not exist, and it never can. All

great artists merely change and this can be seen in the example where a “cool jazz”

man such as Davis, would embrace Brown’s music, whilst Brown’s musicians aspired

to his.302 Davis obviously had no qualms about dispensing with an identity founded

on past glories. There was also the point that the politics of the civil rights era were

encompassing of the entire African-American population, so the music that would suit

the temper of the time most adequately was the one that would provide for a

collectivity more efficiently.

“The Changing Same”

Amiri Baraka (then writing as LeRoi Jones) contends in his oft-cited essay “The

Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music)” (1966) that the rise of gospel music

could be seen as the urbanised, working class alternative to the more “middle-class”

jazz forms.303 As Baraka will argue, the working class African-Americans had a

stronger connection to Gospel as “…[it] was the more emotional blacker churches that

the blues people were members of, rather than the usually whiter, more middle-class

300 (Gilroy 1993: 96)301 (Hirshey 1985: 76)302 In his book on Miles Davis’ electric years, Running the Voodoo Down: The Electric Music of MilesDavis (2005), author Philip Freeman discusses the influence of James Brown’s early 1970s line-up ofthe JB’s and the influence of their music on Miles” band. In particular the similarities in style betweenBrown’s bassist Bootsy Collins, and Davis” Michael Henderson(Freeman 2005: 123-124)303 (LeRoi Jones 1967: 192)

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churches the jazz people went to”.304 The relationship between the two styles would

often cross the sacred/secular divide as “…the gospel singers have always had a more

direct connection with the blues than the other religious singers”305. On this point,

Baraka informs us that gospel innovator Thomas Dorsey was himself once a blues

singer and piano player who went by the stage name of "Georgia Tom," and was

famed for partnerships with blues legends such as Ma Rainey and Tampa Red.306

Dorsey was working both sides of the sacred/secular divide, as Hirshey notes:

In the twenties Dorsey made a decent living as sideman, writer, andperformer. Before he penned gospel classics like "Precious Lord," hewrote double entendre blues titled "It’s Tight Like That." In thebeginning of his gospel career, his bluesy leanings sometimes got himthrown out of some churches.307

Containing the musical integrity of church music was a contentious issue, perhaps

because of its value as an arbiter of communal agency. Indeed the reason that

generations of African-Americans have always had a close relationship to the church

is perhaps due to its central role in catalysing minor peoples into a collective. Before

the social goals of the civil rights movement, there was little hope for many

marginalised African-Americans who depended upon the church and its traditions as a

means of survival. The political importance of maintaining the integrity of the

institution is perhaps why there was the strict sacred/secular music divide, which

seems quaint in retrospect but was very real, as recently depicted in the biographical

film on Ray Charles, Ray (2004) .308 However, it was perhaps because of, rather than

in spite of, these very tensions which contributed to gospel's vitality and promoted it

to newfound success:

[o]utraged by the growth of classical-oriented jazz and inspired by thesuccess of artists like Mahalia Jackson and Ray Charles, the youngNew York musicians began in the late Fifties to reassess the Negrofolk idiom-the cries, chants, shouts, work songs and pulsating rhythmicvitality of gospel singers and shouting choirs. Then, in one of the mostastounding about-faces in jazz history, the fundamentalists (most of

304 (LeRoi Jones 1967: 192)305 (LeRoi Jones 1967: 192)306 (LeRoi Jones 1967: 192)307 (Hirshey 1985: 27)308 As Ray Charles comments in documentary, Piano Blues (2004) the observance of the separation ofsacred and secular was perhaps not really that separate at all.

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them are conservatory-trained liberals) abandoned Bartok, Schoenberg,and "all that jazz" and immersed themselves in the music of ThomasA. Dorsey, Roberta Martin (gospel artists) and Howlin” Wolf. Jazz,which had been rolling along on a fugue kick, turned from theacademy and faced the store front church.309

It is not then difficult to understand how Brown’s funk would have a similar

egalitarian appeal for an audience of which such “roots” music was representative of

an important sense of historical consciousness in the civil-rights era. This is why

Baraka would situate Brown at the head of the new collective congregation that was

in the process of “becoming-black”310 in the midst of the civil rights struggle:

…from G.T. (Georgia Tom), and even before that - to J.B. (JamesBrown), have all come that way. The meeting of the practical God (i.e.,of the existent American idiom) and the mystical (abstract) God is alsothe meeting of the tones, of the moods, of the knowledge, the differentmusics and the emergence of the new music, the really new music, theall-inclusive whole. The emergence also of the new people, the Blackpeople conscious of all their strength, in a unified portrait of strength,beauty and contemplation.311

Whilst Baraka’s comments resonate with the essentialist rhetoric of the time, such

comments are of course indicative of the “conscious” ethos that we associate with the

rise of what will become known as soul. The soul era itself was beginning to emerge

around the time of this 1961 interview with Dorsey who will remark that the return to

the gospel tradition was due to something he called “the transitions of time”.312These

transitions were obviously of an encompassing existential nature, and the gospel style

would project an aspiration that would become transformed into the soul aesthetic.

309 (Bennett in Hirshey 1985: 76)310 This concept of becoming-black, which is as provocative and perhaps problematic as becoming-woman with which it appears in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 291-293). Deleuzerefers to this concept of “becoming-black” again in Cinema 2, in regard to Powers of the False: “…upto that highest power of the false which means that a black must himself become black, through hi swhite roles, Whilst the white here finds a chance of becoming black too”(Deleuze 1989: 153)311 (LeRoi Jones 1967: 192)312 (Hirshey 1985: 27).

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As I have demonstrated in this chapter, gospel is not merely a style of music, but

rather a pretext for becoming. Soul might have shared some discernible attributes with

gospel but when it came to the lived experience James Brown took it all the way, and

left his peers behind.

In this chapter I attempted to articulate how the irrational nature of the repetition used

in the gospel genre created an open-ended composition, one that was not so concerned

with trying to engineer a compositional “whole” but would instead emphasise a more

concerted concentration on the nuances of timbre produced through repetition. These

elements of repetition and irrational cuts found in gospel would in turn resurface in

Brown’s funk (and beyond). We can thus begin to trace Brown’s debt to gospel,

where such repetition can become a catalysing force for a more collective approach to

musical composition. Furthermore, the repetition inherent to the form becomes an

affirmation of difference and the music of the church, I contend, is geared toward a

form of “futural time”. For African-Americans, the gospel style had long provided a

belief in the world when it was needed and the form would regain commercial

popularity during a time of broader existential concern. James Brown would tap into

this collective power of the church during the momentous events of the late 1950s

civil rights era, and subsequently extend the form at this important time. Funk as a

gospel inspired music will take up this important catalysing role for a population

subjected to the any-space-whatever condition that was proposed in the previous

chapter. The composition of this gospel style was suitably malleable to be directed

into these new musical paths.

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CHAPTER FOUR

THE “I” BECOMES WE

As I established in the last chapter, the influence of gospel on the music of James

Brown can be heard in his use of devices such as repetition and “cut”. Yet Brown is

cited in Snead’s article precisely because of his most emphatic use of such gospel

derived musical devices, which did not translate so readily to all manifestations of the

soul music genre. Whilst Brown’s music, of course, was considered the epitome of

this soul style, known as he was by such monikers as Soul Brother No. 1 and The

Godfather of Soul, the reality of the situation, from a compositional point of view, is

that his music would stylistically diverge from that of his peers. As I contend in this

chapter, the seeds of a “time-image” oriented compositional aesthetic heard in the

emphatic repetition of the gospel style is subsequently seized upon by Brown and

channelled into his funk.

However before I can make this distinction between a compositional “movement-

image” that might be discerned from “time-image”, it should be noted that whilst

gospel was soul’s spiritual predecessor, in terms of its appeal to transcendence and

telos – “we shall overcome” - it would not make full use of gospel’s more radical

compositional approach to the working of time. I will discuss soul’s inherent

movement-image orientation in detail in the next chapter. For present purposes,

however, what should be noted is the difference between such compositional

inheritances as opposed to more “spiritual ones”. For the compositional means by

which soul would take its messages to the marketplace, were, more often than not,

relatively orthodox.

The gospel aesthetic, however, might allude to a “transcendental form” of time, or as

a reflection of the Stoic notion of Aion. For Aion is the form of time that Deleuze and

Guattari associate with becoming, and a concept of time central to a time-image

cinema.313 For Deleuze, Aion is not lived time but time in its transcendent form, that

is, a concept of time upon which we have projected our own sense of chronology. It

313 (Bell 1994)

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is this more transcendental form of time that I will argue later in the chapter exists in

alterity to the more teleologically inclined soul aesthetic.

My attempts to determine the exact derivation of the generic attribution of soul were

largely fruitless. Perhaps I should take comfort in the fact that Brown himself has

said, “…don’t ask me when they started calling my music soul ‘cause I don’t

remember. It was always that to me”.314 However, the elevation of soul into a

commercial genre has been credited to Atlantic Records and their attempts to

distinguish the secularised versions of gospel songs recorded by their artist, Ray

Charles, from its more churchy competitors.315 Atlantic’s Ahmet Ertegun that was

sufficiently drawn to this term “soul”, to name the 1957 album by Ray Charles and

Milt Jackson, Soul Brothers.316 Ertegun admits that the term had of course, been

commonly circulating among, “…black jazz musicians, mainly in New York, in the

late fifties and early sixties. The soul movement in jazz arose as a sort of backlash

against the snobbery some musicians felt had invaded and stultified the music and, in

effect, made it less black”.317 Soul’s newfound commerciality was made possible

because it indicated a more commercial iteration of the nominally, “primitive”, church

music.318 Operating under the aegis of soul, Ray Charles would breach the traditional

separation of sacred and secular musics, even though “[m]any, particularly older

people, considered the merging of sacred and secular to be in bad taste”.319 Yet this

egalitarian nature of soul music also made it an appropriate candidate for a wider

embrace by audiences outside the African-American community and allowed it to

become the musical expression of the civil rights era.

314 (Brown in Hirshey 1985: 60).315 Over the years this has been claimed as an invention of Charles but also of Atlantic president AhmetErtegun. Milt Jackson/Ray Charles Soul brothers. As Michael Haralambos explains, ‘There is generalagreement that soul music began in the mid-”50s when Ray Charles, who had formerly sung blues in astyle similar to Charles Brown, began to record secular versions of gospel songs. In 1954 My Jesus IsAll World to Me became Ray Charles’s I Got a Woman. The following year the `Reverend Mr Ray”,the `High Priest” or the `Righteous Mr Ray” as he has variously been termed, gave a similar treatmentto Clara Ward’s old gospel song This Little Light of Mine. Retitling it This Little Girl of Mine, Raychanged a few words to sing the praises of his girlfriend instead of his marker. The traditionally strictseparation of blues and religious music was ended’ (Haralambos 1974: 100-101).316 (Hirshey 1985: 78)317 (Hirshey 1985: 76)318 Gospel, rightly or wrongly has been referred to as a form of “American Primitive” as compiled onthe following CD, American Primitive, Vol. 1 - Raw Pre-War Gospel 1926 – 1936 (1997) (VariousArtists 1997).319 (Haralambos 1974: 100-101)

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Soul and the civil rights struggle - The “I” Becomes We

The defining events of the civil rights struggle would take place roughly between the

mid 1950s and the late 1960s. As Ben Sidran remarks in his Black Talk (1971), the

civil rights era would have its symbolic beginning in the 1954 Brown vs Board of

Education decision.320 This famous civil-rights case would produce Afro-America’s

first official victory over segregation, and as Sidran contends, “[t]he boost this

decision brought to black confidence is inestimable”.321 The decision would in turn

inspire a “…new black assertiveness [that] emerged about 1955 with the rise of the

‘soul’ mystique”.322 Maintaining the ongoing success of this collective struggle for

social justice would obviously affect the spirit of the time on an existential level.

The newly inspired sense of assertiveness that came from such victories would

positively affect Afro-Americans’ image of themselves and the past. Driven by a will

to identify, African-Americans would thus begin to more readily embrace their past

musical history, including “roots” music, such as gospel, thus setting up the necessary

environment from which soul could emerge.

“Soul” music, then, was one origin of a cultural self-improvement

program and, in insisting the Negro had “roots” that were valuable

rather than shameful, it was one of the most significant changes to

have occurred within black psychology. “Soul” music was important

not just as a musical idiom, but also as a black-defined, black-accepted

means of actively involving the mass base of Negroes”.323

It comes as little surprise, then, that some of the most famous performers, which of

course included Brown, but also Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin and Otis

Redding, would unashamedly assert their relationship to the church through their own

320 The Brown v. the Board of Education was the initial 1954 lawsuit challenging school segregation,brought in Topeka, Kansas. The inertia that began to build from the case set off a more encompassingstruggle and the Brown Vs Board case began to encompass an umbrella lawsuit across a series ofsegregation cases as plaintiffs in other states began to emerge against the state legislature. The eventsare comprehensively discussed on The Tavis Smiley Show, May 19, 2004 (The Tavis Smiley Show2004)321 (Sidran 1995: 126)322 (Sidran 1995: 125)323 (Sidran 1995: 126)

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particular expressions of the soul aesthetic. For example, Michael Haralambos quotes

blues man B.B. King on the differences of soul to blues in terms of audience

interaction: “In James [Brown]’s and Aretha [Franklin]’s case they are more like in

church, a Holiness church, where everybody’s getting the beat, getting the feeling.”324

On this point, Haralambos, in turn, extrapolates that:

Soul-singers often demand the emotional involvement of theiraudience in much the same way as gospel singers. James Brownexhorts his audience to “feel good” and “get the feeling” and directsits mood with songs I Feel Good and I Got the Feeling. Like the leadsinger in a gospel group he sings “Hey hey I feel alright” and invitesthe audience to voice its response.325

Soul music would thus use this more collectively quested appeal as part of its

crossover-friendly expression of affective mobilisation during the civil rights era.

Through its musical reiteration, soul inferred a destiny of natural corrective justice

that would apparently be delivered through the will of God. Based on such events, the

emotional spirit driving the civil-rights struggle would move Sam Cooke to write, A

Change is Gonna Come (1964),326 although why God should act in the 1960s, when

He had not intervened several hundred years previously is a moot point.

Such transcendental narratives would also suggest that maintenance of passivity in the

face of one’s political goals was a virtue, that if not rewarded in this world, would

apparently be rewarded in the next. Elevating such transcendental “goals” over a more

immanent political strategy, would not necessarily garner universal favour. Indeed,

Malcolm X would famously malign this position and chastised the Christian African-

Americans for not believing in this world as it was.327 Malcolm chastised them for

dedicating their time to the rousing refrains of “We Shall Overcome”, when they

should “…stop singing and start swinging”.328 There was action, of course. The

images of the civil rights demonstration of the early 1960s are well known, and

perhaps forever epitomised by the resounding images of the 1963 “March on

324 (Haralambos 1974: 100)325 (Haralambos 1974: 100)326 That Cooke’s song so supremely reflected the general spirit of the times made it a likely candidatefor Craig Werner’s book on the rise of the soul movement, A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race andthe Soul of America (2000).327 (Malcolm X 1992)328 (Malcolm X 1992)

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Washington” where Martin Luther King would deliver his famous “I Have a Dream”

speech to a multi-racial audience.

Soul music also wore its heart on its sleeve accordingly, and would be subsequently

referred to by Billboard, as “music with a philosophy,” an up-tempo “black

nationalism in pop”. 329 Neal comments on the emergence of the soul aesthetic that,

“…[t]hough clearly not the first aesthetic that mirrored the segregated realities of

black life, the soul aesthetic was the cultural component to the most visible black

nationalist ideas of the twentieth century”.330 It was the first time that this particular

section of the population was able to prominently articulate their collective goals and

soul’s strident narratives would often veer into manifesto, exhibited in songs such as,

A Change Is Gonna Come (1964), Respect (1967), Say it Loud! I'm Black and I'm

Proud (1968) to name but a few more epochal musical moments. Soul’s emphasis on

narrativising in its appeal for collectivity would distinguish its lyrical content from the

more politically ambiguous themes of the previous rock’n’roll generation. Not for a

moment would I deny the politics of the previous generation of rock’n’rollers, but

rather, that their political agenda was (necessarily) more insidious.331 Hence we

witness a general trend where the risqué undercurrent that marks the work of the

1950s wave of rock’n’rollers is instead replaced by the more righteous spirit of the

soul period. Unlike the music of this previous wave of African-American popular

music artists, soul was very much “grand” narrative-driven, in the sense that the songs

deliberately attempted to invoke a universalising and anthemic quality to aide the

struggle for change. Gerri Hirshey makes this observation in reference to an empirical

study undertaken by Michael Haralambos in his Right On: From Blues to Soul in

Black America:

The “back door man” of the blues had been replaced by the soul man, alover possessed of both guilt and morality. The “I’ of the bluesman hadbecome the “we” in soul music. And having borrowed so much fromgospel, soul music was bullish on hope. Activism, while still suicidalin some quarters, had gotten a booster shot of faith with the CivilRights Act of 1964. “I Have a Dream”, from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s1963 speech, became the official slogan of radio station WCHB in

329 (Hirshey 1985: 315)330 (Neal 2002: 5)331 An example that is evident for in my discussion of Little Richard’s Tutti Fruitti in chapter 5.

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Detroit. Even WDIA in Memphis adjusted its pitch to “50,000 watts ofSoul Power”.332

As a general rule, all musical forms will, by nature, indiscriminately synthesise

previous genres and any qualification of particular musical streams that might make

up the evolution of a particular genre is a complex business. However, in this

particular instance, there is a decisive existential shift to be found in the shift in focus

from individuality to collectivity as ascertained by the change in lyrical expression

anyway. To return to the earlier observation made by B.B. King in relation to the

differences between blues and soul, it is in this appeal for collectivity that a genre

such as soul bears a closer relationship to gospel than it does to the blues, although the

forms are never mutually exclusive.

Maintaining these general distinctions of temporal orientation between the genres is

complex and fraught with problems. For example, the observation that soul emerged

spiritually from gospel, might appear to contradict the previous comments made by

Amiri Baraka, who stated that gospel was closely related to blues. This is the point

however, where it is important to differentiate how each of the genres would orient

themselves to time. In fact from a compositional point of view the circularity of the

12-bar form does betray an assertion of repetition. Yet in both genres there is a

relative sense of compositional progression, in the sense that there is a certainty to

their compositional logic that makes them less “irrational” than styles such as gospel

and funk, which might launch into a “cut” at any particular moment. Thus the easiest

way to make these distinctions between the genres respective compositional

orientations to time is to gauge their adherence to a telos and a belief in causality.

There are of course, no decisive rules to this type of qualification, and in fact Brown

himself would embrace all of the genres mentioned – gospel, blues and jazz and direct

them into his version of soul. However, it is his predilection toward the more

irrational composition of the gospel form that would constitute the most enduring,

influence on his music. For Brown’s more collective approach to composition was

driven by the gospel aesthetic and would, in turn, sow the seeds for many of the

characteristics of funk. Soon many of the devices gleaned from the music of the

332 (Hirshey 1985: 315)

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church were re-deployed into the emergent funk style, confirmed here by ex-

bandleader and long-time Brown band stalwart, Fred Wesley:

I think James Brown was tremendously influenced by preachers. WhenI hear a preacher looking for a note...And when he finds that note, thenhe would work on that one note for a long time. And when he wantedto take it higher he’d say, “‘take it up a little higher. ““A littlehigher,”“ then ““Higher!”“ And ““Higher!”“ The next thing you knowhe goes ““Higher!”“ and it becomes a scream.333

In fact Brown was always quick to point out the church’s formidable influence on his

formative musical education,334 an association that had some pragmatic benefits that

extended beyond a spiritual education: “…in order to use their piano, I started

cleaning out Trinity Baptist Church before services. There was gospel singing and

hand-clapping, and the preacher would really get down. I’m sure a lot of my stage

show came out of the church”.335

In fact, Brown’s act may well be perceived as a secularised dramatisation of the more

charismatic forms of Christianity as he actively assimilated such gospel staples as

testifying and call and response, all the while maintaining the authority of the

“preacher”.336 Haralambos writes that Brown’s work, “…exemplifies many of the

features of gospel music that have been incorporated into soul. In Shout And Shimmy

he uses falsetto screams and melisma with wild exuberance and does a parody of

testifying at the beginning and during the middle of the song”.337

These characteristic features of the gospel tradition would eventually be heard, by an

increasingly broader audience, via the release of his breakthrough album, Live at the

Apollo (1963). Brown wanted to release a live album for the very reason that it would

333 (Wesley in James Brown: Soul Survivor 2003)334 “My music is like a parable…When you get happy, you don’t quite get enough. An’ you just keepdoin’ it and doin’ it and - it’s the way people react when they get happy in church. Really I’ve alwaysgone for that same kind of spiritual concept. Preachers did inspire me: Brother Joe May, Daddy Grace,Rev C L Franklin, Aretha’s daddy. And Little Richard, of course” (Brown in Cynthia Rose 1990: 126).335 (Brown in James Brown: Soul Survivor 2003)336 By way of example, during the autobiographical section of Brown’s anti-drug rap, Public EnemyNo. 1 (1972), Brown says with complete sincerity that “…I know when I was a kid they say I wasgonna be a preacher …” (Brown 1972b).337 (Haralambos 1974: 101)

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more accurately reflect the energy of his show,338 and perhaps also because it was

only via vinyl that he could ever begin to connect with the white marketplace. The

enormous success of Live At the Apollo may well have been due to its role of

intercessor between the cultures black and white, not only because the album emerged

during a time of actual physical segregation, but also because it gave young white

kids another great reason to continue overcoming it. In fact, the white audience

bought the album in such quantities that it provided Brown with an unprecedented

sales record for an R&B album.339 It continues to be one of the most celebrated

albums in all of popular music, and as testament to its status, was recently given its

own dedicated volume, Douglas Wolk’s, James Brown's Live At The Apollo (2004).340

In fact Brown has credited gospel for no less than the “the one” itself, as Brown

asserts in this interview in Uncut (2004): “Gospel always had The One,” Brown says,

“but it became more dominant once I clarified it”.341 The one becomes Brown’s

enunciation of a more entrenched cultural approach, and one that took in influences

from Africa to gospel.

Brown and Africa

In fact as much has been staked on “the one” as a diasporic expression of an African

aesthetic, I should like to clarify this relationship. Brown’s work is often subject to a

lazy reductionism that attempts to give the music a nominal ethnic identification

which only tends to subsume commentary on the imminent conditions which would

have such an effect on the funk style: “By turning rhythmic structure on its head,

emphasizing the downbeat-the “one” in a four beat bar-the Godfather kick-started a

338 (Brown & Tucker 1986: 130-131). It should also be noted that Brown’s record company absolutelyhated the idea, and that Brown paid the then substantial sum of $5700 to record it himself (Brown &Tucker 1986: 131).339 (Geoff Brown 1996: 98-99). Furthermore Peter Doggett writes in a Record Collector article on thealbum, “King couldn’t envisage the record breaking out of the limited market for R&B albums, initiallypressing just 5,000 copies. But within a month of its spring 1963 release ‘Live at the Apollo’ hadcrossed into the Pop charts, where it eventually rose to No. 2. For many thousands of white kids whocould only dream of venturing uptown to Harlem, James Brown’s album was a worthy substitute forthe real thing. In fact, only the Beach Boys “Surfin’ U.S.A.” outsold it among teen oriented albums thatyear”(Doggett 1997: 77)340 For a detailed account of the impact of this album, not only on Brown’s career but on popular musicin general, see Douglas Wolk’s James Brown's Live at the Apollo part of the series of the 33 1/3 seriesof mini-books dedicated to some of popular music’s most celebrated albums (Wolk 2004).341 (Brown in Hoskyns & Brown 2004: 68)

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new pop trend and made a rhythmic connection with Africa at the same time”.342

Creating this sort of automatic response between Brown and Africa denies the real

complexity of identity, musical and otherwise.

Whilst I would concede to funk working within a lineage of African origin, Brown’s

music is most certainly more closely connected to the hybrid Black Atlantic musical

forms such as gospel. In fact, Brown has always adamantly denied any African

lineage for his music, such as in this passage that appears in his 1986 autobiography:

It’s a funny thing about me and African music. I didn’t even know itexisted. When I got the consciousness of Africa and decided to seewhat my roots were, I thought I’d find out where my thing came from.My roots may be embedded in me and I don’t know it, but when I wentto Africa I didn’t recognize anything that I had gotten from there.343

Given his impoverished childhood and lack of education, one would not expect

Brown to be conscious of African musical forms and Brown had formulated funk long

before he even visited that continent.

Yet Brown’s reluctance to identify with Africa has become a staple of commentary, in

particular attributable to a fear of ethnicity. For instance, Robert Farris Thompson

discusses here this apparent dichotomy in Brown’s loyalties as one based in Brown’s

fears of a compromise of his personal Southern Christianity”:344

"I know Brown thinks his Africanness could be a problem," addsThompson. "He feels that, to admit it, he might have to give up hisreligion. But in the 1990s, misapprehensions like that will disappear.People are going to realize that to be a Baptist or an African MethodistEpiscopalian in black America is automatically at the same time tohave been practising, coded and creolized, the classical religions of theKongo… James Brown…is already there, he was already blended.There is nothing here for him to lose. The Bakongo themselveswelcomed the Catholic fathers and took on the cross of Jesus - becausethey saw similar, equal potency. So that is the cry of the future: the cryof the blues and the cry of James Brown and the cry of the whole Afro-

342 (Vincent 1996: 8)343 (Brown and Tucker: 221)344 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 126)

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Atlantic world! To stop seeing each other as problems and realize theseare equal potencies".345

Whilst it may be prudent to generally concur with such a statement, that does not

mean accepting Brown’s retraction into some notional identity either, but rather, as

discussed in chapter 2, that Brown is a product of “routes” rather the “roots”. 346

However, despite Brown’s reluctance to assimilate any African musical influence, ("I

went over there and I heard their thing, and I felt their thing. But I honestly hadn’t

heard their thing in mine"),347 it should be noted that Brown was actually keen to

embrace a distant African history. Brown’s 1968 visit to the African continent was

one of the first by a major African-American star.348 Of course the door to any kind of

past was that of the church, the closest place that a minor people could locate cultural

roots and this is why it perhaps continues to act as such a potent cultural intercessor.

The power of the church music was one of territoriality and collectivity that Brown

would capitalise upon for his own musical purposes. The use of the irrational cuts

that would instigate the rapturous gospel style might have proven so attractive to

Brown’s funk template, because of the way that it capitalised on a form of non-

chronological time, that time of Aion, which I will describe in the next section as the

time of becoming.

Perspectives on Time - Aion/Chronos

When Deleuze sets out to define the shift from the “stories” of the movement-image

to the “becoming” of the time-image, he is intimating the shift from the chronological

time to Aion or, the time of becoming. This becoming requires an openness to

difference, a perspective that might differentiate it from the determination that

345 (Thompson in Cynthia Rose 1990: 128-129)346 Although I must say that I found it interesting to read in Fred Wesley’s recent book on his time asbandleader with Brown, that Brown apparently attempted to lift some African beats. Wesley mentionsthat during a 1974 trip to Cameroon, Brown, “…mentioned that he had gotten some record by someAfrican artists and that we should copy them for our own personal use” (Wesley, 2002: 176). If Brownwere so actively operating out of African musical practice, as his compositional approach has beendescribed, would it not appear strange for Brown to study and plagiarise the rhythms of a music that heis already so apparently familiar with?347 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 126)348 Details on James Brown’s first African visit to Abidjan, Ivory Coast on 29th March 1968, paid for bythe country’s government see (Geoff Brown 1996: 155)

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governs the common sense notions of time and space. As Jonathan Rajchman

comments here, the form of time that Deleuze will refer to as Aion, allows us, “[t]o

affirm ourselves –to construct and express ourselves – as multiple, complicated beings

brought together before any transcendent model or plan, in other words, we require a

time not of Chronos but of Aion”.349 The eternal return thus offers this affirmation of

the transcendental time of Aion, rather than a measured time of Chronos.

To understand the transcendental form of time more fully, we need to formally

introduce Deleuze’s analysis of the concepts of time. The notions of Chronos and

Aion are derived from the Stoics.350 Whilst Deleuze will canvass these conceptions of

time in The Logic of Sense (1968/1990), they would receive further consideration in

subsequent works such as A Thousand Plateaus. It is in that book that Deleuze and

Guattari refer to Aion as the intangible time of becoming351as, “…the indefinite time

of the pure event or becoming, which articulates relative speeds or slowness

independently of the chronological or chronometric values that time assumes in other

modes”.352Deleuze himself will subsequently refer to Aion as a “non-pulsed” form of

time and to be distinguished from the “pulsed” form of Chronos, where the latter is

perhaps best described as encompassing our common sense notion of time.353 We are

more inclined to understand time as marked out by the periodicity of Chronos that

gives chronological time its territorialising capacity. As such, Chronos can be

understood as, “…the time of measure that situates persons and things, develops a

form, and determines a subject”354. The differences between these forms of time say

Deleuze and Guattari, are not just the difference “…between the ephemeral and the

durable, nor even between the regular and the irregular, but between two modes of

individuation, two modes of temporality”.355 In contradistinction to a concept of

chronos/chronological time, Deleuze will observe Aion as the time of becoming, and

349 (Rajchman 2000: 111)350 In The Logic of Sense (1990) the text where Deleuze explicates the Stoic concept in some detail thespelling is Aion see (Deleuze 1990) , whereas in A Thousand Plateaus (1988) it is referred to Aeon andalso spelt this way (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 262). Deleuze scholars such as Ronald Bogue havecontinued with the “Aion” spelling see for example, (Bogue 2003), and for this reason I will also referto it accordingly.351 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 263)352 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 263)353 Deleuze will also say of Chronos that chronological time should not be judged on its regularity ofpulse or meter but rather its periodicity (Deleuze 1977/1998).354 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 262)355 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 262)

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that which does not belong to history.356 This latter time is more interesting to my

investigation of the forms driving gospel and funk in particular, because of the way

the gospel form will exploit a transcendence of time through hypnotic repetition. We

could say that the gospel form relies on repetition as a means to introduce an

alternative notion of time.

For gospel composition, improvisational in nature, indeterminately unfolds as it

occurs. The nature of this collective approach is at the heart of a gospel aesthetic and

its heart might well be found in the summoning the time of Aion. This is the form of

time proposed by Deleuze and Guattari as the time of becoming. 357 As Deleuze and

Guattari have elaborated in A Thousand Plateaus, Aion is, “…the indefinite time of

the event, the floating line that knows only speeds and continually divides that which

transpires into an already-there that is at the same time not-yet-here, a simultaneous

too-late and too-early, a something that is both going to happen and has just

happened”.358 In general one might say that apprehending this transcendental form of

time is one of the prime attractions of a temporal medium such as music. It is in

assuming a relationship to Aion that we might perhaps conceive of musical practice as

a process of becoming, where the artist beckons the audience to break out of the

strictures of a chronological and measured time of the everyday.

It is Aion as the type of transcendental concept of time that Deleuze will refer to when

he speaks of the time-image.359 This is because the time of Aion cannot be reduced to

the measurable in time and space, unlike the constructed form of Chronos that drives

the movement-image. The correlation might be further clarified if we understand that

such time-images are detached from a “logical” order of an action-reaction schema

and the linear form of time it implies. The time-image is thus characterised by its very

lack of determination within the whole and it is this very uncertainty of its identity

that makes it a creative force for thought. We should perhaps think of making tangible

the transcendental time of Aion as the more emphatic temporal impetus behind forms

of improvised music. Musical improvisation by nature is devoid of instruction, such

356 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 96)357 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 262)358 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 262)359 Using Deleuze’s example of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) as “the first great film of a cinemaof time” (Deleuze 1989: 99), Jeffrey A. Bell discusses this in his essay how Citizen Kane thusexemplifies what Deleuze means by the term “Aion” (Bell 1994).

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as the reading of musical notation and the adherence to an action-reaction schema it

requires. Thinking of a time outside of Chronos requires continual orientation (or

perhaps reorientation) in the face of a form of time that cannot be tangibly grasped.

Finally, through the notion of the apprehension of a minor temporality we might

better understand the process of musical expression as an attempt to render Aion into

a tangible form, whilst the form of time will of course be subsequently rendered as

Chronos, or chronological time.

This is why I am more interested in the process of capturing other forms of time in

composition. As such we might think of this concept as an engine for the production

of time where “becoming” can be understood as the expression of the difference of

the present rather than maintaining the identity of the past. This comment follows

from Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion in What is Philosophy? that becoming should

not be perceived as belonging to history,360 although this statement should not be

mistakenly understood as a complete disregard for history, as Deleuze and Guattari

maintain that history has its part to play in becoming and, “[w]ithout history,

becoming would remain indeterminate and unconditioned, but becoming is not

historical”.361 That is, to fully embrace becoming means moving away from a

predilection to emphasise a chronological situation of history as, “[t]he new arises

from “an ambience or milieu rather than an origin, of a becoming rather than a

history, of a geography rather than a historiography, of a grace rather than a

nature”.362 In this respect, we can begin to understand why the gospel tradition would

act as a catalyst for the African-American diaspora as it could perhaps musically

reconcile the sheer diversity of pasts and collectively provide a sense of future

becoming.

This broader agenda of becoming is played out in the music’s compositional form.

For instance a repetitive musical aesthetic relies on emphasising the affirmation of a

present rather than making sense of placing the passing moment into perspective and

presenting a teleological form that relies on history to make sense of its totality. This

affirmation of potential difference through each repetition (even if it doesn’t

360 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 96)361 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 96).362 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 96)

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immediately transpire) nonetheless produces the effect of an ensuing excitement,

which derives from our frenzied attempts to apprehend the uncertainty that might

occur. It is in this sense that I perceive that the repetition of the gospel form favours

this relation toward the futural form of time. The rupturing effect of ‘the cut” can

perhaps be understood as an affirmation of potential difference that deliberately

throws any plateau of similitude back into the chaosmos of uncertainty. In fact it is

this perpetual reiteration of an uncertain temporal disjunction, which drives the

excitement of a repetitive music such as Brown’s.

To apply these concepts to our previous discussion of Please Please Please, for

instance, we might say that the use of repetition that Brown elicits from the song

might act upon its audience as a kind of time machine which enables its audience to

transcend the record’s two and a half minutes of chronological duration. Whilst all

music has this capacity for temporal disorientation, the effect is more evident through

the repetitive aesthetic as it undermines a more determined form of time. The music’s

emphasis on the affirmation of the difference of the present, milks the tension of an

uncertain trajectory as the listener is suspended in a state of uncertainty as they are

met with a further repetition of the musical refrain. The constant reiteration of this

musical figure both gauges as well as guides the energy level of the audience by

forcing them to anticipate in the production of difference that might occur at any

given moment, which is precisely how the concept of the “bridge” operates in

Brown’s music. The disjunctive key change of the bridge is always threatening the

comfort of habit creating the sense of anticipation.

The Irrational Cut

Again we might find similarities between the use of the “cut” found in James Brown’s

music and the concept of the “irrational cut” that Deleuze cites as characteristic of the

time-image cinema. The importance of the “irrational cut” is that it embraces the

power of indeterminacy, whereby, “…the interval suspends the spectator in a state of

uncertainty. Every interval becomes what probability physics calls a "bifurcation

point" where it is impossible to know or predict in advance which direction change

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will take. The chronological time of the movement-image fragments into an image of

uncertain becoming”.363

These jarring cuts throw any preconceived teleological “goal”, narrative or otherwise,

into disarray, and instead confront the audience with the uncertainty of time itself. In

this sense the use of the irrational “cut” is tantamount to plunging its audience into the

chaosmos, rather than being dragged along by narrative convention and clichés. As

such the audience are forced to rethink preconceived relations of action and reaction.

The irrational cut takes the compositional emphasis away from the expectations of a

linear evolution of action-reaction to one of involution, where time will fold in on

itself. This emphasis on the direct experience of difference rather than narrative or

compositional convention both confounds and liberates the audience at once. This

more direct experience of difference is provided in the gospel style in the following

manner: the audience can dispense with an intensive relationship with melodic

progression or the “accumulation and growth” of the composition and instead allow

themselves to be suspended in time. In this respect we might say that the gospel form

successfully dispenses with a fetishising of the author and instead implores a direct

relation with a “God” as the arbiter of duration in general.

We might propose that more generally, the gospel form looks toward a more

transcendental form of time. This outlook further underscores the tenacity of the

gospel tradition as the means of constructing tangible space/time assemblages within

an any-space-whatever existence. The gospel form is more concerned with the

transgression of chronological time. This would make sense given that the any-space-

whatever conditions determine the time of the minority. For this reason, there is

perhaps increasing investment on behalf of the Black Atlantic diaspora to use the

environment of the church to maintain a means of escape from the hegemonic time

and space and to substitute for any such emancipation in the actual world.

The gospel aesthetic provides an enduring example of how, when the actual present is

too intolerable, a minor population might turn to art to conjure the more virtual

existential territory. This type of collective approach to existential territorialising, for

363 (Rodowick 1997: 15)

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instance, might be demonstrated through the ensemble renditions of the slave songs of

the cotton fields. The collective instigation of the musical composition provides

temporal and spatial transgression from the madness of the apparent logic that

imposes upon their existence.

The ensemble approach to the gospel form of song would at least allow one to

transcend singular being and instead become a singing “body without

organs”,364demonstrative of the Deleuze-Guattarian concept. This concept is initially

proposed in their Anti-Oedipus, and in its most simple sense might be understood as

“…the body without an image”, 365 or the body that precedes its social production

through its organs. Through song, through rapture, the subject comes closer to being

part of a collective, and the forgetting of embodied experience and becomes otherwise

subsumed within a more collective “body”.

In his essay, “Becoming-Music: The Rhizomatic Moment of Improvisation”, Jeremy

Gilbert argues that the becoming at the heart of “recent dance musics and improvised

musics” might be perceived as such a collective “body without organs”. He writes,

In these moments when the affective morphology of sound takes

shapes not easily comprehensible in terms such as ‘masculine’ and

‘feminine’, ‘order’ or ‘chaos’, a becoming-music is enacted which

draws a line of flight away from the physical-ideological constraints of

the gendered body or fixed musical genres: a body without organs; a

smooth, cosmic space.366

I might add to this idea that at the heart of a musically inspired becoming is a

forgetting. Given the images that we may perhaps associate with the more charismatic

strains of the gospel tradition, what comes to mind are scenes of audience members in

rapturous exaltation, seemingly overcome by the spirit, or even perhaps, out of

themselves.

364 (Deleuze & Guattari 1983b: 8)365 (Deleuze & Guattari 1983b: 8)366 (Gilbert 2004a: 126)

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We might also put this phenomenon down to a type of paralysis induced through

repetition, where affection can no longer depend on the certainty of logical action or

agency. The music thus exploits the interplay of repetition and cut to provide the

hypnotic, trance-like state. The audience is given over to concentrating on the joy of

the affirmation of the moment rather than concerning themselves with projection.

A futural form of time is not one of projection, but rather, comprised of a future as a

product of the affirmation of difference. This concentration on the affirmation of the

present begins to dominate the predilection for such teleological projection. In its

place then is an emphasis on the intensity of experience that comes from such

repetition. Through a use of distinct periodicities of incantation the preacher can

inspire these waves of hysteria teetering on his dynamic directives (or “cuts”).

The Splitting of Time

Such concentration on the affirmation of the present means placing one’s self in some

kind of relation to the incommensurable splitting of time that occurs at each moment.

Sometimes we are overcome by the direct experience of present and other times,

immersed in recollection of the past. Each of these relations to actual (present) or

virtual (past) segments of time are contained in the moment. As Deleuze says, “there

is always a more vast present which absorbs the past and the future. Thus, the

relativity of past and future with respect to the present entails a relativity of presents

themselves, in relation to each other”.367 The institutional regulation of time is

developed around a stabilising of these possible bifurcations, in particular our

propensity to delve into the refrains of pure recollection, which may detract from a

full embrace of a direct experience of present, for instance, maintaining focus on tasks

at hand in the workplace. Whilst the church traditions of the African-American as

well as that of the European church may both initially involve a form of habit-

memory in order to kick off the proceedings, once that is done, the white church

sticks to a path, whilst the black one goes off on an unpredictable course.

367 (Deleuze 1990: 162)

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We could say that minor cultures are perhaps more inclined to seek other alternate

temporal possibilities to a tightly regulated or institutionally sanctioned majoritarian

temporality, if only for the reason that that this is the time which imposes itself upon

their existence. Hence, in some respect the invocation of repetition provides an

inadvertent resistance to the majoritarian imposition of the teleological - the

maintenance of identity through memorial time and the various syntheses that assist

it.368 As such the “apprehension of a minor temporality” is an attempt at a durational

form of expression that serves to express such moments of becoming. Rather than

subordinate time as a product of the linear narratives of lived experience, it would

instead enable a potential form of apprehension - a bridge between past and present

which provokes an active synthesis of memory rather than the passive synthesis of

habit. In terms of the latter we could perhaps think of the highly regulated musical

protocols of the European church, which attempt to contain becoming, rather than

inspire it. The role of any institution is to regulate the complex series of rhythms that

make up the temporality of our psychic lives.

The gospel form would propose a way to emphasise an alternative conception of time

available to composition. This is why I would compare its form to that of the cinema

of the time-image as it produces an image of thought that is non-totalizable and

emphasises a sheer unpredictability alluded to by the irrational cut. Just as I have

demonstrated within musical context, the autonomous interval of the time-image

cinema infers that there is no place for thought to maintain identity’s dependence on a

coherent system of signs. For instance, Deleuze will contend that the movement-

image depends on securing the relation between image and thought that will produce

identity and by extension, totality. In contradistinction, the time-image guarantees

only the disjunctive and discontinuous, brought about through such irrational

divisions and incommensurable relations. This is why we must propose that the time-

image is forever combining relations to past and future, subverting both the more

tenacious forms of memorial time and habit in a far more complex way than a more

linearly structured music.

368 This is what Deleuze will refer to in Difference and Repetition as “memorial-imaginativereproduction” (Deleuze 1994: 138). As Deleuze writes in this passage, “The identity of the unspecifiedconcept constitutes the form of the Same with regard to recognition. The determination of the conceptimplies the comparison between possible predicates and their opposites in a regressive and progressivedouble series, traversed on the one side by resemblance and on the other by an imagination the aim ofwhich is to rediscover or re-create (memorial-imaginative reproduction)” (Deleuze 1994: 138-139).

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It is for the reasons stated above that I believe that Brown’s music might be seen to

apprehend a minor temporality and an alternate form of time. In terms of orientation I

think it is also differentiated from other contemporary African-American musics,

including jazz. Whilst jazz is a largely improvised music, the difference is that jazz

tends to make use of signposting refrains to fall back on rather than to overtly

modulate a singular refrain. I am not trying to deliberately draw up some dichotomy

with jazz here, but rather that the forms of music are defined though their own

particular approaches to time, which affects how the body of both performer and

audience are realised in time and space. The gospel tradition instead plays on the

nuances of singular refrains, and without determined musical signposts it becomes

more difficult to find one’s direction in the overall trajectory. Hence this form

privileges collectivity rather than the singular virtuosity of the soloist of the jazz

tradition. This circular method promoted through gospel would prevail, not only in

funk, but also in any music that wanted to shift the focus to time rather than

movement.

Minimalism

It was through African-American popular music that some of the characteristics of

black music were absorbed into twentieth century music styles. In fact one might look

at the rise of “minimalism” in the 1960s through exponents such as LaMonte Young,

Terry Riley, Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Despite a reticence to declare this on

record, the minimalist style had obviously been affected by African-American music

of the time.369 Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain composed in January 1965, made this

369 Whilst the Minimalists, a movement that includes composers La Monte Young, Terry Riley, SteveReich and Philip Glass were “all…to some degree influenced by [John] Cage” (Morgan 1991: 423) andthe “understatement rather than exaggeration” of the “oriental influences” behind Cage’swork(Morgan 1991: 422), I do think that given the time that these composers were operating in, fromthe late 1950s onward, which coincided with the broader attention to given African-American musicalstyles by the mainstream in general. It would be hard to believe that these composers were not affected.Whilst Reich, for instance, would later discuss the influence of Ghanaian music on his work, whichundoubtedly it was, I find it a little strange that little is said about the music that they grew up with. Forexample, two of Reich’s earliest and most well known works, It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out(1966) both make use of recordings made of African-American subjects, and repeat them. The debt tothe gospel form is quite overt when the speech of a Pentecostal preacher repeated for It’s Gonna Rainor using the speech of an African-American again for Come Out. In this piece Reich uses the speech ofa young man injured in the Harlem Riots of 1964 whose line “to let the bruise blood come out to showthem”.

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influence plain by making the central focus of the piece the voice of a black

Pentecostal preacher recorded on the streets of San Francisco.370 The piece singled out

a contraction of a broader sermon until the words “it’s gonna rain” were looped over

and over in what would appear to an exaggerated monument to the repetition of the

black church tradition.

John Law (1997) discusses minimalism as the form symptomatic of heterogeneity, 371

and his remarks are also just as applicable to the music of the church, or Brown’s for

that matter. This heterogeneity is inspired by the fact that there is no teleological goal,

“[f]or in the music of minimalism there is no terminus, no end point”, he says. Law

will go on to draw parallels between this music and with Deleuze and Guattari’s

concept of a plateau which, “…is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the

end”: 372

So it is with the music of minimalism. There are no great Mozartianvistas. No overviews. No resolutions. Minimalism is always in themiddle. There is, except in the most straightforward sense, nobeginning and no end. Instead there is tension andincompleteness…this is a music, yes, of surfaces. Of displacements. Ofminimal and endless transformations. Of discomfort. Of continualmovements to find some kind of stable place. That never find a stableplace. Of continuing incompleteness. Of continuing. Ofincompleteness. Yes, I repeat, of tensions.373

The emergence of minimalism at this particular point in time would of course be

inspired by the political tensions of the time and reflected through this stylistic

initiative. Given the increasing prominence of black music making inroads in white

homes, I do not believe it a coincidence that the minimalist style would emerge

alongside Brown’s funk. In fact in the book Experimental Pop, the authors Billy

Bergman and Richard Horn write that the “endless, hypnotic funk repetitions” in

Brown’s music, “…come as close as you can get to African and minimalist music”.374

However in terms of pragmatics, and contrary to the function of funk, minimalism

would not necessarily ignite the same overt effect of a belief in the body. Whilst these

370 Reich discusses this in the liner notes of Early Works (1987) (Reich 1987).371 (Law: 1997)372 (Deleuze and Guattari quoted in Law: 1997)373 (Law: 1997)374 (Bergman & Horn 1985: 15)

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two musics would not normally be directly compared, given the effect of tension and

anticipation central to both musics, there are many similarities to be noted. Continuing

within that tradition set out long before in gospel, the emergence of minimalism

would continue to emphasise an attention to time over movement. From this point we

begin to see the very first series of transitions into musics that could conceivably be

labelled as time-image in nature. These diagrams of compositional practice drawn

from gospel, funk and minimalism will lead into the compositional approaches that

would emerge into contemporary electronic dance musics.

Yet it should be noted that the type of thought behind such discernibly time-image

musics is given a more emphatic secular existence through the influence of black

popular musics. This becoming music of the future would thus express the shift from

the extensive spatiality characteristic of the movement-image to the intensive

spatiality of the time-image.375 This notion of intensive space takes one beyond

thinking of time in terms of spatial perception and allows one to maintain an

immanence against the transcendent form of time that phenomenology necessarily

invokes. The shift from the chronological pulsed Chronos to that of apprehending the

time of Aion and becomings is precisely an invocation of an “intensive spatiality” that

minor communities had partaken of as a means to counteract the extensive space that

was enforced upon them.

This is of course not to deny Western music’s own relations to Aion, a relationship

that is always at the heart of musical composition, but rather to foreground its relative

emphasis. The imposition of the teleological as the default “image of thought” was

slowly divested in Western music of the twentieth century from Debussy onwards.

There was of course a time when European churches had their monks chanting and

maintaining a form of repetition, but Enlightenment philosophy became laden with

issues of progression that would take up philosophical precedence and as a result the

music too would follow suit. Thankfully then, the Afro-American tradition would

bring a reconciliation of these apparent binaries, most prominently through musical

expression.

375 (Rajchman 2000: 130-131)

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For instance by the time the myriad influences diverge into forms such as Disco, it is

still clear that the legacy of the Black Atlantic and gospel connection emerges, an

influence apparent in what is popularly attributed as the first disco record, a 1973

Norman Whitfield production, Girl You Need A Change Of Mind, featuring

Temptations vocalist Eddie Kendricks.376 Whitfield attributes its inspiration to the

church, `People always ask me about the breakdown. Well, my background is the

church. It’s not unusual in a church song to have a breakdown like that”.377 Indeed the

artists would reinvigorate a process that was a staple of church celebration, as

Kendricks attests, “I stood in the studio with the musicians, giving instructions as we

were cutting for them to break it down to nothing, then gradually come in one by one

and rebuild the fervour of the song”. 378 The work of Brown and his peers would

obviously bridge these forms of composition, sacred and secular that would crystallise

into electronic dance music forms. As Cynthia Rose observes:

It is experience - constantly revealed, re-lived, and re-interpreted interms of the fresh, contemporary moment. As James Brown’sadaptations of gospel music, his own brand of preaching, and the moraladmonitions of his music demonstrate, these are not static but dynamicbelief and performance traditions. Improvisation and innovation areexpected. In I Got The Word In Me And I Can Sing It, You Know, hisbook on the performed art of the African-American sermon, Gerald LDavis makes the point that "however African-American performanceand creativity might be observed, the organizing principle ofcircularity, rather than linearity, is evident . . . it holds a central, coreimportance in African-American performance." Whether one calls this"roots" or ‘the groove", such an "organizing principle" is easily seenonstage in the acts of Brown, Clinton, Prince or a jazz ensemble.Across the diaspora, listeners may apprehend its heartbeat in recurringmusical phrases or in slices of common slang which turn up again andagain…Even the young rappers and hip-hop breakdancers of the “80s,whose work is founded on the Jamesian beat, sense this history behindtheir art - not to mention Brown’s central role as a conduit of thathistory.379

The gospel tradition thus informs an approach to the rendering of time through

musical expression that extends across generational and generic experience. In all of

this, the relation of preacher is in some respects similar to that of the conductor who

376 (Brewster & Broughton 1999: 167)377 (Brewster & Broughton 1999: 167)378 (Brewster & Broughton 1999: 167)379 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 121-122)

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presided over the musical proceedings. The major difference though, is that an

orchestra has a score and thus we are denied of the same palpable sense of

uncertainty. The preacher/Brown in this sense is one who is empowered with the

invocation of mediating the chaos. Within the context of the gospel tradition this was

formerly the role of the preacher, and in electronic dance music tradition it is the role

of the DJ who speaks via the records. For this reason the records must have some kind

of historical territorialising function.

Yet the more interesting point that we shall discuss in later chapters is that the DJ

does not necessarily hold them to a particular time in history. To construct a milieu,

figures of authority, such as Brown are brought into the music as a means of

valorising its message and affirming the spirit of its composition. This is perhaps how

Brown was elevated into this superlative position within these any-space-whatever

practices. Brown is invoked through the DJ, like the spirit invoked through the

preacher. Brown’s voice punctuates and cuts through the music as a means to

strengthen repetition. So when the DJs came to use his voice it became a crystal that

could catalyse disparate social and technological machines. Hence his squeals and

grunts would become ubiquitous, where a grunt or a well-timed “Good God!” would

be conveniently inserted into the sampled work as a deliberate reiteration of an

affective intensity. The continuing popularity of the James Brown scream as a sample

is perhaps because of its intensity of sensation and as such goes beyond a mere

significational capacity. Instead we can understand it to be the solicitation of a space

of recollection, of the hard times and horrors that cannot be articulated.

Traditional musicology is thus not well disposed to adequately accounting for these

types of machinic musical relations. As this mode of analysis is more likely to recount

what music might “mean”, the musicological approach tends to subsume musical

forms into narrative. We only need refer to David Brackett’s discussion of Brown’s

1971 single Superbad to see such a superfluous form of musicological analysis in

action. As a track such as Superbad is primarily concerned with dancing, it would

make more sense to posit the music’s relationship with affect, which is a more

relevant way of discussing how such music works, rather than having to resort to what

it may “mean”. Dance music, whether funk or the electronic dance musics to come are

about this pursuit of affect. To make meaning primary is missing the point. Indeed,

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the call for a more suitable theoretical framework for the discussion of popular music

and dance music in particular had previously been intimated in Generation Ecstasy

(1999) by author Simon Reynolds:

Rave music represents a fundamental break with rock, or at least thedominant English Lit and socialist realist paradigms of rock criticism,which focuses on songs and storytelling. Where rock relates anexperience (autobiographical or imaginary), rave constructs anexperience. Bypassing interpretation, the listener is hurled into a vortexof heightened sensations, abstract emotions, and artificial energies.380

Reynolds’ criticism indicates the need for a general reconsideration of representation

as the basis of discussing the experience promoted in practices from gospel to rave.

By emphasising the relationship to existential time as the focus, it also makes us

aware of the redundancy of meaning within such a compositional regime.381 Instead

we should be focussing on how to enable the body to think anew through the affective

relations produced as apprehensions of a minor temporality.

As Deleuze and Guattari have famously expounded in A Thousand Plateaus, affects

are becomings, 382 and of specific interest here is the role of art as a catalyst for this

becoming. If a temporal art form such as music apprehends a minor temporality then

the form of time it is concerned with is Aion, as the time of becoming. The Deleuzean

conception of art is always about introducing a becoming-world rather than

attempting to represent the actual world. Just as Chronos is a representation of time,

Aion is the full potential of time, and the artist is more concerned with such potential.

This is the potential of a new experience of the world rather than a reiteration of an

already existing concept. This is why Deleuze and Guattari will contend that the most

successful forms of art will return their respective audiences to the site of affect.

Furthermore, it is the pursuit of such affect that might explain the ongoing pursuit of

the Brownian refrain in many forms of electronic music, for the musical composition

becomes a catalysing agent that gives expression to its imminent social environment.

This is also indeed why the artist is so proactive in the process of creating connections

to difference through the production of percepts and affects.

380 (Reynolds 1999: 009-010)381 This might be the attempt to giving “meaning” as Brackett attempted to do with James Brown’sSuperbad as discussed back in chapter 1382 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 256)

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Accordingly, Deleuze’s Cinema books are not as concerned with meaning as with

relations. For instance in Cinema 1, Deleuze famously targets the structuralist,

psychoanalytic reading of film championed by Christian Metz. Deleuze acknowledges

that whilst the cinema initially took on the human perspective as a purveyor of

“meaning” via a system of action, or that which was referred to in the first volume as

‘the movement-image”, the medium eventually drops its filter of signification and

“becomes” a revelation of time itself. The regimes of movement-image and time-

image do always co-exist, however they can be seen to predominate at certain stages,

those that reflect a particular social and collective psyche or what we will later

describe as the “spiritual automaton”. What needs to be understood at this juncture is

that the mobilisation of these relations is due to the a-signifying and a-syntaxic

material that Deleuze ascribes to affect.383

Affect

Affect, then is perhaps the most fundamental of all concepts in the Deleuze-

Guattarian philosophy. In their final collective work, What is Philosophy? (1994)

Deleuze and Guattari declare that art is concerned with the creation of percepts and

affects, which together, constitute “…a bloc of sensations”. 384As they argue here,

these affects and percepts should be differentiated from the nominal understanding of

perception or affection because they are “...independent of a state of those who

undergo them”385 and affects are not simply affections or feelings but rather “…go

beyond the strength of those who undergo them”.386 As Deleuze and Guattari write:

"The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself".387

Indeed, the Deleuze-Guattarian conception of affect is more representative of a

relation of forces that mobilises bodies and is neither merely psychological nor

emotional, but all at once and besides. Indeed as Massumi offers in the translator’s

383 (Deleuze 1989: 29)384 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 164)385 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 164)386 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 164)387 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 164)

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preface to A Thousand Plateaus, we should understand the Deleuze-Guattarian sense

of affect in the following way:

Affect/Affection. Neither word denotes a personal feeling…L’affect(Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is aprepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from oneexperiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentationor diminution of that body’s capacity to act.388

Whilst Deleuze’s position emerges from the philosophical concept of Spinoza

centuries prior, it has also been ratified to some extent by the scientific world, in the

work of contemporaries such as Francisco Varela. As with these recent scientific

developments, becoming requires us to depose the notion of a human-centred

universe, and instead pursue the idea of the human as merely a contraction of the

world itself and harbouring its affects in turn.

Unfortunately the problem with theories of affect arises when we have to reconcile

such forces within a specific representational understanding and this is where affect

becomes a term used more or less synonymously and erroneously with “emotion”.

Brian Massumi takes up this problem in his essay “The Autonomy of Affect” (1996),

which provides an important introductory text on the issue, where he recounts this

conflation: “[a]ffect is most often used loosely as a synonym for emotion. But one of

the clearest lessons of this first story is that emotion and affect - if affect is intensity -

follow different logics and pertain to different orders”.389 What we understand as

emotion is actually what we have perceived to have felt or are feeling after the point

of initial impact of the affective force. In this respect Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts

of percepts and affects are intended to counteract these more static interpretations.

Massumi also remarks, “[t]he problem is that there is no cultural-theoretical

vocabulary specific to affect. Our entire vocabulary has derived from theories of

signification that are still wedded to structure even across irreconcilable differences...

In the absence of an asignifying philosophy of affect, it is all too easy for received

psychological categories to slip back in, undoing the considerable deconstructive

work that has been effectively carried out by poststructuralism”.390 Indeed when one

388 (Massumi in Deleuze & Guattari 1988: xvi)389 (Massumi, 1996: 221)390 (Massumi 1996: 221)

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has wrested the percepts and affects from human perceptions and affections, all is

becoming and thus the “…aim of art is to wrest the percept from perceptions of

objects and the states of a perceiving subject”.391

There are of course competing theories of affect, all with their own specific

disciplinary histories. Whilst affect’s initial derivations come from the field of

psychology it has also taken on specific postmodern interpretations, such as Frederic

Jameson’s famous pronouncement in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late

Capitalism (1991) that contemporary postmodern culture is generally characterised by

a “waning of affect”.392 Jameson argues that we have bought into the capitalist

machine at the expense of the intensity of our emotional experience. This apparent

lack of emotion is the major casualty in contemporary culture where the marketplace

will exploit it indefinitely. We therefore engage our surroundings on a merely cursory

basis but without the depth of feeling about the world around us that we “once did”.

Of course to make such a claim one has to make certain ontological assumptions, such

as essentialising a point in time for the emergence of this apparent emotional decline.

Deleuze will of course, have none of this, and this is perhaps why his cinema studies

work in contradistinction to the postmodern. Jeffrey A. Bell comments in his essay,

“Phenomenology, Poststructuralism, and the Cinema of Time” that the Cinema books

are “Deleuze’s postmodernism”.393 Bearing little similarity to postmodernism beyond

the nominal break, Bell puts forward that the Cinema books are, “…simply a different

response to the problem of difference, and not a rejection or denial of traditional

philosophy”.394 This is perhaps said tongue in cheek because whilst some of the

surface attributes in a historical sense are similar, the results are very different. If

anything, the Cinema books stress an increased relation of affect rather than its

waning. Affect in the Deleuzean sense is relations between bodies which can perhaps

be more readily understood like kinetic energy, they are always there and I prefer this

idea which is why I think Deleuze’s methodology is preferable to a postmodern one.

391 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 167)392 (Jameson 1991: 10)393 (Bell 1994)394 (Bell 1994)

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In common with many poststructuralist and postmodernist philosophers, Deleuze cites

the aftermath of World War II as the point of a distinct change in thought. Deleuze’s

position differs from the postmodern position in the sense that his nominal break

doesn’t lead to a decline in the loss of the real, but instead will propose a renewed

relation to the affective. For Deleuze affect is always immanent. Indeed as affects

mobilize the universe, they cannot simply wane; rather it is just a matter of

modulation and relativity. The evolution of any art form can be perceived as such a

series of affective machinic relations, and in this respect a history of contemporary

dance music quite clearly presents to us a history of such affects as the mediation

between bodies. Hence we should be concerned with what the medium tells us about

the context in which we are living or the mode of enunciation of that medium. This

should be understood as the expression of affective relations rather than significative

ones, which is where the utility of music comes into its own, as an affective mediator.

In fact one could propose that all music is a use of the refrain to draw together such

affective relations.

This is precisely what happens when James Brown takes up the intensity of affect of

the gospel experience in his work. The repetitious, non-totalising experience of the

gospel tradition makes a mockery of trying to understand music in terms of

signification. If one were to maintain this pursuit then Brown would be a particularly

perplexing example as his lyrics were often improvised exhortations dedicated to

“feel” rather than the recitation of narrative. This is also what is so engrossing about a

James Brown scream, whether live or sampled as it conjures up an abstract machine

of affect in general. Brown’s vocal inflections, call to mind a concept Deleuze and

Guattari refer to as the “principle of asignifying rupture” where the rhizome may be

“…shattered at a given spot, but will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new

lines”395 just as Brown wantonly cuts through the circularity of the musical form,

punctuating rather than adhering to compositional movement.

Such affective devices can work quite adequately without being reduced into

signification and it would be silly to take that route to analyse this music. The

affectively inspired theoretical approach foregoes the perpetual debate over the

395 ( Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 9)

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“meaning” of a musical composition, as it can only produce difference. As Gilbert

rightly says, “[m]usic’s sonic-corporeal effectivity is not universal and transhistorical,

a fact registered by the simple observation that what is musical for some cultural

groups is merely “noise” for others”.396 Indeed what music is, is not the concern but

rather the fact that its boundaries are never fixed and they are always fluid. As we will

discuss in more detail in Chapter 5, the limits of discursivity are only too visible

which is why we need to introduce asignifying qualities to understand the

‘transversal” relations rather than universalising forms of common sense or logic.

To merely discuss music in terms of representation or meaning ultimately limits the

scope of its productivity. To judge the qualities of art as a reflection of technical

aptitude is also not enough. Often the most “affecting” artists are not the most

technically able. The point is that any discussion of music, or art in general in terms of

anything but how it produces connections is never adequate. As Guattari will point

out, “…affect is not a question of representation and discursivity, but of existence”.397

Which is why in the following quote Guattari contends that any effort to translate the

affective into the discursive is ultimately an exercise in futility:

They start to exist in you, in spite of you. And not only as crude,undifferentiated affects, but as hyper-complex compositions: that’sDebussy, that’s Jazz, that’s Van Gogh.” The paradox which aestheticexperience constantly returns us to is that these affects, as a mode ofexistential apprehension, are given all at once, regardless, or besidesthe fact that indicative traits and descriptive refrains are necessary forcatalysing their existence in fields of representation.398

Indeed we could also understand this example in terms of music’s resistance to its

reduction into discursivity. Indeed music’s relationship with affect may be the most

pronounced of all art forms mainly because of its non- linguistic status. In his essay,

“Signifying Nothing: ‘Culture’, ‘Discourse’ And The Sociality Of Affect” (2004)

Jeremy Gilbert argues for an affective based theory of music rather than one based

around meaning. 399 Gilbert, who had previously co-authored a particularly astute

commentary on contemporary dance music culture, Discographies, (with Ewan

396 (Gilbert 2004b)397 (Guattari 1995: 93)398 (Guattari 1995: 93)399 (Gilbert 2004b)

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Pearson) argues for a more progressive theory of musical reception, one that might

diverge from the more significationally dependent musicological analysis:

Music has physical effects which can be identified, described anddiscussed but which are not the same thing as it having meanings, andany attempt to understand how music works in culture must, as manycommentators over the years have acknowledged, be able to saysomething about those effects without trying to collapse them intomeanings.400

As discussed in the previous chapter, art for Deleuze and Guattari is always the

expression of that uncommunicable encounter with the “intolerable”. Dispelling the

emphasis on signification and representation to emphasise the becoming of a

particular image is another important lesson of the Cinema books and is why Deleuze

famously targets Christian Metz’s structuralist reading of cinema: that there is no

purpose to reduce such work to a universal “meaning” even if it is one that it has not

previously assumed. This is why Gilbert argues that:

The problem we have is that music is by definition an organised formof experience, one whose effectivity is strictly delimited by sedimentedcultural practices, but it is one whose structured effects cannot be fullyunderstood in terms of meanings; precisely, they cannot be understoodaccording to the structural logic of language. It is to this point that Ithink this set of reflections leads us – to the observation that, at least asfar as music is concerned, a notion of “culture” which sees in it only‘signifying practices” is quite simply not up to the job. Music isobviously cultural, but its “culturality” is not limited to its capacity tosignify.401

Which leads Reynolds to beg the interesting question in regard to a phenomenon such

as the rave culture, “…is it possible to base a culture around sensations rather than

truths, fascination rather than meaning?”402 Reynolds' attraction to Deleuze and

Guattari403 would perhaps have its basis in the philosophers' abilities to look at

specific artistic phenomena, such as electronic dance music and to explain it in terms

of a machinic rather than a significative value.

400 (Gilbert 2004b)401 (Gilbert 2004b)402 (Reynolds 1999: 010)403 See Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture (Reynolds 1998). Reynoldsdiscusses the influence of Deleuze and Guattari on his work in this online interview with Wilson Neate(Neate & Reynolds 2006).

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Deleuze and Guattari are of the view that art should never be fixed down to notions of

intent, for it can only seek an audience, or seek a people. The power of affect can

never be simply reduced to signification, particularly not any structural model of

language. In fact, one of the main tasks of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy is to

show that the use of language to structure both our conscious and unconscious life

means being limited to such signification, and foregoing the more encompassing

notions of affect that are really behind desire. The vain search for apparent “meaning”

continues to obstruct a rather more progressive discussion of what we might refer to

as art’s affective pragmatics. The imperative of art is to communicate the intensity of

feeling that one might say exists only in the gaps that language creates. The becoming

of musical expression is to express those parts of existence that language cannot

adequately describe. This is why I have argued for the Deleuze-Guattarian idea that

the work of art is designed to plunge its audience into the chaosmos of becoming,

rather than merely reiterate what could otherwise be simply expressed in language. In

short, language is inadequate to the task of translating the full power of affect. This is

also perhaps why the world needed a musical style such as funk to more

comprehensively express the more encompassing existential concerns behind the civil

rights movement.

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CHAPTER FIVE

SOUL AS MOVEMENT-IMAGE

In the previous chapter I attempted to pursue the relation of soul to generic precursors

such as gospel. These styles shared some obvious characteristics, in particular their

appeal to a notion of time that we might understand as Aion. It was Brown’s embrace

of the more radical elements of gospel that differentiated him from the broader soul

genre embraced by his peers. This is where Brown’s music was important in giving

some of the more esoteric practices of soul a popular music outlet and also how

Brown’s music would begin to diverge from soul in what might be considered in

terms of an existential consideration. That is, he developed the repetition of gospel as

a means to a new time rather than the more orthodox, teleological outlook of soul

music.

The main objective of this chapter, then, is to show how Brown’s music may have

developed the opportunities for such a belief in the world. The emergence of funk, as

we shall discuss in this chapter, provided Brown’s musical alterity, which enabled

him to transcend some of the constraints of soul. This is how Brown could maintain

his popularity when so many of the other soul artists ‘went down with the ship’. This

alterity would become a great collection of literal forces into the future. Through his

music, Brown was attempting to apprehend the broader existential forces open to the

full potential of time in musical form, rather than retract into the more narrative based

form found in most soul music of the time. The difference between Brown and the

feeling of the broader soul movement can be rather simply summed up as the living

difference between A Change is Gonna Come and Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.

Both of these archetypal soul songs were released within a year of each other, in

1965, at the very apex of the soul movement.

Hence my analysis of soul music in this chapter is quite unlike previous accounts of

this period, in that I am less concerned with genealogy and more concerned with the

philosophical orientation that drives such notions of a “movement”. Whilst enjoying a

window of opportunity lasting roughly a decade, the soul movement would ultimately

suffer from a problem that besets most “movements”, the philosophical dependence

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on a belief in a kind of teleological time that is disconnected from the present. For no

matter how well intentioned the goals of the soul aesthetic and the accompanying civil

rights movement, they were directed to addressing change that might occur at some

unspecified time in the future. However, rather than placing one’s faith in time as a

revelatory process, a minor people must not define their future through a majoritarian

interpretation of time and space, but instead show how such majoritarian

determinations do not hold up. This is why Deleuze developed the notion of a time-

image, which is the aesthetic manifestation of a cinema that no longer adheres to the

“truth” of the common senses form of time and space.

All of this may, of course, sound rather familiar to the postmodernist. Indeed, if we

have learned anything from postmodernism, we have learned about the death of such

“grand narratives”.404 The Deleuzean shift from movement-image to time-image

shares something of the death of grand narratives with postmodern theory. However,

unlike postmodernism, a time-image cinema is not predicated on the same type of

loss, such as that which might be associated with a Jamesonian “waning of affect”. In

fact, if anything, it is distinguished by its restoration of the very power of the body.

Furthermore, instead of maligning the perceived lack of connection with the real,

Deleuze embraces what he refers to as the “powers of the false” - the encounter with

the virtual alterity inherent in any moment in time (and thus co-existent with any

apparent truth of the present).

However, before we can address this concept, we have to assert that the concept of

truth is not something that we have “lost”. The point is that we never had it in the first

place. It is the time-image that helps us to realise this. Reclamation of the “truth” does

not necessarily make life any easier for a body, but if anything, more restrictive. This

is partly a question of creativity. If we are delivered an answer to life’s mysteries,

then what need is there for investigation? Of course, without such investigation, we

are left bereft of the creative processes to emerge from such an endeavour. To put this

another way, without ‘truth”, it is the endeavour itself that we are concerned with,

rather than the production of an answer. Hence, the very lack of truth extends the

404 In seminal postmodern manifesto, The Postmodern Condition (1979), Jean-François Lyotard arguesthat the “grand narratives” are stories that a culture produces to make sense of its practices and beliefs.For instance, an ideology has its own “grand narrative” where the narrative reflects a teleology andmaintains these belief systems (Lyotard 1984).

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possibilities of what a body can do.

Here, however, we need to reconsider what a body is, or is not. The Deleuzean notion

of the body is different from how we might normally perceive a body. The Deleuzean

notion of “a body” should not be interpreted as the human form, somehow cut off

from the world, but is the world, in that it is immersed in it. In this sense the body is

intrinsically connected to the myriad machines and desires that produce and flow

through it. The body is a kind of open, dynamic machine. To think of the body as

machine is to think connection. The full potential of connection, however, can only be

achieved after casting off the limits of a priori notions of time and space. An

intolerable situation can shock thought into irrational connection, however traumatic

this might be, because emerging from such an affective event can set in motion the

body’s rebirth as well. For the body that is thrown into this chaosmos must emerge

“somehow” and it is this process itself that forces one into new methods of responding

to the world. It is on the point of such irrational connection that Brown’s contribution

is perhaps the most exemplary.

In the decline of the soul aesthetic, Brown fulfils a similar creative function. Despite

the fact that Brown is synonymous with soul music, I would argue for Brown’s

autonomy from soul’s narratives. For Brown’s work is often genre defying, and

without precedent.405 For this reason, I believe that his work stands outside the

overriding image of thought of soul and instead works toward a new “minor” music in

a very different sense. Through such idiosyncratic methods, Brown would produce a

new belief in the world which is not so much a belief in the “…existence of the world

but in its possibilities of movement and intensities, so as once again to give birth to

new modes of existence, closer to animals and rocks. It may be that believing in this

world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task…”406

Any innovation, by nature, requires a belief in the world, because it requires a faith in

405 Evidence of some of these unprecedented moments can be found via some of Brown’s moreextraordinarily strange tracks, including I’m Tired but I’m Clean found on the 1964 album, PureDynamite: Live at the Royal (Brown 1964a) Hip Bag 67, found on the 1967 album, Live at the Garden(Brown 1967) and the 1969 single, Ain’t It Funky Now (Brown 1969a). The latter which has Brownplaying organ and talking to himself whilst guitarist Jimmy Nolan playing this incredibly fast, butintricate strum on a single chord for nine minutes.406 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 74-75)

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direct experience with a world that cannot simply appeal to a model. The artist’s

wilful submission of themselves into this chaos will have them emerge with percepts

and affects produced in the attempt to apprehend the chaos of life.

When compared, the two titles indicate no less than two disparate and totally opposed

existential outlooks. In introducing his “new bag”, Brown’s declaration of an

immediacy of immanent forces was emphatic and he was not about to place his faith

in a mere chance of change up ahead. This does not mean that the future played no

role in Brown’s music. Brown’s compulsion to do something “now” would virtualise

a future in which funk would feature prominently. This is different to the narrativised

future of soul in that an ever present now took precedence over projection. The

groove’s ever present now, is an affirmation of the joy of the moment rather than one

of future projection. This will be of obvious importance later on as the aesthetics of

indeterminacy will be keenly embraced by the DJs and electronic dance music

practitioners, who will also recreate the chaosmotic groove through a repetition of a

“break beat”. An affirmation of the most suitable space of all possible worlds amid

the misery of an intolerable social circumstance.

The importance of Brown’s funk is in setting up the necessary affordances of this

future musical movement that would emerge before soul’s brief window of

opportunity was irrevocably shut. Brown’s music would enable the means of

becoming-other even after disillusionment of the decline of soul’s own image of

thought. I will contend that its marshalling of forces is why Brown’s music continued

to maintain a vitality for the more underground producers who would subject Brown

to extensive sampling over and above most of his soul contemporaries in the wake of

its decline.

Soul as Movement-image

Buoyed by the optimism of the challenge of civil rights, the soul aesthetic maintained

a general faith in the proposition that a “change was gonna come”. Soul music

continued to feed into the overwhelming sense of optimism that accompanied the

music right up until at least the mid-1960s. In this respect, the philosophical position

of the movement was one driven by a teleological notion of Truth propelling a sense

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of social justice that would emerge in a linear, common sense, and unified time. Soul,

then, has many of the characteristics Deleuze ascribes the movement-image in

cinema. Both follow a mode of thought that “intuitively” organises what is presumed

to be the “organic” logic of time, which derives the temporal from an accumulation of

actions (movements). This time is what Deleuze would refer to as “organic” because

it reiterates a “common sense” notion of meaningful, teleological, linear flow. It is a

time further aligned, through actions (movements) to the natural orientation of the

sensory-motor-schema, which in turn is made, by the whole schema, to comply with

“common sense”. As D.N. Rodowick explains:

[t]he indirect image of time restricts itself to the sensorimotor schema.Movements are represented as actions prolonging themselves in spaceas reactions, thus generating chains of narrative cause and effect in theform of linear succession. Ultimately, the sensorimotor schema impliesa world apprehensible in an image of Truth as totality and identity. Themovements of thought are exhausted in the dialectical image of anever-expanding spiral and in the belief of a world mastered byaction.407

Time is only made visible secondarily, in the primary accumulation of movements

with the sensory-motor-schema. It is this more conventional notion of time that, for

Deleuze, drove early cinema up to the post-war period. It is also this conventional

understanding of time that underpinned the existential perspective of the soul

movement: a perspective that narrativised time and artificially connected it to a

unified and actionable will-to-truth. In this sense the soul movement was entirely

modernist in that it was driven by an idea of the world geared to a teleologically

driven set of convictions. This is perhaps why Mark Anthony Neal ascribes to the soul

aesthetic, “…the most vivid and popular expression of an African-American

modernity”.408 It must be said that I am not criticising the belief in movement that

drove the soul aesthetic, nor denigrating the amount of thought, work and suffering

that went into these appeals for a new type of existence. The problem, however, was

how to deliver the dream to those who either could not, or did not, adhere to it.

407 (Rodowick 1997: 84-85)408 (Neal 2002: 3)

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Hence the real power of political change, which tends to elude macro-politics, might

be more readily achieved through the micropolitics of desire and what a body could

do. These are glimpses that might be found in “… the frenzy of Aretha Franklin’s

voice or the syncopated choreography present in any James Brown performance”. 409

My argument is that it is more productive to concentrate on the bodily reactions

breaking out of historical events. The affects that these produce effect as real a

transformation of the social as teleological narrative unity, if not, more so. In fact,

even in the short term such glimpses were dramatic, even at the time, they

demonstrated the vast virtual potential of a body. Yet whilst I contend that these

gestures were indicative of a new visibility of new forces, this visibility had its price.

The power of body given such new found social freedoms meant that it was often

working against the narratives that mobilised it in the first place. This is why we shall

see that in the aftermath of soul’s faith in the universal notions of movement that the

emphasis will shift instead to the ethical power of individual bodily movement. That

perhaps the ultimate lesson of music is that there is nothing to believe in but the ethics

behind specific interactions with other bodies.

It is this shock to thought that I am dealing with in this chapter. I shall now discuss

some of the specific examples of the potential of what a body could do, in its shock to

thought. These can be seen in the overt displays of showmanship of James Brown in

the 1960s. Given the fact that his stagecraft of that time is considered extraordinary

even today, one wonders just what the audiences of the time might have made of it. A

singular moment, such as James Brown’s performance at the T.A.M.I. Show, might

have provided a glimpse of a future that was perhaps just too complex to be given any

real consideration by broader society at the time.

The T.A.M.I. Show

Taped in front of a live, and more importantly for the time, a multi-racial audience,

the T.A.M.I. Show broadcast,410 which took place in 1964, alternated between both

409 (Neal 2002: 4)410 The acronym T.A.M.I. has alternately been used in reference to the titles Teenage Awards MusicInternational and Teen Age Music International. In fact the TAMI broadcast has perhaps taken on morehistorical significance as time has gone by. The TAMI Show has been re-released a number of time ona number of different mediums. On VHS video and now DVD it is titled (Various Artists 1965).

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black and white popular music’s biggest stars. This now-legendary concert event

would, for instance, feature Brown’s performance, alongside acts as diverse as the

Beach Boys, Ray Charles, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Chuck Berry, The

Supremes and The Rolling Stones. The T.A.M.I. Show broadcast has also been

retrospectively attributed the distinction of initiating one of the white world’s first

encounters with Brown’s radical stage show, a point made by Peter Guralnick in his

book, Sweet Soul Music:

The first that we actually saw of James Brown was in the movie, theT.A.M.I. Show, with a string of pop stars (the Beach Boys, PetulaClark, Chuck Berry, and the Miracles among them) and a performanceby James that was nothing less than revelatory. He screamed, he stoodstock-still, he exploded with lightning precision, he skated on one leg-and he completely stole the show from the Rolling Stones, whom myfriends and I were initially almost as interested in seeing.411

Retrospective accounts given by members of both the Rolling Stones and Brown’s

band have recounted that Brown’s extraordinary performance at T.A.M.I. had a more

vindictive agenda, angered as he was by the fact that he was relegated from top-

billing by a then comparatively unknown Rolling Stones. Brown wanted to put the

fear into these English kids and teach them a lesson in stagecraft. Brown was

rumoured to “make the Rolling Stones wish they’d never come to America”412 and to

make sure of this, he would add an even more ferocious intensity to what was already

an unprecedented spectacle. 413 Brown and his bands had been arduously making the

rounds of the “chitlin’ circuit”414 for a decade, and they were operating at another

level entirely. Thus Brown’s bitterness over the white musicians’ attempts at

recolonising African-American musical territory was entirely justifiable. The result

411 (Guralnick 1986: 252-253)412 (Wyman 1990: 271). However, after this initial confrontation, Brown would go on to subsequentlyembrace and encourage the young British group (Wyman 1990: 272). However Bobby Byrd wouldlater comment that the Famous Flames were just as scared of the effect of the Rolling Stones as theStones were of them. In fact Byrd says to Geoff Brown that they didn’t want to be put up against theStones, but rather placed between the Motown acts that they already knew they could beat (GeoffBrown 1996: 114).413 Brown and Famous Flames performed four songs Out of Sight, Please Please Please, Prisoner ofLove and Night Train. Night Train in particular, is one of the most noteworthy visuals in the history ofvisuals. It has been said that Elvis Presley used to watch it nightly, and in Gerri Hirshey’s interviewwith Michael Jackson, that appears in Nowhere to Run he also sings its praises(Hirshey 1985: xii)414 “Chitlin’” is the Afro-American slang for “chitterlings/chitlings” which was the intestines of pigsprepared as food and popular among this section of the community. By extension, the “chitlin circuit”was a touring circuit of segregated clubs and cafes of black patronage that many African-Americanmusicians would tour.

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was extraordinary. As Marc Eliot has commented, the show helped to usher in

Brown’s crossover to the white mainstream through a performance, “…in which he

changed forever the face and course of popular music, and the teen culture that looked

to it for its anthemic identity”.415 Many of the white teens watching became instant

converts. Accounts of the performance are given pride of place by the white authors

of texts on soul, such as Gerri Hirshey,416 Peter Guralnick,417 Marc Eliot418 and others

as a decisive and life-changing moment that would inspire their own personal

journeys into soul music fanaticism.

Brown’s performance at the T.A.M.I. Show raised the bar for popular music’s level of

intensity. In particular, it made new demands of performance in popular music. The

effect was almost immediate. Having to directly follow Brown at the T.A.M.I. Show,

Mick Jagger would step up his level of animation quite discernibly in response to the

challenge.419 To put Brown’s performance in context, one has to merely compare its

intensity with the quaint respectability of the other acts on the bill. Whilst Smokey

Robinson and the Miracles may have also included some extravagant choreography,

they were not screaming and crying and running across the stage on one leg.

Brown’s audaciously uncompromising performance was even more radical given the

fact that the whole concept of desegregated shows and audiences was only made legal

a few months previously with the 1964 Civil Rights Act.420 In retrospect, package-

shows such as T.A.M.I. were pioneering social experiments. These shows would be

415 (Eliot 2005: 29)416 (Hirshey 1985: xii)417 (Guralnick 1971: 28-30). Here Guralnick is paying tribute to the role of The Rolling Stones on hismusical education, including their inadvertent introduction of James Brown to the author via theT.A.M.I. Show, which the Stones also played. “Of all their contributions to my own education, though, Iwould say that the one for which I was most grateful was the presence of James Brown in The Stones-headlined T.A.M.I Show film. James Brown, of course, we had heard of, we knew his music a little, andhis reputation as an entertainer preceded him. Nothing that we heard could have prepared us for whatwe saw even in the grainy, far-away quality of the film. The dynamism, the tireless energy andunflagging zeal, the apocalyptic drama of his performance were all unprecedented in out experience,and when we emerged from the theatre we had the idea that we could skate one-legged downWashington Street, defying gravity and astonishing passers-by. The Stones after that performance hadbeen nothing more than an anti-climax, and we watched in silent approval as the blacks trooped out oneby one, leaving the field to the latecomers” (Guralnick 1971: 28-30)418 (Eliot 2005: 29). Eliot refers to the T.A.M.I performance as “universally regarded as the mostastonishing performance in the entire history of rock and roll” (Eliot 2005: 29).419 (Geoff Brown 1996: 114)420 President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law on the 2nd of July 1964.The act basically outlawed the segregation of public places such as libraries, swimming pools, theatres,restaurants, and hotels. (U.S. Government 1964)

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instrumental in revealing new sections of previously marginal American cultures.

Before such shows pre-civil-rights segregation forced African-American musicians

into that alternate logistical network colloquially referred to as the “chitlin” circuit”. It

was on this “chitlin circuit” that Brown’s act had been honed for over a decade.

Countering the British Invasion

The reason why I have dedicated the above section to Brown’s appearance on the

T.A.M.I. show is because it illustrates how a singular event can catalyse the

development of a broader series of new social assemblages and forces. In this respect,

the performance was probably as threatening as it was entertaining. If the soul

generation did indeed “overcome” then the broader, majoritarian society was ill

prepared to assimilate such an alien set of performance conventions. Even Mick

Jagger could barely follow him, although given time, he was willing to have a go.

Such British following of artists such as Brown was a major factor in increasing the

visibility of the African-American artist, although it was the groups of the recent

“British Invasion”, rather than the original artists, who were the benefactors.

The “British Invasion”, spearheaded by the Beatles in 1964, was consolidated by

subsequent waves of artists who began to appear from all over the UK. These acts had

all relied to some extent on African-American music, and the ensuing prominence of

their “covers” made the more curious seek out the original performers.

In the recent, Mike Figgis’ directed, Red, White and Blues (2003), this British

repatriation of African-American music is credited with providing broader exposure

to white audiences in what was in many respects an otherwise invisible part of

American culture. This point of view is bolstered throughout the film through the

observations of Afro-American music icons such as B.B. King. King confirms that

this British re-importation of black music increased both the visibility and economic

welfare of the black musicians. King makes the point that the appropriation of black

music by white artists would ultimately allow for social possibilities that would have

otherwise taken a great many more years to achieve.421 Indeed many of these

421 King in Red, White and Blues (2003)

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musicians, marginalised and neglected in their home country were genuinely touched

by the reverence these British musicians extended towards them. Covers of this

material by white artists would enable increased exposure to the pop market, and in

addition provided (for some) an unexpected windfall from the extra royalties

generated. However, whilst the take up of African-American music by whites did

have some positive benefits, it would be disingenuous to simply equate the

emancipation of black popular culture with the enthusiasm of some white R&B

enthusiasts.

In fact, a more realistic scenario is that for most black popular music artists, one

marginal situation was replaced by another. As white musicians were able to

approximate covers of their R & B idols, their audience was alleviated of the

complications of broader interracial assimilation. Indeed the white appropriation of

the black pop market conspired to destroy the momentum of black musicians gaining

a foothold in a broader section of the pop market. As Ben E. King says in the “Be My

Baby” episode of the BBC documentary series, Dancing in the Street (1996):

There was a bit of jealousy because we were cut off at a time when we

just getting ready to be stronger ourselves [Black pop

performers]…All signs were there that the music being created right

here at home was going to be tremendously big and then all of a

sudden these kids came along (the Beatles) and stopped all that...and it

was a strong pill to swallow...and I think the only one to survive that

thing was someone like James Brown who was so far to the left of

what they were doing that it didn’t affect him. So James covered all of

what was going on and what Blacks felt they needed musically to

survive the Beatles thing.422

Brown’s music, however, was not covered by the “British Invasion” artists as readily

as the music of other more orthodox soul artists had been. The covers of the bulk of

the white musicians such as the aforementioned Rolling Stones gravitated toward the

more orthodox types of soul songs of performers such as Solomon Burke and Marvin

422 Ben E. King in episode Be My Baby (1996) of the BBC documentary series, Dancing in the Street(1996)

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Gaye.423 Brown was becoming increasingly immune to such threats as his intricate big

band sound and the scale of the operation insured him somewhat against appropriation

by the smaller British beat combos. The threat of the British groups, just like the

appearance of the Stones at T.A.M.I, perhaps led Brown to more radical feats of

musical creativity. However, via this process, Brown’s music did indeed become

more “minor”, and perhaps less accessible to covers by white groups. Brown would

instead retain a more underground, cult status among niche groups such as the Mods,

whose propensity was to the embrace the more marginal of the soul artists. So when

Brown was covered, it was by Mod favourites The Who.424 Even then, Werner duly

describes these attempts as, “[t]he low point of obsession with black American

music”.425

Appropriation or Becoming?

There are reservations about the way black music was “covered”, although these tend

to reduce the situation to mere “appropriation”, a description that does not fully

account for the complexity of what occurs during such a cultural encounter. So whilst

it is tempting, and even fruitful to discuss how “white appropriation” may have

diluted the “authenticity” of black music, I believe that it might be just as fruitful to

put such critique of “appropriation” aside to consider alternatives and ask, to what

extent were whites also becoming in such encounters?

Attempting to qualify the difference between the “becoming” of the white musician,

as distinguished from straight out exploitation is an occupation fraught with

difficulties, although I believe it a worthy endeavour. To demonstrate this idea, I

examine in the following section a particularly thoughtful approach to such becoming

as articulated by Charles Stivale in his examination of Cajun culture, Disenchanting

Les Bons Temps.

423 The Rolling Stones, for example, recorded Burke’s, Everybody Needs Somebody to Love, That'sHow Strong My Love Is and Cry to Me found on the (UK versions) of The Rolling Stones No. 2 and Outof Our Heads (both 1965) LPs and Gaye’s Can I Get a Witness? and Hitch Hike on the (UK versions)of The Rolling Stones (1964) and Out of Our Heads (1965) LPs.424 (Geoff Brown 1996: 136)425 (Werner 2000: 82)

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However before I introduce Stivale’s ideas I will first make reference to a classic

example of the type of criticism that lambasts the “dilution at the hands of white

appropriation” described here in Dave Headlam’s, “Appropriations of Blues and

Gospel in Popular Music” (2002),426 Headlam writes that the covers of black blues

and gospel music by white artists’ strip the music of its authenticity and provide their

respective audiences instead with a “…watered-down form”, “…with their original

meanings lost”.427 Headlam thinks such appropriation is symptomatic of the white

person’s desire for the Black “grain of the voice”, a concept famously coined by

Roland Barthes.428Barthes’ “grain” is a “…texture in the sound and the associated

expression, is a human element interpreted as a physical and emotional effort that

resonates with listeners, as they relate the emotions to their own lives”.429 Yet while

symptomatic of a white desire to emulate this particular black “grain of the voice”, all

the while, “…the original performers and creators of the expression and its social

meanings tend to be left behind in such cultural transactions”.430 A key problem with

this argument, however, is that it depends on maintaining a distinction between an

authentic model, and copies regarded as somehow "lesser" to the original. There are

crucial political points to be made along these lines perhaps. However, I would rather

analyse such covers in a different way, not in terms of authenticity and dilution, but in

terms of the becomings that emerge out of such encounters.

For example, in Disenchanting Les Bons Temps, Charles Stivale provides an example

of cultural encounter that might better inform what is at stake in the qualification of

appropriation or becoming. Stivale discusses his ongoing enthusiasm for Cajun

culture and from the position as an “outsider” assesses how authoritatively he might

claim his own “becoming-Cajun”.431 Informed by his own suspicions “…about the

status of outsiders' views in relation to indigenous cultural practices”,432 nevertheless

he goes through a process of attempting to differentiate himself from the more casual

tourist and thus seek some level of authentication. He writes, “[f]rom a literal

perspective, the concept of becoming-Cajun is ironic because it is evident that as a

426 (Headlam 2002: 180)427 (Headlam 2002: 161)428 (Headlam 2002: 161)429 (Headlam 2002: 161)430 (Headlam 2002: 161)431 (Stivale 2003: 14)432 (Stivale 2003: 24)

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francophone Italian-American, I can never become Cajun, not even by choice”.433 Yet

the simple fact is that Stivale cannot help but be affected by the culture he is spending

so much time with, yet must accept that there is no identity to maintain his

authenticity against. All is becoming, even the Cajun’s are becoming-Cajun, as he

explains:

…the search for authenticity on the part of the cultural tourist is alsoreflective of the minority of the native Cajun's experience. That is,difficulties pertain to being Cajun because the very hybridity of Cajunidentity-the socio-cultural and in-between of diverse ethnic origins,social classes, and racial groups – renders any fixed or stable Cajunidentity quite impossible, despite claims to the contrary.434

The more appropriate method of engaging Cajun culture might be through the ethics

of the encounter or a “speaking with and to rather than for”.435 Stivale’s becoming

through his engagement with this particular culture is not one based in the saying of “I

am” or attempting to pass one’s self off as. It is at this moment when becoming is

rendered self-conscious, a futile qualification of an untenable claim of authenticity,

rather than an engagement of productive difference with the culture at hand.

Thus to return to the “white” appropriation of “black” music, under no circumstances

should the resultant series of becomings be merely limited to the idea of a performer

projecting a new appropriated identity, for the reality is that the result is anything but.

One of the most enticing aspects of playing “black” music was not to appropriate the

music, or even the performer’s identity so much as to attempt to interact with the

experience of the specific time-space of its performer. The white musicians’ attempts

to play this music gave them a space to play out their own alterity, or to develop their

own difference (rather than say, adopt blackness per se) in a relatively (for then)

socially acceptable way. The white musician interacting with black music is like the

stepping stone on a new orientation of becoming. Not that this is without its problems

and I am well aware that, at least in economic terms, this would indicate cultural

dominance in favour of whites.436 The resultant process of this becoming of white

musicians, we might refer to as a partial dissolution of white, as much as it is a

433 (Stivale 2003: 24)434 (Stivale 2003: 25)435 (Stivale 2003: 35)436 (Wallis & Malm 1990: 174)

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becoming-black. This is to say that such becoming will never reach “blackness”, but

will continually involve a departure from majoritarian “whiteness”. 437

What I mean by becoming, here, is quite different to the kind of ill-conceived

emulation found in, for example, the “cooning” of minstrelsy, where the latter might

otherwise demonstrate the crass result that can emerge through a generalised concept

of representation. The problem is one of starting with an idea of representation rather

than to look first at the affective connection, (as found, for example, in the song of the

performer), as a vehicle that might enable an alterity to be divulged through its

repetition. If a naïve notion of representation as identity looks to similitude rather than

alterity in the repetition, then that repetition of similitude will tend towards a

generalised and rather limited series of actions of representation that avoid the

specific contexts of social action. This is of course precisely the sort of essentialist

trap that Deleuze warns of in Difference and Repetition. Deleuze goes to great lengths

to critique generalised attributes made between model and copy438 to instead argue for

the more heterogeneous, specific and always unfinished nature of becoming.

Furthermore, such becoming is the process of difference in effect, which can never be

achieved through a “bare/covered” repetition439 such as imitation. For imitation is the

opposite of becoming, a point explained here by Deleuze and Guattari:

Suppose a painter "represents" a bird; this is in fact a becoming-birdthat can occur only to the extent that the bird itself is in the process ofbecoming something else, a pure line and pure color. Thus imitationself-destructs, since the imitator unknowingly enters into a becomingthat conjugates with the unknowing becoming of that which he or sheimitates…Becoming is never imitating.440

437 As Dyer comments, these cultural biases toward white are still part of popular construction of white,as majoritarian, as neutral territory, ‘The wide application of white as symbol, in non-racially specificcontexts, makes it appear neutral: white as good is a universal abstraction, it just happens that itcoincides with people whose skin is deemed white’ (Dyer 1997: 70).438 (Deleuze 1994: 126-128)439 In Difference and Repetition (1994), Deleuze distinguishes between “an uncovered or barerepetition” as the type of mechanical repetition of the Same (he gives examples of a ceremony orstereotype) (Deleuze 1994: 17-18), while a “covered” repetition is a repetition which has differencehidden within itself. As Deleuze writes, “The mask, the costume, the covered is everywhere the truth ofthe uncovered. The mask is the true subject of repetition. Because repetition differs in kind fromrepresentation, the repeated cannot be represented: rather, it must always be signified, masked by whatsignifies it, itself masking what it signifies” (Deleuze 1994: 18).440 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 304-305)

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Whilst there may have been attempts by white musicians to imitate, appropriate and

perhaps even denigrate black music in their repetition of the form, it would be to the

detriment of the understanding of black-white relations within music to just collapse

the complex series of assemblages into one, for instance, of the appropriation of

representation or identity. This would ignore the vast and real becomings that occur

otherwise. To speak in terms of appropriation is to accept the banal estrangement of

model and copy. This in turn limits a more rigorous exploration of “what a body can

do”441by limiting a body’s “proper” actions to those that are able to find a general

form of representation.

What Can a Body Do?

A qualification of becoming in opposition to a more banal repetition of imitation is

necessary to see how the becoming of the body might productively take place. It

should also be noted that the Deleuzean notion of a body should not be thought of in

the way we might more commonly conceive it, as a lesser material extension of a

(greater) subject. It is important to understand that this notion of the body is not of a

fixed biological form, but one instead based on the ethology discussed in chapter 1.

The premise of the Deleuze-Guattarian ethology is not to describe what a body is, but

rather to examine the connections it can make. For example, Samira Kawash rather

concisely explains Deleuze’s particular take on the body:

The question of the body turns on whether we can conceive of adesubjectified body, a mode of corporeality that escapes structures ofidentity and subjectivity but that is not an implicit return to the violentabstractions of philosophical idealism that relegate the body to thefleshy, contaminated world of substance. This body cannot beconceived as the human body, the biological, organismic counterpart tothe human subject; nor can it be attributed to something more essential:it is not body of X (for example, body of the subject) but simply bodyas materiality, a corporeal something that returns as resistance, refusal,singularity, radical particularity.442

One of Deleuze’s central concerns is to provide the right philosophical conditions to

allow becomings of the body to take place. For a start, some concepts, more than

441 (Deleuze 1983: 39)442 (Kawash 1998: 133)

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others, allow us to imagine what a body might be capable of as a productive problem,

even if we may not always care for the results. The more imminent problem is to

think of the potential of such bodies as extending far beyond the types of

commonsense relations that we bestow upon them. Commonsense relations imply

notions of time and space derived from generalised representational schema that can

be perceived as being more or less disconnected from the body. These, of course,

produce bodies in a generalised manner through the ‘truthful” narration of State

thought, which marks and represents them accordingly.

In distinction to State thought governing the capabilities of bodies, a micropolitics of

desire might require us to imagine a body as the basis of a belief in the specific,

complex and fluid world as it is, rather than confined in the body to the product of an

adherence to ideology or dogma. In fact, Deleuze remarks, after Spinoza, that a belief

in the world is a belief in the body itself:443

What is certain is that believing is no longer believing in anotherworld, or in a transformed world. It is only, it is simply believing in thebody. It is giving discourse to the body, and, for this purpose, reachingthe body before discourses, before words, before things are named…444

To recap on the point made in chapter 1, this belief in the world, is not to be found

through our knowledge of the world but only through an experimentation of the body

(including of course the brain) that might connect to the world. We need to remain

open to the possibility that man and the world will be once again connected.445 The

importance of the “minor” artist or the “minor” language is to facilitate such

connections to the world as it actually is, rather than to the world’s representation by

dominant thought. As Rajchman writes, “ “Minor languages” like Black English pose

this problem – one must devise ways of being at home not in a territory but in this

Earth, which, far from rooting them in a place, an identity, a memory, releases them

from such borders…”.446 This is why Deleuze and Guattari argue that the function of

the artist is to return us to the affective possibilities of the body. This is the freeing of

the power of affect which causes Deleuze to remark in Cinema 2, “Not that the body

443 (Deleuze 1989: 172)444 (Deleuze 1989: 172-173)445 (Deleuze 1989: 172)446 (Rajchman 2000: 95)

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thinks, but, obstinate and stubborn, it forces us to think, and forces us to think what is

concealed from thought, life”.447 As I will discuss in the next chapter the creative

power of life emerges as a result of the naïve figure asking, “why can’t I do this”?

To ask one’s self such a question is the first step to connection rather than limitation,

and, as I have briefly outlined above, orienting a body to an embrace of connection

rather than judgemental difference is one of Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s) most

fundamental concerns:

We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in otherwords, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter intocomposition with other affects, with the affects of another body, eitherto destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actionsor passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerfulbody.448

To provide for the affective connections that might ameliorate “becomings rather than

stories” is the ethical challenge of the Cinema books. This ethical challenge informs

the approach of this thesis to popular music.

If the search for truth produces a body it does so in an unexpected way. For instance,

we might find ourselves searching for the truth about a subject (of a body) and the

process will, in turn, require our assimilation of images of that subject (and body) to

produce the desired result. However, the paradox that Deleuze brings up is that the

more images we seek in relation to the “truth” about something, the more potential for

difference actually emerges. The quest for a “truthful” image of an authenticity will

only bring difference to the fore.

In the Cinema books Deleuze uses the cinema of supposed reality, the “direct cinema”

and cinéma vérité styles associated with directors such as John Cassavetes, Shirley

Clarke, Pierre Perrault and Jean Rouch to explain how a cinema of supposed “truth”

would instead free up the dichotomy of the false and the true:449 “…if this cinema

discovered new paths, it also preserved and sublimated an ideal of truth which was

447 (Deleuze 1989: 189)448 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 257)449 (Deleuze 1989: 150)

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dependent on cinematographic fiction itself: there was what the camera sees, what the

character sees, the possible antagonism and necessary resolution of the two”.450

In other words, cinéma-vérité should not be considered as a “truthful” medium but

rather one that implores of its makers their own transformation, as they must seek out

their own powers of falsification to become with their subject. As Deleuze says, this is

the, “…constitution or reconstitution of a people, where the film-maker and his

characters become others together and the one through the other, a collectivity which

gradually wins from place to place, from person to person, from intercessor to

intercessor”.451

Rather than simply ascribing the work of these filmmakers as a “truth”, Deleuze

attributes the cultural encounters sought out by the directors in question as indicative

of their desire to become other. As Deleuze says in relation to Godard’s discussion of

Rimbaud’s formula “I is another”452 the subject becomes aware of an internally spilt

subjectivity and in reference to the work of documentarian, Jean Rouch, will contend

that through his films the director may find a chance to become-black.453 That is, the

formula “I is another” can be understood as that moment where one apprehends the

very possibility of becoming itself.

Overcoming the Limits of Representation

Music, of course, has always been at the centre of the most profound events of

becoming. This is perhaps because music’s invasive territorial nature brings

assemblages into relations that might not have been otherwise encountered. By the

time of soul, black music was slowly creeping into the consciousness of the

mainstream and forcing people to contend with it, whether they liked it or not.

However, stressing the becoming that emerges from such an encounter, does not mean

that I am blind to the difficulty that black musicians had to face. Whilst it may have

been of enormous ontological benefit for the development of white musicians who

were able to freely play this music, I realise that this was often at the expense of their

450 (Deleuze 1989: 149)451 (Deleuze 1989: 153)452 (Deleuze 1989: 153)453 (Deleuze 1989: 153)

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black counterparts. So questions of becoming are not meant to erase the often gross

iniquities that continued to pervade social policy. My point is to first emphasise some

of the points that tend to be marginalised. It is necessary to move the agenda away

from retrospective judgement of appropriation in order to analyse some other

dimensions of the politics of the time. This will enable a better analysis of the

complex encounters and becomings that also took place.

For a start, the becoming in question was not only limited to an exchange of cultures

split along racial lines. In fact Brown’s own creativity was perhaps fuelled by the fact

that he was marginal within his own culture. If one accepts the idea of the white's

becoming-black, perhaps Brown too, had a similar goal. As we have discussed in

previous chapters, Brown’s work is often equated with generalised notions of

“blackness”. Yet at this stage, Brown himself was still trying to “become-black”. That

is to say that even a nominal “blackness” is never absolute, but always shifting and

subjected to its own hierarchies and stratification. For example African-Americans

still maintain a skin colour hierarchy.454 It was somewhere within this hierarchy that

Brown had to find his own “black”. For example, Brown’s childhood friend and revue

member, Leon Austin describes Brown as being “dark skinned”: “He made the ugly

man somebody,” says Austin, albeit rather disconcertingly, to Gerri Hirshey.455

Austin’s distinction somehow inferred that this made Brown’s accomplishments all

the more empowering for the many previously invisible African-Americans forced to

endure a similar marginalisation at the time. 456

The notion of “dark skinned” here refers to the deep-seated skin-tone hierarchy,

which unfortunately, remains a rather arcane process of differentiation used by

African-Americans that has its roots in assimilation with the majoritarian culture. The

white audience were of course less likely to be offended if their “negroes” were as

454 The skin colour hierarchy exists not only among African-Americans, but unfortunately remains arather tenacious vestige of colonialism in general. It has been the subject of frequent discussion,including the following journal articles, “Shades Of Brown: The Law Of Skin Color” (Trina Jones2000) and “Hey Girl, Am I More than My Hair?: African American Women and Their Struggles withBeauty, Body Image, and Hair” (Tracey Owens Patton 2006)455 (Austin in Hirshey 1985: 285). In a passage discussing Brown’s appearance on the Ed SullivanShow, Hirshey writes “James Brown cut loose with a swaggering pride few men of color dared expressin mixed company. Even among blacks, it ruptured the stratification of “high complexion” versus low.‘A darker person would probably be named as ugly,’ Leon explains. And James Brown is dark. ‘So,’says Leon, “he made the ugly man somebody” (Austin in Hirshey 1985: 285).456 (Austin in Hirshey 1985: 285)

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Caucasian looking as possible, such as a Lena Horne, a Johnny Mathis or a Nat

“King” Cole, although of course through no fault of their own. In light of what came

before it is fair to say that embracing “blackness” as an identity was a goal still yet to

be mobilised into a mainstream recognition in any overt way.457 Only the “crazy”

Negroes like Malcolm X dared to speak of such a future collective. Indeed, Amiri

Baraka relates the concept of “becoming-black” to his piece, The Legacy of Malcolm

X, where he writes that even “…the Black Man must aspire to Blackness”.458 This

observation is similar to a moment in A Thousand Plateaus where Deleuze and

Guattari also say that “…even the black man must become-black”.459 As Deleuze and

Guattari say further in this passage that, “…if blacks must become-black, it is because

only a minority is capable of serving as the active medium of becoming, but under

such conditions that it ceases to be a definable aggregate in relation to the

majority”.460

Whilst undoubtedly provocative, controversial and given that it is proposed by a

couple of old, white French guys, a little presumptuous, the concept of becoming-

black is not so much about representation as the ephemeral nature of something that

has no tangible existence beyond a political position. It is really only problematic

when it is thought of as a represented, “black” body or “black” people. We are of

course, here dealing with becoming-minor which is much less a choice made than

being thrown into a political position, even in the political economy of music.

For Deleuze and Guattari have said in A Thousand Plateaus that becoming is fluidity

itself and is never representational: “Becoming is a verb with a consistency all of its

own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, “appearing,” “being,” “equalling,” or

457 The discursive shift from “Negro” to “black” was an effect of 1960s activism, including theformation of the Black Panther movement in 1966 (Vincent 1996: 51). For example, in her 1967publication “Revisiting ‘Black Power’, Race and Class”, Marxist scholar, Raya Dunayevskaya, citesthe importance of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) who as chairman of the SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) from May 1966 to June 1967 would popularise the slogan “BlackPower” (Dunayevskaya 1967). With Charles V. Hamilton, Carmichael had written Black Power: ThePolitics Of Liberation In America (1967) (Dunayevskaya 1967). Brown’s usage of “black” in Say itLoud! I'm Black and I'm Proud was one of the earlier assertions of the term “black” rather than theoutmoded “Negro” (Vincent 1996: 55).458 (Baraka in Nealon 1988 :86)459 As Deleuze and Guattari write in A Thousand Plateaus, “[o]ne reterritorializes, or allows oneself tobe reterritorialized, on a minority as a state; but in a becoming, one is deterritorialized. Even blacks, asthe Black Panthers said, must become black” (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 291).460 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 291)

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“producing”.461 In his essay, “Refraining, Becoming-Black: Repetition and Difference

in Amiri Baraka’s Blues People”, Jeffrey T. Nealon makes the point that such

becoming thrives on an inbuilt marginalisation that keeps a minor artistic form, such

as black music, producing difference through repetition: “In fact, in a painful paradox,

it is precisely the specific material history of African Americans' marginalisation—

rather than some naturally contestatory African-American spirit—that makes possible

the active responses and myriad sites of black culture”.462 Nealon makes these

observations in light of his reading of Amiri Baraka’s seminal Blues People (1963),

and the latter’s consideration of be-bop at the time. Baraka’s main argument is that

the African American’s “…conditional separation from the mainstream spared

him”463 and that the project of bebop was “…to make that separation

meaningful…restore jazz, in some sense, to its original separateness”.464 Nealon says

that for Baraka the unique contribution of the beboppers was the fact that they

"reinforced alienation, but on the Negro’s terms".465 Following Deleuze, Nealon

argues that the subsequent repetition of such marginalisation might re-manifest itself

as a repetition of productive difference: “[s]uch an ‘alienation’ or ‘separateness’ is,

then, a repetition of segregation, but with an important difference: this is a repetition

that reinscribes the forced segregation of blacks to create a deterritorialization, a line

of flight for African-American culture”.466

Yet an earlier comment from the same essay strikes me as worth investigating further:

“Benny Goodman is not crowned the "King of Swing" by mistake; his coronation is

precisely one of the many complex, site-specific bulwarks against the becoming-black

of America”467. Given that Nealon fully accepts the Deleuzean notion of such

complimentary modes of becoming, is this a move away from “becoming” to a single

critique of “white appropriation”? The problem is similar to that found in the idea that

the British Invasion represented a similar resistance to a becoming-black. It lies in the

very conscious decision to market an Elvis, or even a Pat Boone over a Big Mama

Thornton or Little Richard. In fact such resistance to becoming, or rather attempting

461 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 239)462 (Nealon 1988: 85)463 (Baraka in Nealon 1988: 85)464 (Baraka in Nealon 1988: 85)465 (Baraka in Nealon 1988: 85)466 (Nealon 1988: 85)467(Nealon 1988: 85)

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to arrest becoming as a resistance to a virtual future will always be present in every

generation of music (heavy metal, gangsta rap, death metal and so on), and the

affirmation of a minor becoming is not, pragmatically at least, completely opposed to

a strategic majoritarian politics. At the same time, while accepting this, it would be a

pity to lose sight of the different strategies of the politics of becoming.

To return to Nealon’s comment, it could be argued that Goodman’s own career

trajectory was in part due to his own “becoming-black”. The white musicians’

attempts to tackle these new cultural and musical forms, such as Goodman’s desire to

play jazz, always possesses a large component that needs micropolitical consideration,

about their own becoming-black. Playing the music of a minor people is an attempt to

apprehend a minor temporality, although it can also be a “capture” of that, a striation

of the minor within the major, it can provide a way for even those in a minority

position, such as Brown, to continue to become as the music itself continues to open

lines of becoming that fracture the major.

Of course Brown too would have to face the terms of his representation and perhaps

become minor, become black, in response. In fact it was Brown’s own minority

within a minor culture, as an “uneducated”, “dark-skinned”468 man that perhaps

further led him to take a marginal position and give it not only a new sense of

presence, but with that presence the belief of being able to connect with the world.

This is perhaps why so many African-Americans loved him, because he was a

political figure in a way that was not even known, or understood by, the white

majority –this majority of course in the Deleuze- Guattarian sense, of the dominant

culture rather than the numerical majority. In contrast to a performer such as Little

Richard, James Brown would appeal to the minor. For instance, Richard speaks here

of Brown’s distinct appeal to Black America: “James Brown was different from me.

He was big to the black market. When he came to town, you would get ten thousand

blacks. When I came to town, you would get ten thousand whites, and about ten

blacks”.469

468 (Austin in Hirshey 1985: 285)469 (Richard in Charles White 1985: 153)

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Why Brown would appeal to blacks in a way denied to Richard, is not further

explained in his memoirs,470although it would probably be fair to attribute some of

Richard’s lack of sustained success within the general African-American community

to their discomfort in Richard’s overt homosexuality.471 As black culture in general

was strange enough to whites, most of his original teenage audience probably had

little idea about his sexuality and embraced him for his more general reflection of

otherness. Richard was perhaps helped neither by the layers of pancake-make up he

has worn through his career472 which may have been read as an appeal to “whiteness”

and of much contrast to Brown’s apparent “ugliness”, which as his friend Leon Austin

attributed as Brown’s “common man” appeal within the African-American

community. 473 For Brown maintained a sense of aspiration that betrayed the social

limitations of the “darker skinned black”, and it is perhaps for this reason, that Brown,

in the tradition of the Deleuze-Guattarian minor author, would inspire a greater appeal

to collectivity. For Brown was able to give the most marginal of the minor a belief in

the world. Brown was not only playing music but by doing so was by extension,

bringing the practically invisible bodies of the marginal and all of their potential, into

focus. To top it off he dared to “feel good”, regardless of the skin he was in. The

melancholic laments of the blues idiom were being replaced with exuberant paeans to

life in general. This was political, then, in the sense that such a blatant espousal of

“feeling good” not only directly challenged the majoritarian persuasion toward the

maintenance of the Protestant work ethic, but also because it claimed bodily pleasure

– indeed particular bodily pleasures - as a right. On the most banal level of pure

representation, Brown’s dynamic physicality on stage was a visible signal of a more

audacious presence of non-white people, doing apparently non-white things. The

dynamism of James Brown’s stage show was ready to make a mockery of (white

imposed) Puritanical mores. Indeed if one is to express an assemblage that would

directly challenge such mores, why not call it funk?

470 As told to Charles White in The Life and Times of Little Richard (Charles White 1985)471 Richard’s breakthrough single Tutti Frutti (1956) was a thinly disguised allusion to his sexuality,where the original lyrics concerning a gay male with good behind, "Tutti Frutti, good booty/If it don’tfit don’t force it/You can grease it, make it easy…” (Richard in Charles White 1985: 55) were changedto the more ambiguous “tutti frutti…aw rooty” by co-writer Dorothy La Bostrie (Richard in CharlesWhite 1985: 50-51).472 (Charles White 1985: 144)473 (Austin in Hirshey 1985: 285)

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The Foundations of Funk

The music that would emerge from Brown’s grunts and groans would come to be

known as funk, a slang term for “the smell of sex”474 and a once obscure jazz term

that Brown, would of course, take into the mainstream. Frank Kofsky writes that the

term, funk, in its original jazz context is to do with authenticity and “[h]ence to call a

composition, a passage, or a player funky was not only to offer praise in general, but a

means of lauding the object of praise for its specifically black qualities”.475

Despite this long and involved history, Brown’s appropriation of funk is anchored

into the popular consciousness. Indeed the description funk would become

synonymous with Brown to the point that he could almost assume its ownership. To

quote hip-hop pioneer, Fab 5 Freddy from “his dictionary for homeboys”: “”funky”

is used for everything to do with music, fashion, culture or ideas that comes from a

black background, and in a special sense for any cultural achievement inspired by the

Godfather of soul James Brown”. 476

Yet, as I have begun to note, funk has entered the parlance of popular culture as a

generic musical term synonymous with Brown’s music; the term had been kicking

around since the turn of the century. As Cheryl Keyes explains, “funk was a term

brought to musical prominence in the title of a jazz tune called Funky Butt by a New

Orleans jazz cornetist, Buddy Bolden, around the 1900s”,477 although funk probably

received its greater currency through Jelly Roll Morton’s I Thought I Heard Buddy

Bolden Say (1939). Here the word funky is truly delivered into the popular lexicon a

point made by Robert Palmer in Dancing In the Street (1996). 478 From here it begins

to be integrated into jazz lexicon. Keyes, for instance, says that it was in the 1950s

that hard bop pianist, Horace Silver, would use the term funk “…to define the return

474 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 46-47). Funk was a not a polite term at all and as Maceo Parker tells CynthiaRose, “I do remember havin’ to get that term ‘funk’ OK’ed by my parents, and some of my peershavin’ to get it OK’d by their parents…to them, it was just not a gentleman’s word” (Cynthia Rose1990: 47)475 (Kofsky 1970: 44)476 (Poschardt 1998: 417)477 (Keyes 2002: 41)478 (Palmer 1996: 239)

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to the evocative feeling and expressiveness of traditional blues” as captured in his

Opus de Funk. 479

Given its rather salacious etymology, there was perhaps something always

“unorthodox” about a “funky” approach. The understanding of funk in the jazz culture

of the 1950s was as a style to counteract,

The coldness, complexity, and intellectualism introduced into themusic by Bop, Cool, West Coast, and Third Stream jazz. By the late1960s, the term was reformulated by the soul singer James Brown todenote an earthy and gritty sonority characterised specifically byBrown’s preachy vocal style and his horn and rhythm section’sinterlocking rhythmic "grooves".480

Some scholars have attempted to excavate its usage even further back. For instance,

Robert Palmer cites the work of African arts scholar Robert Farris Thompson where

the latter is to suggest:

…that "funky" may derive from the Ki-Kongo lu-fuki, defined as"positive sweat:" This is very close to the contemporary Americanusage, and Thompson notes that in present-day Africa, Ba-Kongopeople use lu-fuki and the American "funky" synonymously-’to praisepersons for the integrity of their art:” Thus James Brown’s celebratedadmonition to "Make it funky now!" Certainly no one in rock or r&bhas put more sweat into his performances than soul Brother NumberOne. Add to this Ki-Kongo concept of "positive sweat" the Yorubaconcept of ashe, or "cool" (‘this is character," writes Thompson inFlash of the Spirit, ‘this is mystic coolness") and what have you got?"Cold Sweat"!481

It is not my intention here to further detail such etymological claims. All of this

history, however speculative, does not really tell us how Brown’s particular intricate,

polyrhythmic turn emerged at this particular time. The funk assemblage may well

have inherited a liberal dose of African musical heritage, yet the question here is: why

did this aesthetic emerge so discernibly from Brown’s music and not one of his

predecessors? Attempting to answer this question presents us with the interesting

question of funk’s emergence at a particular time as a musical expression of the

479 (Keyes 2002: 41)480 (Keyes 2002: 41)481 (Palmer 1996: 239)

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coexistent existential circumstances of the civil rights era. For instance Brown’s

emphasis of “the one” was peculiar enough to him, that it would discernibly set his

music apart from his contemporaries in the first place.

Whilst there may be no actual definitive reason why Brown would be the one to pitch

the foundations of funk, the closest musical reason was his love of gospel. After

establishing himself with the marketplace, Brown would return to the more minimalist

repetition of the gospel style that he had temporarily abandoned after Please, Please,

Please. However, if one scours Brown’s back catalogue important indications of the

emerging funk style can be heard. Here we can allude to examples such as 1962’s I’ve

Got Money482 or 1964’s Oh Baby Don’t You Weep,483 the latter being based on an old

gospel song Oh Mary Don’t You Weep. The latter track is the first of many of

Brown’s elongated jams that warranted two-part singles where a single title would

take up both A and B-sides. Brown’s music increasingly resisted the linearity of

composition used in most Western conceptions of harmonic structure, where the

composition was realised as a series of peaks and troughs through which the listener

would be steered for a period lasting roughly two-and-a-half to three minutes.

Brown’s compositional methods increasingly rejected a linear and easily navigable

trajectory that would maintain a traditional build up to and exploitation of the

hook/refrain. This was one of the bases for the compositional characteristic of funk. It

could be attributed to ways of composing developed out of a keen understanding of

the circumstances around Brown, especially as the navigable trajectory of time that

was supposed to lead to Afro-American assimilation was looking increasingly shaky.

Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag

Perhaps Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag was the most overt expression of this minor

language. It was a revolutionary assemblage of difference. First of all, it indicated a

commitment to rhythmic change via The One. Second, Brown seemed to be

deliberately making his music more marginal in nature by embracing increasingly

liberal doses of black vernacular and slang. However, combined with his penchant for

articulating the idiom in a sometimes-impenetrable Southern accent, it served to

482 (Brown 1962)483 (Brown 1964b)

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accentuate the difference of Brown’s world for many sections of the listening

audience, in particular, many of the white teens who had begun buying Brown’s

records at this time. Whilst the experience of encountering this world was one

achieved through the safety of commodification, it also had the effect of unveiling

some of the more invisible sections of society.

So now that this marginal part of society bathed itself in the spotlight, some critics

expected the performers to make the most of this newfound visibility to say

something. For example, in Black Talk (1971), Ben Sidran attacked the often

deceptive political content of many soul songs, prompting his comment that the

genre’s frivolous nature was its major deficiency: “For all its clamour, the ‘soul”

movement was, at bottom, not a serious challenge to Western conventions at all.

Although it had had serious implications in terms of a challenge to the dominant

Puritan ethic, the music itself was rarely more than party music”.484 Sidran’s

assessment is a good example, however, of the grand, and majoritarian, political

gesture. In fact it was as party music that soul music had the ability to “[challenge] the

prevailing logic of white supremacy and segregation in many ways that were

discomforting to some, regardless of race or ethnicity”.485 To be fair, Sidran actually

excludes Brown from this assessment, a point that I will detail in chapter 6, although

it is still a common criticism that can even be heard today, and, I believe, misguided

in the sense that saying something must come from a more serious occupation.

Indeed, whilst Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag did not appear to say much – in terms of

lyrical content, it merely recounted a bunch of dance moves – the record was one of a

cumulative effect of this shock of the new. Its political potency was based on this

‘rendering visible’ of previously invisible sections of America in the space of less

than three minutes and this visibility was distinguished by the “groove” as indicative

of a new emergence.

Thus looking at Brown’s compositional shift in terms of the concepts of Deleuze’s

Cinema books, this may well have instigated the shift from the “movement-image”

conventions of music, before Brown, to the types of time-image musical conventions

that will come after him.

484 (Sidran 1995: 133)485 (Neal 2002: 4)

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Brown’s musical impact then, moves far beyond just lyrical narrative. For instance

most academic discussion on Brown revolves around Say it Loud! I’m Black and I’m

Proud. For example, this is why, despite Brown’s often benign, and even ill informed

political pitches, he could still maintain a presence. As Rickey Vincent explains:

To a generation of frustrated blacks who understood Malcolm X whenhe called for freedom “by any means necessary”, Brown had touched anerve. He inspired the poets to dream of Black Revolution, to speak ofkilling whitey (though not his point of view), and to prepare forredemption on this earth, not the next. Brown had entered themovement. He influenced everyone, from revolutionary poets UmarBen Hassan and Gil Scott-Heron to balladeers Marvin Gaye and StevieWonder.486

The fact of the matter is that the track was never totally embraced by Brown. Despite

the plaudits it has subsequently received, Say it Loud! I’m Black and I’m Proud was

to receive only a handful of performances.487 Brown remained unsure about the

consequences of the record in this time of significant social upheaval. 488 As long-time

Brown band member Sweet Charles Sherrell was to comment in a recent interview

with Matt Rowland in “rare groove” magazine Wax Poetics:

Well, after I heard the words to it, it kind of frightened me, becauseyou know at that time a whole lot of stuff was going on… MartinLuther King and all the riots and stuff. We’ve been playing,performing for all races of people—I’ve seen them in the crowd, youknow. So [I’m thinking], ‘this is going to hurt him.” Because you can’tgo to a concert and sit there and say, ‘say it loud, I’m Black and I’mproud” if you’re not Black or if you’re not Mexican or whatever. Youcan’t do that so you’d feel cheated, you know. That scared me. ButJames realised it too. Because all of a sudden his crowds starteddropping off. 489

Perhaps as testament to this decline in crossover popularity, whilst Say it Loud! was a

Top 10 hit on the white pop charts, the single would be his last for nearly twenty

years. With the increasing uncertainty of the times, the single’s strident message

486 (Vincent 1996: 78)487 (Brown 1995)488 Says Brown band member Sweet Charles Sherrell “He only did that song live maybe three or fourtimes. Five at the most. Then he stopped doing it. For that reason” (Rowland 2002).489 (Rowland 2002)

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would appear to have had the effect of eroding Brown’s major “cross-over” to the

white US audience which commenced only a few years earlier. Crucially, with regard

to his much criticised TV appearance, this also reflected Brown’s increased visibility

as surrogate black leader. As former road manager Alan Leeds states in the

documentary about Brown, soul Survivor, “I remember a leading politician once told

him, 'You're in trouble now…Any one who can stop a riot can start one'”.490

The fear surrounding the period was further escalated by a number of “black power”

hits that would emanate from the James Brown production stable,491 which included

tracks such as Hank Ballard’s solo, How You Gonna Get Respect (When You Haven’t

Cut Your Process Yet) (1968) and Blackenized (1969). As Jesse Jackson has

commented in relation to the song:

We always felt that because of being black, we was always put downbecause of it - but James Brown had the youth to know that its OK tobe who you are…a lot of the kids had been wearing hair one way butwhen James Brown came out with “I’m Black and I’m Proud” youstarted to see what we call Naturals and that meant showing BlackPride.492

Say it Loud! I’m Black and I’m Proud was, to quote Rickey Vincent, “…a turning

point”,493 however, not only because it affirmed present identity, but precisely

because it beckoned the emergence of a new collective - a “people to come”.

In a sense, the lyrics of the song gave expression to something occurring musically

throughout funk. The full power of Black and Proud was not only contained within its

lyrical message, or even that there was someone prepared to go on and dare believe in

a future at such a time of political disarray. Brown’s ultimate force was really

contained in the broader musical assemblage, and expressed through the music of the

burgeoning funk genre.

490 (Leeds in James Brown: Soul Survivor 2003)491 Albert Goldman once titled an essay with the equation "Black Power = James Brown"(Goldman1968/1992).492 (Jackson in James Brown the Godfather of Soul: A Portrait 1995)493 For instance Rickey Vincent provides a lengthy account of James Brown’s influence on Soul erapolitics citing Brown 1968’s single Say It Loud I’m Black and I’m Proud, which he cites as “…aturning point in black music” (Vincent 1996: 78)

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There is also an equally compelling assemblage of forces to be found in the abstract

and surreal quality of much of Brown’s funk.494 Whilst much is made of Brown’s

more overt political tracks, there are many more releases that veer between the

esoteric to the downright bizarre. Here I refer to titles such as, Let a Man Come in and

Do the Popcorn (1969), one of the many “Popcorn” related records Brown released in

the period of 1968-1969 alone, testament to a man preoccupied with cashing in on a

rather obscure dance craze. For further scrutiny I Can’t Stand Myself (When You

Touch Me) (1968) which is basically a riff repeated for seven minutes, let alone tracks

such as I’m Tired But I’m Clean (1963), the musical content just as bizarre as the title

itself. For some of us who came to Brown’s music devoid of the context of the time,

the bizarre quality of such titles proved all the more alluring.

The experimentalism inherent in these tracks is just as important as the well-regarded

strident narratives, of a Say it Loud! I’m Black and I’m Proud (1968) or I Don’t Want

Nobody to Give Me Nothing, (Open Up the Door I’ll Get it Myself) (1969). The fact is

that part of funk’s power lay in its pure abstraction. It was this that would enable new

thought – and new creative practices, musical and social - to emerge, although this

was not preconceived. In fact, true to the sheer pragmatic function of the Idiot, Brown

did not mistakenly assume presuppositions of intent or align his work to some

transcendental project that would undermine its very newness. We might recall here

the comment made by Brown, from chapter 1 of this thesis that funk was not the

result of some preconception or even direction, “funk was not a project…the thing

was ahead”.495

It should also be noted that funk was not necessarily an encompassing vision but

reflected just one aspect of Brown’s music. For James Brown was also an aspirant

crooner, jazzman and preacher. Yet it was funk that would emerge as the most

prominent musical development, one that asserted its power as an acute expression of

the existential conditions of the broader environment. Deleuze and Guattari comment

that, “[t]he creation of concepts in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and

494 For example, in a Rolling Stone magazine article, “Being James Brown” they describe Brown’s“…famously atonal and abstract keyboard work [as] truly worthy of Sun Ra or Daniel Johnston”(Lethem 2006).495 (Brown in Cynthia Rose 1990: 59)

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people that do not yet exist”.496 Deleuze would hope this future form would be

recognizable by virtue of its dislocation from the present.

The crazy lyrics are more indicative of this people to come. Radical change by nature

is always a difficult thing to achieve in a popular music context, and this is perhaps

why it was mainly seen as the reserve of the so-called avant-garde. Whilst the

revolutionary quality of Brown’s music is often analysed from a textual point of view,

such as those previous qualifications of the Say it Loud! I'm Black and I'm Proud, the

literature should give equal attention to Brown’s revolutionary musical

experimentation. As I will discuss in the next chapter, it was Brown’s disregard of

common sense that allowed him to proceed on such a radical musical course. In this

respect I am reminded of the quote from Godard, who once remarked that his

objective was not "making political films, but rather making films politically".497

This is why a central argument in this thesis is that Brown’s greatest statements were

always delivered musically rather than as a lyrical narrative. The emphatic delivery of

“the one” in a track like Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag made the approach of the other

soul artists somewhat subdued in comparison, even and especially as “party music”.

Cliff White writes that the lyrics do matter:

Sketched in personal and simplistic terms as usual, the song, like manyJames Brown compositions, had far deeper implications than just thechanges in his own career. It was a definite statement about the civilrights revolution then sweeping America, which was more tentativelyalluded to by other soul hits of the period, such as Curtis Mayfield andthe Impressions” People Get Ready and Sam Cooke’s A Change isGonna Come.498

Yet to try and understand the revolutionary impact of the music in terms of narrative

is only a small part of the point. The full “message” – the apprehension of a new

minor temporality of becoming - is derived from the power of the music’s rhythms, in

particular the shift to “the one”. In his recent “second” autobiography Brown writes,

“the one” was not just a new kind of beat; it was a statement of race, of force, of

stature, of stride. It was the aural equivalent of standing tall and saying Here I am, of

496 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 108)497 (Monaco 1976)498 (Charles White 1985)

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marching with strength rather than tiptoeing with timidity”.499 Hence the message was

not so much to be heard in what Brown was saying, but rather the way that he was

saying it. One can only imagine what an emphatic refrain of “I Feel Good” may have

represented when at the same time African-Americans were still the targets of

indiscriminate lynch mobs.

The political power of Brown’s music was its challenge “deal with me” rather than

the pleas for “respect” inherent to most soul of the time. As Brown would later sing “I

don’t want nobody to give me nothin’, open up the door I’ll get it myself…don’t give

me integration, give me truth, communication”.500 At the same time, to reiterate the

most powerful aspect of Brown’s great funk tracks, such as I Don’t Want Nobody to

Give Nothing (Open up the Door, I’ll Get It Myself) is not to be found in the lyrics,

but rather in the music’s drive. I reference here in particular the live version that

appears on the Sex Machine album and which provides one of the most incessant

attacks on a single chord to be heard on record. Every downbeat on “the one” is

signalled by a single sustained guitar chord, most likely by Alphonso “Country”

Kellum, acting as the left hand jab, and with a fast Jimmy Nolen “chicken scratch”

coming in from behind, providing the motion and the fancy footwork. When it comes

time to deliver on the chin, Clyde or Jabo would then slam the equivalent of a vicious

right on the snare on every second and fourth beat. Boom-Bap, Boom-Bap, Boom-

Bap. Music that sent its audience into spontaneous bouts of air boxing. This is little

wonder, as funk was an aural equivalent of a prize fight, one in which Brown would

never deliver from the canvas, no matter how bad things were outside of the

auditorium. Through the incessant, almost violent, musical rallies in which he took

hits from the various instruments, Brown might scream, wail, fall to his knees – but

just as his trademark caped performance has indicated since the late 1950s – “…he

would always die on his feet rather than live on his knees”.501 Repetition was the key,

to make sure that the message of “deal with me” was delivered, Brown just took a

musical phrase and incessantly repeated it over and over and over again, for however

long it took to express the emotion underpinning that series of repetitions. Whether

consciously or not, Brown was giving his audience lessons in how such a severe

499 (Brown & Eliot 2005: 72-73). Although probably liberally interpreted by ghostwriter Marc Eliot.500 (Brown 1970c)501 To paraphrase the 1968 song, Say it Loud! I’m Black and I’m Proud (Brown 1969c).

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musically driven violence might sustain an audience who were hard pressed to engage

in a more corporeal one. Such calculated and precise musical attacks were delivered

courtesy of “the one”.

This compositional aspect of funk would reflect gospel’s more enduring influence on

Brown’s work, in particular, an exploitation of the repetition of the groove. In

harnessing the power of repetition, funk would perhaps provide a sense of escape

from the inhuman circumstances that its audience had to otherwise contend with on a

day-to-day basis.

Through “the one”, Brown would be able to mobilise the intensity of African-

American life, if only because his approach to time, with its origins in gospel, was

still so very alien to whites. This musical difference increasingly reflected a

preoccupation with time over compositional movement or “goal”, and this more open

approach to time was driven by this emphasis on “the one”. The unrelenting drive of

“the one” was itself a general expression of broader existential circumstances,

although the impetus of its exactitude is a point that I will briefly speculate upon.

Funk’s “Industrial” Elements

One of these speculations, in terms of funk’s clockwork exactitude is that the rhythms

of the industrial life of the everyday would very likely have had an impact. I argue

that the tightness and exactitude of James Brown’s music is obviously a reflection of

the broader industrial conditions which might be seen as much a reflection of the

imminent industrial environment of the any-space-whatever as it was of any African

cultural practice. The repetitive clank of industrial machines would make an obvious

impression on the drumming of Brown’s Clyde “Funky Drummer” Stubblefield, the

creator of the now ubiquitous “funky drummer” beat,502 who has attributed such

industrial environmental factors as seminal musical experiences:

502 The myriad appearances of the samples of Brown’s Funky Drummer are so frequent that it is hard toconcisely document the ongoing appearances of this sample. I will list here some more recent uses ofthe track. A tribute track to Clyde Stubblefield entitled Good Old Clyde (2005) by “nerdcore” hip-hopartist MC Frontalot is available on his website (Frontalot 2005) (left off his debut album due toclearance issues). Furthermore, a mixtape of tracks that prominently feature the Funky Drummer beat,called, Sound of the Funky Drummer and put together by “Edan The Deejay” has also being doing therounds (not exactly legally) (Edan 2004). A recent personal anecdote. The Funky Drummer beat has

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Where I was raised up in Chattanooga TN…We had wind up clocks.And they go ‘tick-tock…’ all through the whole night. Pitch blackdark…nothin’, you see nothin’…and you just hear that ‘tick-tock…’through the whole night and that’s time…and I go to sleep by that. Andthen to wake up to a factory, that made wooden cases and they had achimney that would go…shoot puffs of smoke out. Wewere…surrounded by mountains and valley and so when this thingwould go ‘poof’ and would it would hit the mountains and it wouldcome back and go ‘poof…boom’. So that had a rhythm. Washingmachine… ‘slish-slosh’…that had rhythm. And the train tracks. I wasraised up around all those rhythms and I used to walk in time with‘em…that’s the way it started by me being raised around those types ofrhythms.503

In this respect, funk can also be seen as a musical reflection of industrial experiences

of African-American life. For Brown’s musical sensibility of clockwork efficiency

and rhythmic exactitude conjure up the demanding conditions of the factories of the

North, of its manual labour and piecemeal work developed around the demands of

Taylorism. Brown too, knew the ardours of manual labour504 and through funk the

repetition experienced by the working class African American is transformed into a

musical aesthetic.

In fact, I contend that funk is yet another musical expression of the technological

environment impacting upon human thought. Funk can thus be considered another

chapter in a long and much considered techno-musical lineage. The incorporation of

technologies that stood outside the traditional musical world and their effect on 20th

century music in particular, have already attracted much scholarly attention. In

general these include the work of the Futurists and their embrace of the aesthetics that

emerged out of World War I,505 there is the transformation, after the Second World

been prominently interpolated into the intro music for The Rolling Stones recent Bigger Bang tour of(2005-2006) and witnessed by myself at Telstra Stadium, Sydney on 11th April 2006. As stated in theJames Brown entry of Wikipedia, “James Brown remains the world's most sampled recording artist,and Funky Drummer is itself the most sampled individual piece of music”(Wikipedia.com 2006).503 (Stubblefield 2003)504 Brown had been working since a small child. In the documentary, Soul Brother No. 1 (1978) Browndiscusses looking on the streets for “clinkers”, pieces of coal which had already been burned to try andkeep warm as one of his childhood preoccupations.505 The artist and writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti founded the Futurist movement in 1909. “In aseries of polemical manifestos, Marinetti asserted the necessity of throwing out all previousconceptions of art…in order to develop a new kind, suitable for an age based upontechnology”(Morgan 1991: 114). However, it was the Italian painter Luigi Russolo that would actuallyaffect the music of the Futurists rather than the more classically trained musicians in the movement

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War, within jazz from the big band style to more insular be-bop movement. These

developments were due as much to new technologically imposed conditions that went

hand in hand with economic and social conditions. Funk maintains its position in the

evolution of this tradition.

I believe that extrapolating the extra-machinic and industrial influences that might

have impacted on the funk aesthetic has been overlooked. For understanding the

industrial nature of funk might help to understand working class blacks playing

working class music, and this might ultimately account for the sense of sheer

uncompromising force that could be heard in funk. In this respect the bigger the band,

the mightier the force, and it is for example, for this reason that I believe that Brown,

however unconsciously, would retreat into a collective approach over a more virtuosic

one. I therefore turn to this collective approach first.

This collective approach would lead to an extraordinary new set of approaches to the

use of instrumentality within the composition. For instance, one can only marvel at

the invention displayed in the guitar figures of Jimmy Nolen, Brown’s long serving

guitarist. Nolen’s style of playing mostly consisted of minimal percussive patterns,

the effect not being unlike a jab to the gut every offbeat. If Nolen would pick up

several notes of a chord, the bass player may share another, and the horns could be

left to pick up the rest. Each part was a cog in a broader machine, broken down into

piecemeal functions. Brown would select from a reserve of musicians, which he kept

on hand to attempt to replicate any particular sound that he might have in mind. For

example, Brown would famously keep a reserve of drummers on hand506 to translate

the aforementioned grunts and groans in a more accessible form of music. The

musician that most successfully captured Brown’s vision would become the player for

(Morgan 1991: 115). Russolo issued his own manifesto, “The Art of Noises” in 1913, whichculminated in the production of a series of new instruments called intonarumori (“noise intoners”)(Morgan 1991: 115-116). The Futurists’ “…wish ‘to conquer the infinite variety of noise-sound’ hasremained a recurring interest throughout the century” (Morgan 1991: 117).506 Live At the Apollo era Brown drummer Clayton Fillyau tells Jim Payne of Brown’s strategy ofkeeping several drummers in reserve, “I’ve been on shows where we had five drummers and five drumsets set up! And believe me, when you hit that stage, there would be no messing around. All fivedrummers would be looking at James Brown, ‘cause when he pointed his finger at you…that next beat,you better be there” (Payne 1996: 29).

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the track. The drummers in particular, were most susceptible to this type of

behaviour.507

There was almost a prefabricated approach to constructing music in this way with

Brown’s grunts and groans as a sometimes undecipherable blueprint. This was

contrary to the virtuosity of jazz tradition, of author-genius conventions that still

inhabited the broader existence of the artist in the West, at least. It also gave a new

emphasis on the invocation of a type of Heideggarian “standing reserve”508 of beats

and rhythms, pre-empting the methods that we now associate with digital technology.

In the midst of this, Brown’s desire to emulate whites’ wielding of power was perhaps

a source of his own tyrannical behaviour, bearing in mind the detrimental effect this

had on the morale of his musicians and further indication of Brown’s complex

relation with the Protestant work ethic and how it might reflect industrial practice.

Although, in fairness, Brown was perhaps the hardest on himself. As the “hardest

working man in showbusiness”509 led by example, the sheer intensity of Brown’s

physically and mentally arduous stage show required an extraordinary stamina and the

pace was so extraordinarily demanding that most musicians would find themselves

having to leave eventually, due to burn out.510 Perhaps the demands Brown placed on

himself and the band was his peculiar way of paying respect to his audiences who

themselves had to work so hard in often low-paying jobs to make his shows. That

respect was to go through the ritual of being worked to death on stage, in a way

507 This is precisely what happened with the making of the proto-funk of the single Let Yourself Go(1966). Recorded fresh after a show at the Latin Casino, the record is seminal to the burgeoning funkstyle, so minimalist and driven that the future is in place. As Brown sang in that track, “...it ain’t justSoul…it’s just a rhythm and blues” (Brown 1991b). From this time, each successive single wouldspend more time hammering away at fewer chords with more ferocity. In the process, Brown becameincreasingly finicky when it came to the exact rhythms to set the baby in motion. This can be heard inthe re-released version of Let Yourself Go507, as the brief section where Brown is instructing thedrummers was included on the Star Time box set (Brown 1991b). This newly appended prologue isparticularly illuminating. We hear Brown telling drummer John "Jabo" Starks to hit the snare wheneverthe singer grunted "uh uh", watched from the sidelines by Stubblefield who was replaced after notbeing able to deliver during the first couple of run-throughs (Geoff Brown 1996: 144-145).508 The concept of “standing reserve” is an attitude towards nature as exploitable resource and valued interms of its utility. For Heidegger the essence of technology might be found in the way that suchtechnology allows us to view nature as merely a passive resource to be exploited as “standing reserve”.Heidegger discusses this idea of technology as a producing in us the attitude of nature-as-resource inhis famous essay “The Question Concerning Technology” (Heidegger 1977).509 (Weinger & White 1991: 15)510 “Everybody would get worn out in that show eventually. Nobody would last over a long period oftime” (Stubblefield in Payne 1996: 62).

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playing out the daily intolerable circumstances of their existence. Brown was acutely

aware that he was singing to the average African-American person, articulating ways

of feeling and of setting up a communal atmosphere that makes his live albums so

enticing. Thus as times got tougher, so would Brown’s sound.

An Expedient Production of Territory

There is nothing like a drum to mobilise a people. In the midst of the dramatic events

of the civil rights struggle, funk had a point to get over. The apparent “simplicity” of

its melodic structure enabled it to more expediently produce territory. Dancing was a

crucial part of this rhythmically driven aesthetic. As Nelson George has discussed in

his Death of Rhythm and Blues, leaving space in the music for dance was intrinsic to

funk’s composition.511 As dance was funk’s primary concern, the approach to its

composition would necessarily have to reflect such facilitation of affective

connections. Funk was so effective at the time precisely because it had successfully

elevated rhythmic complexity to the level of attention once reserved for melodic and

harmonic concerns. This had the effect of giving a new precedence to rhythmic

complexity in popular music. Indeed Brown was dedicated to stripping the music

down to rhythmic essentials. His maintenance of such simplicity is evident on the

1967 track Get It Together where Brown exhorts “don’t play so much!”512 Brown

would later explain this approach to Gerri Hirshey:

I tried the heavy approach two or three times, and every time I tried,I’d get stopped. Just have to keep coming back and simplifying it. It’sa funny thing. You make a little three-finger chord on the guitar andthey’ll sell a million copies, and the minute the cat spreads his handacross the neck, you can’t give the record away.513

Whilst Brown hardly neglected to showcase the abilities of his musicians - indeed his

calls to long time serving saxophonist Maceo Parker often constituted a major

compositional element in itself - the solos were generally contained and always

subordinate to the maintenance of rhythmic unity of the ensemble. Moreover, solos

were almost always under Brown’s strict command as the musicians were directed

511 (George 1988: 102)512 (Brown 1991a)513 (Brown in Hirshey 1984: 289)

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into keeping the groove together. Brown’s troupes for the most part were very much

treated like the hired hands that he perceived them to be and they were for the most

part denied the individual notoriety enjoyed by their notable jazz counterparts. Indeed

funk sent out a clear signal whereby the nature of the beat itself, encased in its hard

driving and emphatic rhythms, was the most expedient way of creating a new territory

via new temporalities. Brown’s unprecedented approach to rhythm in general has

been often remarked upon. In the 1978 biographical film, soul Connection, the

commentator remarks that “…Brown treated his band like a drum”,514 an analysis

reiterated in subsequent commentaries.515

It was thus important that the Brown band were a driving ensemble that elaborated

collective repetition rather than individual virtuosity. The logic here is one I have

already pointed to, namely that the repetitive beat is the most expedient way to

establish new territory within the immediate existence of those present. Repetition

demands attention, even as we unconsciously attempt to differentiate each instance of

it. This is perhaps why it can be so frustrating to try and listen to. Yet, at the same

time, this is what hooks us and repetitious music can often make a more expedient

claim on territory than that of a more melodically complex music. This is perhaps

why we are subjected to repetitive techno being blared from cars, rather than bursts of

chamber music. The impact of the beat maintains its consistency over time and space

rather than breaking up as it hits the audience’s consciousness. The movement-image

conventions of jazz were perhaps not as suited to the task of maintaining territorial

intensity required at the crucial time when funk was being developed. This became

increasingly pertinent in the aftermath of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination and

the decline of the spirit driving soul. A new music would have to make up territory

fast, to compensate its audiences for the lost ground that was occurring socially.

For all of these reasons, funk begins to shape up as an exemplary expression that

apprehends a minor temporality. It shares attributes with a minor literature. Its

514 (Maben 1978)515 Brackett includes this quote from Robert Palmer, “Brown would sing a semi-improvised, looselyorganized melody, that wandered while, the band riffed rhythmically on a single chord, the hornstersely punctuating Brown’s declamatory phrases. With no chord changes and precious little melodicvariety to sustain listener interest, rhythm became everything. Brown and his musicians and arrangersbegan to treat every instrument and voice in the group as if each were a drum” (Palmer in Brackett:144).

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egalitarian nature allowed for quick circuits of dialogic exchange. For instance

Brown’s prodigious output, up to eight albums a year enabled him to maintain an

intimate and ongoing dialogue with his audience, although Brown always made sure

to address his core audience, which can be witnessed in the playful exchanges with

the group that must have left more than a few members of the audience scratching

their heads at the time. Evidence of the more minor of Brown’s work is to be found

in tracks such as There Was a Time (1967). Such tracks must have appeared

increasingly esoteric to white audiences, even if they were still listening.

Fundamentally a one chord vamp, the song enticed the audience to think about life

down south replete with call and response where the audience would chant in unison

with Brown’s cajoling lyric, “…the name of the place was Augusta GA…”516 These

were songs in dialogue with the diaspora from the South, migrating to the larger

cities. They may have also put some of the church holiness back into the music,

through the increasingly hypnotic grooves that Brown embarked on around the same

period.

Funk would become the rhythmic blueprint of repetition that would provide Brown

with his signature forms right up until the present day. Following Brown’s lead at

King Records, other stables began their own variations on funk aesthetics through

labels such as Stax and Hi Records, both based in Memphis, and even Motown began

to change its tune in the late 1960s, with the more funk oriented, Norman Whitfield

productions.517 Geoff Brown further comments that,

[i]n the house Brown built called funk, immediately, every soul singerand his drummer got their "unh unh" in sync and within a year, maybetwo, the device was reduced to the level of genuine soul cliché, rightalongside crude impersonations of Otis Redding’s "gotta-gotta" andWilson Pickett’s scream, Brown would experience this sort ofimitation to a far more damaging degree, professionally, in theseventies.518

516 (Brown 1967b)517 These would include Whitfield’s “psychedelic” productions for The Temptations including trackssuch as Psychedelic Shack and Cloud #9 (1968) and Papa was a Rolling Stone (1972). For more on theWhitfield productions at Motown see (Vincent 1996: 126)518 (Geoff Brown 1996: 144-145)

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Whilst it is difficult to pinpoint exactly when Brown started to call this new

formulation, funk, he was in fact beaten to the use of it in a record title. That honour

went to Dyke and the Blazers who put out Funky Broadway (1967), which was

perhaps more famously covered by Wilson Pickett in the same year. Perhaps the

confirmation of funk as a genre was to be heard within the grooves of Brown’s Cold

Sweat (1967):

“"Cold Sweat," wrote Cliff White, was almost completely "divorcedfrom other forms of popular music"; soon Brown’s lyrics, “…hadreduced themselves to free association, melody had virtuallydisappeared, the band (now under the direction of Pee Wee Ellis)featured two, and sometimes three, drummers in live performance tomatch its leader’s ever-more-propulsive drive, and James’s voice wasstrained to the breaking point - past it, in fact, as sometime during thisperiod he was forced to abandon his characteristic scream for asuccession of shrieks, whinnies, grunts, and emphatic Good God!s,with normal speech reduced to a husky whisper that could only serveas a scarred warning to other singers”.519

By way of confirmation of this statement Jerry Wexler, the legendary Atlantic

producer of Aretha Franklin and other soul stars commented, “”Cold Sweat” deeply

affected the musicians I knew… It just freaked them out. For a time, no one could get

a handle on what to do next.”“520 Brown’s unorthodoxy meant that an untrained

musician was, by sheer force of will, driving music into formerly “non-musical”

places and would enable previously unforeseen affordances in the evolution of black

music. To quote Fred Wesley: “Do you think you could have accepted a tune as

radical as “Cold Sweat” from a less bizarre artist”? 521

519 (White in Guralnick 1986: 242-243)520 (Wexler in White and Weinger: 31)521 (Wesley 2002: 302). Wesley also refers to his attempts outside of the James Brown band to avoidplaying Cold Sweat with his own group, as he thought that Cold Sweat was musically “ridiculous”(Wesley 2002: 302). Nevertheless, Wesley would have to bow to the pressure of his own ensemble andplay it. Wesley accounts for the near mutiny of his band due to his refusal to include it in the set-list, ashe thought it was musically wrong and unworthy of his attention, “A few people had requested some ofthese songs, such as "Cold Sweat" by James Brown. I had heard "Cold Sweat" and was veryunimpressed with it. It was not on par with the material we were playing. It only had one change, thewords made no sense at all, and the bridge was musically incorrect. I wasn’t about to abandon ourupscale style and selection of music and sink to the level of a little honky-tonk sissy singer and soundlike every other band up and down the pike” (Wesley 2002: 302). It wasn’t long after that that Wesleywould join Brown as accomplice in making this “bizarre” music.

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One of the most prominent features to characterise Cold Sweat was Brown’s

increasingly deconstructive (and reconstructive) approach to the music - stripping it

down and building it back up.

As I shall discuss in chapter 7, a crucial point here is that this process of stripping the

music right down to its bare musical skeleton can be seen in retrospect as the

production of an affordance that would allow a compositional potential for the digital

technologies of the future. In the Modulations book that accompanied the

Modulations documentary on the history of electronic music, Chris Sharp comments

on the meaning of the break for contemporary dance music:

However you want to define it, the logic of the breakbeat is hip-hop’sgift to the world and the most crucial development in popular musicsince James Brown almost invented the "give the drummer some"interlude with "Cold Sweat" in 1967.522

Don’t Do No Soloing…Just Keep What You Got

There are a number of key elements to emerge from Brown’s apprehension of a minor

temporality. I have already discussed such key characteristics as his emphasis on “the

one” or the grunts and screams used to “cut” the repetition and to strengthen it in its

reiteration. But there is another factor to highlight and that is the increased attention

given to the rhythm section itself as exposed by an emphasis on the ‘break beat’. The

‘break beat’ was the part of the record where Brown would isolate particular sections

of the track. Brown would transform such breakbeats into an integrated part of the

internal logic of the track. For Brown, the breakbeat was not a solo showcase so much

as a revelation of the mechanics within his musical machine. In particular, there was

the increasing emphasis on isolating the break. Brown had hardly invented it, as the

break beat was a feature of jazz musicians for years prior. However, Brown made it

an inherent part of the composition rather than it simply acting as a diversion. For

example, one of his most famous dialogues on record is when he is preparing

drummer Clyde Stubblefield for the ‘break’ on the track Funky Drummer (1970),

where Brown says to the drummer, “don’t do no soloing brother/just keep what you

522 (Sharp 2000: 153)

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got/don’t turn it loose/cause it’s a mother”.523 In effect this translates as - a solo will

only dilute the intensity of the groove.

When Brown strips the music down to its essence in the ‘engine room’ of the rhythm

section, it provides the most overt demonstration of music as force and it is such

wilful adherence to continuity and drive, rather than artifice that elaborates how funk

might be seen as a rendering visible of a series of broader existential forces. That

“rendering visible” that Deleuze attributes to the art of Paul Klee:

…the painter does "not render the visible, but renders visible"; impliedhere are forces that are not visible, and for a musician, it’s the samething: the musician does not render the audible, he/she renders audibleforces that are not audible, making audible the music of the earth,music in which he/she invents, exactly like the philosopher.524

Brown’s deconstructive approach to music means breaking it down to its most

essential and therefore territorialising force. I have argued so far that funk was a

harnessing of such forces. It is through such processes in funk’s rendering visible of

forces that the minor’s approach to art becomes one of resistance525 to narrative and

the reiteration of convention and instead experimenting with the forces that might

create the existence of new territories. This is why it is important to note here that the

political power of his work is not necessarily achieved by what it attempts to “say” –

in fact lyricism might become mere rhetoric or dogma, but by using the force of the

rhythm to pursue the forces that constitute new forms of expression and becoming. In

this respect what took Brown beyond the strictures of the soul aesthetic was that he

could give the body a new emphasis, and emphasise the body as the real deal of

becomings leading into the future.

Brown’s music was positive towards the future not just through narrative, but also

through activating the presence of bodily potential in the new. The rendering visible

of the presence of the body, of what were previously invisible bodies and untapped

bodily forces becomes a sort of directly expressed “manifesto” of the possible in

itself. Such a rendering visible of these forces helps us to understand why Deleuze

523 (Brown 1986)524 (Deleuze & Parnet 1996)525 (Deleuze 1986: 173-4)

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says that a belief in the world is a belief in the body. The way Brown screamed on

mainstream TV, together with his frenetic dancing style challenged the dominance of

a more discreet Puritan ethic. In the words of “Blackie” a member of Australian punk

rockers The Hard-Ons, “[h]ow hardcore is this man, that during a racist era he would

strut across the stage dripping in sweat, singing “I feel like a sex machine”?”526.

Whilst I had previously discussed Sidran’s lament about soul being nothing but party

music, Sidran makes an exception when discussing the music of James Brown:

It should be stressed that James Brown’s screams and the twodrummers he employed to generate an enormous rhythmic dynamismwere more revolutionary than were his somewhat controversial lyrics,which included “I’m Black and I’m Proud” and “Don’t want nobody togive me nothing, open the door, I’ll get it myself,” especially becausethey were not recognized as being revolutionary. The techniques of theoral culture thus met with little opposition and altered the perception,and so the behaviour, of young Americans in the privacy of their ownhomes.527

Of course, to be minor in the sense meant here is not necessarily just a divorce from

the major. Rather it is to disrupt the dominance of the major from within.

Brown was of course becoming increasingly visible to the mainstream, enjoying

exposure on the previously off-limits bastions of family entertainment such as the Ed

Sullivan Show in 1966. In this respect Brown could claim to be the living testament to

some of the gains being made by the civil rights movement. Furthermore he was able

to speak to a broad cross-section of mainstream Afro-America in a language that was

discernibly theirs. Many of them recognised a reflection of Black cultural

backgrounds in Brown’s mediation of techniques gleaned from his background in the

church. No other performer had so brazenly modulated the voice into the inimitable

screams, grunts and squeals for which Brown is synonymous.528 These utterances

articulate an emergent minor presence far better than the enunciation of the easily

framed and common sense “see-able and the say-able” ever could.

Amiri Baraka had once hailed the “…wilfully harsh, anti-assimilationist sound of

526 (Blackie 2001)527 (Sidran 1995: 147)528 For instance the very same type of vocalising that was directed at me every time I mentioned thesubject of this thesis.

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bebop”,529 as the epitome of Black musical resistance. However, by the time of his

1967, book Black Music, Baraka would actually revise this in favour of what Brown

was doing at the time:

James Brown’s screams…are more "radical" than most jazz musicianssound…Certainly his sound is "further out" than Ornette’s. And thatsound has been a part of Black music, even out in them backwoodschurches since the year one. It is just that on the white man’sinstrument it is "new." So, again, it is just life need andinterpretation.530

Seen perhaps from another angle, Brown asserted political power precisely because

people didn’t even recognise such uses of the body as political. Here again, the

reduction of language – its deconstruction – would be crucial. One can juxtapose

Brown’s performances with performances of other soul stars like Marvin Gaye or

Smokey Robinson to see how Brown had slowly transformed vocal technique.

Brown’s style was not the smooth dulcet tones of his peers. It was the harsher tone of

the autodidactic, based on something between singing and ‘screaming”. Like the

distilled beat of funk, Brown’s inimitable screams could be seen to reflect all of the

horror experienced by African-Americans across time within a singular utterance. At

the same time, Brown also affirms the minor nature of the music. His push into the

mainstream set the stage for the uncompromising gospel drenched vocals of an Otis

Redding or an Aretha Franklin.

In addition to his stripped back utterances, Brown continued to pay special attention

to reiterating and even manufacturing street slang, designed to galvanise the minor

sections of the community. In this sense Brown is a true minor figure, constructing

another path that dared to speak in a language that was not trying to assimilate into the

major, and just plain could not:

How many styles or genres or literary movements, even very smallones, have only one single dream: to assume a major function inlanguage, to offer themselves as a sort of state language, an officiallanguage (for example, psychoanalysis today, which would like to be amaster of the signifier, of metaphor, of wordplay). Create the opposite

529(Baraka 1963: 181-182)530 (LeRoi Jones 1967: 210)

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dream: know how to create a becoming-minor. (Is there a hope forphilosophy, which for a long time has been an official, referentialgenre? Let us profit from this moment in which antiphilosophy istrying to be a language of power).531

Brown’s musical thought without image – which as discussed earlier, involves a

process perhaps reminiscent of another of 20th century music’s great Idiots, John

Cage. Cage famously said, “I have nothing to say and I am saying it”. 532What we

may understand by this is that the new requires an espousal of concepts without a

discourse. On this point Rajchman proposes that “…one must devise new procedures

to free affect from personal feeling, percept from common perception, and in a phrase

Deleuze takes from Proust, to create a foreign language in our own language, to be

spoken by a people that does not yet exist”. 533 It is also necessary to step “out of

time” as it is given to us within common sense. A minor language must be able to

articulate the becoming of a future, just as I would argue that Brown’s expression of a

minor temporality necessarily intervened and provided a belief in the world when the

narratives of soul fell apart. In view of the decline of soul’s appeal to majoritarian

assimilation, perhaps it was the more minority oriented sections of the African-

American population that were less affected as they had always realised that were not

part of that society's narrative anyway.

Emphasising Brown’s focus on the groove is indicative of an investment in a

micropolitics rather than the more macropolitical concerns of narrativising. This

revised perspective allows us to instead give precedence to the detail of the

incremental micropolitics of the music. This provides an insightful analysis into the

endurance of its particular aesthetic. This aesthetic – as experienced - provides a set of

conditions allowing the virtual potential of bodies to engender new connections and

affects. Any limit to the body’s ability to become is always as much a product of

social conditions as any inherent physical limitation. Yet becoming does not wait for

either of these to “catch up” with its drive forward. Awareness of this fact marks the

critical difference between soul saying “…in time” and Brown saying “now”, or the

531 (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 26-27)532 This famous Cage quote would provide the title for a documentary on the composer made in the late1980s (Miller 1990)533 (Rajchman 2000: 10)

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fundamental difference in outlook between “a change is gonna come” and Papa

having “…his brand new bag” and audaciously expressing it.

In this respect, the story of Brown’s funk becomes a story about what a body could

do. As we have seen, this involves the re-institution of a belief in the potential of the

world – now. Having a belief in the world as it is, is fundamental to experimenting

with the body. This is a belief in new relations to the world that may hopefully move

beyond those imposed by a “common sense” image of thought. Hence the reason we

turn to music and performing artists is because both push the boundaries of what a

body can do in the world as it stands. A belief in the world is also a belief in the

capacities of bodies to overcome the stories that define their actions. This is where the

world of present, real potential becomes that of a “people to come” – in motion, in

becoming, this can only begin with new kinds of bodies. Why would an African-

American want to “integrate” into a system of so-called “humanity” that was still

lynching people and denying them civil rights based on racial privilege? Again a

quote of Malcolm X’s comes to mind, “…we don’t want integration, we want

complete separation”,534 and why wouldn’t you? This call for complete separation

provided a “line of flight” from the type of thought which had done African-

Americans so much damage up to that point.

As such physical separation was unlikely to occur, we might instead attempt to find

examples of people separating from universal appeals to integration with dominant

culture. This is why I have been so enamoured of Brown’s music over the years,

because of his sheer willpower directed towards separating himself from “common

sense”, his daring to conceive of new and illogical ways of doing things. There is no

better example of this than the type of unorthodox musical approach Brown pursued

in the creation of funk, to which I will now turn my attention.

534 (Malcolm X 1992)

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CHAPTER SIX

FUNK AS THOUGHT WITHOUT IMAGE

Proceeding from the last chapter’s discussion of how Brown’s more temporally

dominant music would diverge from the movement-image oriented forms of musical

composition, in this chapter I will attempt to describe how this radical shift might be

reflective of Deleuze’s notion of “thought without image” as discussed in Difference

and Repetition.

It is through such “thought without image” that I will assess Brown’s creative leaps.

Having established this idea, I will, ascribe to Brown the creative naivety of the

character referred to by Deleuze as the “Idiot”.535 Through this idea, we might more

properly account for the irrational connections made in the name of funk. As Brown’s

music moved away from the neat order of the movement-image way of thinking, we

could say that he facilitated a necessary plunge into abstraction that all becoming

requires. For as Deleuze remarks in Difference and Repetition: “…the theory of

thought is like painting: it needs that revolution which took art from representation to

abstraction. This is the aim of a theory of thought without image”.536

We might begin to think of funk as a necessary force of abstraction within popular

music composition. In her book on Brown, Cynthia Rose described him as a

surrealist,537 although she does not extrapolate on that idea any further. This is a pity,

because the surreal the nature of Brown’s work deserves more attention. In a June

2006 feature article in Rolling Stone entitled, “Being James Brown”, the writers

describe James Brown’s approach to music as being “…like a filmmaker who gets

interested in the background scenery and fires the screenwriter and actors, except that

instead of ending up with experimental films nobody wanted to watch, he forged a

style of music so beguilingly futuristic that it made everything else melody, lyrics,

535 (Deleuze 1994: 130)536 (Deleuze 1994: 276)537 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 38). To describe Brown as a “surrealist” is an enticing proposition, and despiteRose calling the proceeding chapter “The Surrealist Who Came in From the Snow” (the snow referringto his brief cameo in the mid-1960s film Ski Party), this chapter on the construction of funk actuallydoes not take this idea further, but rather leaves the reader to draw their own conclusions.

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verse-chorus-verse - sound antique”.538 Here we could cite the almost preposterous,

unrelenting one-chord tracks such as Money Won’t Change You (1966), When You

Touch Me (I Just Can’t Stand Myself) (1968) and Licking Stick-Licking Stick (1968),

which sound just as audacious, even downright bizarre, forty years on.

Brown’s Departure

This pursuit of musical experimentation, which would emerge as funk, required

Brown to break from accepted musical conventions. Yet, whilst Brown’s pioneering

spirit continues to attract retrospective plaudits, his musicians did not share such

enthusiasm. Brown’s musically “educated” band members were of the view that his

funk prototype was simplistic and unsophisticated and therefore not to be taken

particularly seriously. At any given time Brown’s band would harbour a core of

abundantly talented jazz players, such as Fred Wesley, Alfred “Pee Wee” Ellis and

Maceo Parker, to name a few of the most celebrated. These were musicians that were

more comfortable playing be-bop. As ex-James Brown bandleader, Alfred "Pee Wee"

Ellis would later say, “…he was some other stuff for me; I’d been studying Sonny

Rollins”.539

To maintain the sense of control needed to impose his own particular form of

chaosmos over his learned personnel, Brown famously retreated into a rather

autocratic style of leadership. This despotism was often a demeaning and debilitating

experience and, from time to time, the musicians would avenge such maltreatment,

belittling their employer’s musical ability. In Fred Wesley’s recent book Hit Me Fred:

Confessions of a Sideman (2003) Brown’s former bandleader provides a most

enlightening insight into the trials and tribulations of working with the “Godfather of

soul”. Of particular note is Wesley’s recollection of the antics of former trumpetist

Waymon Reed whom the author cites as one of the most consistently confrontational

members of the group:

In the dressing room, he [Reed] took out his horn and for hours andmore hours played parts of Count Basie’s ‘shiny Stockings”, pausing

538 (Lethem 2006) As I used the proQuest e-journal version, page numbers were not available.539 (Ellis in Cynthia Rose 1990: 51)

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between licks to laugh real loud and say stuff like, ‘that’s real music”,not the honky-tonk stuff we have to play on this gig.540

The musicians’ collective frustration was compounded by the fact that playing

popular music was a far more lucrative proposition than that which was generally

offered in the jazz world. For example, the young Pee Wee Ellis had worked with

Miles Davis541 and Sonny Rollins but left after a lucrative proposition communicated

via Waymond Reed, although Ellis did in fact leave Rollins to join Brown because he

was curious about the experimentation that was coming from the Brown camp.542

Whilst Ellis would leave after a four-year tenure, his imprint is perhaps the most

lasting in terms of bringing to Brown’s music a more abstract jazz flavour.

This state of affairs invariably meant that the musicians would have to subject

themselves to a subordinate role in a comparatively lowbrow genre. Indeed the more

prominent members of the James Brown bands looked upon their tenure with Brown

as a stepping-stone to a higher calling within the jazz world. For instance, the

cantankerous Waymon Reed went on to play with Max Roach and the Count Basie

Orchestra, and was later joined by Fred Wesley, whilst “Pee Wee” Ellis would go on

to assume the directorship of Van Morrison’s band.543 With such musical ambition,

the musicians’ animosity toward Brown’s restricted musical needs is perhaps less

surprising. To add further insult to injury Brown would subsequently bask in the

acclaim afforded his revolutionary funk style, despite the fact that he did not even

understand basic music theory. As Fred Wesley explains:

Simple things like knowing the key would be a big problem for James.So, when James would mouth out some guitar part, which might ormight not have had anything to do with the actual song being played,Jimmy or Country [former James Brown guitarists] would have toattempt to play it simply because James was still in charge. We all had

540 (Wesley 2002: 105)541 In fact Pee Wee credits this experience with Miles preceding his tenure in the James Brown band ashaving an effect on his co-authorship of Brown’s Cold Sweat - Pee Wee: “I brought my jazz influenceto James Brown, which is how things we did together came about. Like, "Cold Sweat" came from myMiles Davis experience...When you listen to his song ‘so What" closely, you hear "ColdSweat"“(Trischler & Ellis 2005)542 (Trischler & Ellis 2005)543 Some would protest (reasonably) at Van Morrison being referred to as jazz, so I will add that “PeeWee” has also “…served as musical director and arranger for the CTI label's influential fusion imprintKudu, overseeing sessions for Esther Phillips, George Benson, and Hank Crawford”(All Music Guide2005).

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to pretend that we knew what James was talking about. Nobody eversaid, ‘that’s ridiculous" or "You don’t know what you’re talkingabout".544

Maintaining the job of bandleader required the successful translation of Brown’s

grunts and groans (for the uninitiated, think an early version of “beatboxing”), into

releasable product. As "Pee Wee" Ellis informs the reader of Lenny Henry Hunts the

Funk (1992),545 Brown would merely grunt certain “feels” and then demand the

current bandleader translate this into musical notation.546 In glaring contradistinction

to the musical prowess of his esteemed alumnus, the only virtuosity Brown is known

to have displayed (his organ playing is a source of contention) was his ability to

mouth sounds to his bandleaders:

I kept on putting together James’s hums and grunts and groans, andmaking music out of them, no matter how stupid I thought it was. Ibegan to take pride in my ability to make something out of anything orsomething out of nothing or something out of any combination ofthings. I gave James no trouble when he laid out formats to songs. Isimply took the orders as he gave them, never questioning, and worriedabout how to make it happen later. But sometimes I had trouble gettingthe musicians to accept such unorthodox patterns as readily as I did. Ihad to argue, convince, trick, and manipulate guys into doing all kindsof unusual things.547

From this perspective, one could hardly blame Fred Wesley for believing Brown’s

music to be a great embarrassment, especially as he would find himself having to

negotiate respected studio musicians to play this “silly music”.548 All in all, Brown’s

past employees often express concern about their association with Brown’s music.

544 (Wesley 2002: 97)545 (Know & Bragg 1992)546 A brief snippet of Brown grunting the beat of Cold Sweat can be heard on the 1996 compilation,Foundations of Funk- A Brand New Bag 1964-1969 (1996)(James Brown 1996).547 (Wesley 2002: 158-159)548 Wesley provides a rather interesting feedback about Brown’s “silly music” from famous sessionman, Gordon Edwards, “On one of the rare occasions when James was in the studio as I did a sessionwith the studio guys, Gordon Edwards, the great bassist, was having trouble understanding what Jameswas trying to get him to play. Finally Gordon, totally frustrated, got up, packed his bass, and told Jamesto his face that he was crazy. He then faced me (I had been trying to help James explain what hewanted) and told me that I was crazy too, for understanding what James was talking about, thenstormed out of the studio. Another time James was trying to show Ralph McDonald, the greatpercussionist, a beat on his congas. McDonald had heard stories about James, including the GordonEdwards story, and after only a few seconds simply walked out. After that, James hardly ever came tothe studio when the session cats were there. He would wait until the basic tracks were done and theywere gone, then would come in and terrorize me. He knew I could take it” (Wesley 2002: 158-159).

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Fred Wesley, for instance, has professed embarrassment over the compositions with

which he was involved, even though they were some of Brown’s most popular titles:

…I was getting credit for a lot of the music, as most people werelooking at the music as James’s and mine together. While I admit that Idid most of the implementation of the music, the concepts werepractically all his. It didn’t sit right with me to be getting credit formusic, especially since, frankly, I didn’t think it was all that great…Igot this sick feeling when anyone told me how great “Pass The Peas”was.549

Such disillusioning accounts of Brown’s unorthodox approach to composition piqued

my curiosity. How did Brown manage to maintain the level of agency required, not

only to direct such talent, but also to synthesise such differences of musical opinion

into the cohesive and enduring influence on popular music it has since become? The

James Brown story points to an interesting inconsistency in the supposed correlation

between hands-on pragmatism and its relation to actual musical agency, instead

providing a tale of ruthless determination victorious over traditionally recognised

“ability”. How do we think about this tremendous innovation achieved by a man, who

by all accounts, could barely play an instrument?

The Idiot

In an effort to address the question of how Brown managed his inimitable

compositional approach, application of Deleuze’s concept of the “Idiot” is beneficial.

This is not, it should be said at the outset, to speak ill of the “Godfather of soul”. On

the contrary, this section attempts to illustrate how a certain type of naiveté was

necessary to realise one of music’s most creative forces. For Brown would exemplify

the necessity of “illogic” in the face of a dogmatic image of thought.

The Idiot character plays a pivotal role in Deleuze’s quest for a way to conceive of a

philosophy undaunted by the presuppositions of a “dogmatic” image of thought. This

“dogmatic” image of thought can be rather generally perceived as any institutionally

dominant form of thinking, or the propensity to reinforce already dominant modes of

thought. It is in the “The Image of Thought” chapter in Difference and Repetition that

549 (Wesley 2002: 172)

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Deleuze develops the Idiot as a type of perspectival character or, what he would later

term with Guattari, a “conceptual personae”.550 The Idiot will ask, “…what would it

mean to start philosophy “undogmatically”, or with an image that secretes no illusions

of transcendence”.551Deleuze and Guattari have referred to dogmatic images of

thought as ‘state thought” because of the attempts to institute the general in to

universalised and transcendent laws of “common sense”. In this respect, our notions

and practices of “common sense” are always in danger of involving dogmatic images

of thought in that their propositions are those of uniform objectivity and rationality by

default and thus limit our perception of difference.

Deleuze attacks the dogmatic image of thought as it harbours the presupposition in

philosophy. Deleuze arrives at his critique of presuppositions via a critique of

Descartes’ cogito, where “I think therefore I am” becomes a basic proposition in need

of no further explanation. For Deleuze, this becomes a position that then “naturally”

evolves into “common sense”. For Deleuze, the assumption of the cogito is subjective

presupposition that will generally govern many common images of thought.552

Yet whilst Deleuze maintains a fundamental disagreement with Descartes over the

cogito’s dogmatic image of thought, he does allow for the fact that the concept was

also revolutionary for philosophy too. The cogito was revolutionary in the sense that

its egalitarian nature appealed to the perspective of the untrained philosopher. Deleuze

argues that Descartes' concept ascribes sense a common property, “…it has the form

of ‘Everybody knows…’”.553 The cogito thus liberated “common sense” – but this

would become a problem, as common sense became institutionalised and upheld for

the sake of its own perpetuity. To break with the overwhelming institutional and

dogmatic power of common sense requires a naïve figure. Rather than maintain an

adherence to the ‘subjective presupposition” of “I think therefore I am”, the Idiot

becomes a champion of an even more egalitarian philosophy.

550 There is a whole chapter in What is Philosophy? dedicated to conceptual personae. The relationshipof the Idiot as a conceptual personae can be found near the beginning of the chapter(Gilles Deleuze &Félix Guattari 1994: 61-63)551 (Rajchman 2000: 36)552 (Deleuze 1994: 129-130)553 (Deleuze 1994: 130)

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It then opposes the “idiot” to the pedant, Eudoxus to Epistemon, goodwill to the overfull understanding, the individual man endowed onlywith his natural capacity for thought to the man perverted by thegeneralities of his time. The philosopher takes the side of the idiot asthough of a man without presuppositions.554

The Idiot exemplifies how a departure from subjective presuppositions can overcome

the apparent objectivity of “public” thought, just as Brown would challenge what

“music” should be. I emphasise the word should here because it is precisely that

general moral character that informs public forms of common sense. Primary to this

moral imperative is the maintenance of the identity of the concept, conceptual

propositions that become the overarching figures of public opinion, and also by nature

the antithesis of becoming. This is why Deleuze, despite his reservations about the

orthodoxy it would become, praises Descartes’ Idiot for espousing a form of “private”

thought to the more “public” and uncontested institutional thought of Descartes’ time.

As John Rajchman comments in his excellent overview of the philosopher’s project,

The Deleuze Connections:

With such Idiots, the pragmatic presuppositions of philosophy shift,revealing new relations between “private” and “public”. One example(not mentioned by Deleuze) might be Wittgenstein, always ill at easewith his public professorship and with the emergence of a new analytic‘scholasticism”, who declared ‘the philosopher is a citizen of no circleof ideas; that is just what makes him a philosopher.555

It is important to realise that there are two sides to Deleuze’s engagement with the

cogito here. On the one hand, Descartes’ cogito is responsible for the presupposition

that Deleuze is critical of. On the other hand it is in this “private” and subjective

thought that Descartes assumes a private kind of thought, available to all, which can

take the form of “outside thought”.556 “Outside thought” can be perceived as the

antithesis of a “state philosophy” and is fundamental to any becoming. Hence what

we are interested in is not the creation of a new common sense, but a continuation of

the Idiot’s power of naïvety to cultivate such “private thought” as “outside thought”.

This is a thought that can in fact counteract State thought’s priority towards a

homogenous and universalising “common sense”. As Brian Massumi remarks in the

554 (Deleuze 1994: 130)555 (Rajchman 2000: 38)556 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 376-377)

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translator’s foreword to A Thousand Plateaus, this “state thought” or “public thought”

is characterised as a form of “...representational thinking that has characterised

Western metaphysics since Plato” and which “…reposes on a double identity: of the

thinking subject, and of the concepts it creates and to which it lends its own presumed

attributes of sameness and constancy”.557 In praise of such “private” thought,

Deleuze has famously championed those figures that dare to be naïve in the face of

conventional “common sense”. This “private” thought is the domain of the Idiot who

has not the sufficient knowledge to uphold the dominant image of thought.

All artists must be Idiots in this sense. If the “artist” harbours under the illusion of

what it is, say, to be a musician and abides by such a dogmatic image, then it is not

creative thought at work. Deleuze prizes naïveté, as, for him, the work of the artist is

not to represent, but to create new connections. Thus Brown’s appeal to the private

thought of the “common man”, would be the key factor in instituting a necessary and

egalitarian musical outlook that was able to create such connections. This would help

to endear his work to a new generation of other musical non-literates who would

sample him into the future, in turn creating new connections.

The Idiot appears in different guises throughout Deleuze’s work. For instance, the

Cartesian Idiot that is found in Difference and Repetition will be subsequently

transformed into a Dostoyevskian Russian Idiot by the time we get to Cinema 2.558

John Rajchman says that Deleuze’s series of naïve characters show us, “…that the

only way to “start without presuppositions” in philosophy is to become some sort of

Russian Idiot, giving up the presumptions of common sense, throwing away one’s

“hermeneutic compass” and instead trying to turn one’s “idiocy” into the

“idiosyncrasies” of a style of thinking “in other ways”.559

These “other ways” of approaching thought, exemplified by the Idiot, might be

perceived in terms of what Deleuze and Guattari referred to as the diagram or map.

557 (Massumi 1988: xi)558 As Deleuze writes in Cinema 2, ‘Sensory-motor situations have given way to pure optical and soundsituations to which characters, who have become seers, cannot or will not react, so great is theDostoevskian condition as taken up by Kurosawa: in the most pressing situations, The Idiot feels theneed to see the terms of a problem which is more profound than the situation, and even more pressing”(Deleuze 1989: 128).559 (Rajchman 2000: 38)

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This dynamic idea of the map is one that allows new aspects of territories to come

into play. Guattari proposed the diagram, “as an autopoietic machine” which not only

gives “…a functional and material consistency, but [also] requires it to deploy its

diverse registers of alterity, freeing it from an identity locked into simple structural

relations.560 The aim of the diagram is that “[t]he machine’s proto-subjectivity installs

itself in Universes of virtuality which extend far beyond its existential

territoriality”.561 Quite simply, the function of these diagrammatic machines is to

generate flows of relations rather than a fixed spatial representation. This allows a

more flexible means of interpretation of what can happen next. Deleuze and Guattari

argue that the map, “…is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is

detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification”.562 In other words, when

freed from the strictures of the maintenance of identity we can begin to think within

the realm of virtual relations. Working with virtual relations, before they are

actualised, maintains an orientation towards becoming rather than the maintenance of

an identity of concepts.

If thought cannot appeal to the identity of “forms” it must entail a more intuitive

process. This involves a faith in difference in the potential of virtual relations. This

faith in difference is the reason Deleuze attributes the Idiot an instinct for orientation.

This is in fact a reorientation of perception that allows the Idiot to perceive new

connections that have not otherwise been able to surface. This naïve faith in

difference obviously requires a particular audacity and James Brown most certainly

had such a quality, as Fred Wesley duly testifies,

Mr. Brown would sometimes come to the gig early and have what wecall a “jam”, where we would have to join in with his fooling aroundon the organ. This was painful for anyone who had ever thought ofplaying jazz. James Brown’s organ playing was just good enough tofool the untrained ear, and so bad that it made real musicians sick onthe stomach.563

Brown fans are rather less likely to so harshly judge the man’s apparent lack of

instrumental proficiency, and his idiosyncratic musicianship is of course acceptable to

560 (Guattari 1995: 44)561 (Guattari 1995: 44)562 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 12)563 (Wesley 2002: 110-111)

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many ears. In fact Brown’s musical talent was of a multi-instrumental capability: the

aforementioned penchant for organ, but other notable instrumental contributions to his

records include the more than passable drums on several early recordings, including

the well known 1962 hit version of Night Train (1962). The judgement of Brown’s

peers may thus appear overly harsh as it is posited within the context of the domain of

the “real” musician. In spite of such criticism, Brown’s organ or piano

accompaniment can be inspirational precisely because of this very incongruity.

Instead of trying to maintain a distinction between “good” and “bad” musicianship,

the point that I hope to elaborate in this chapter is to show that this concept of the

“real” musician is itself a constricting presupposition. In this respect, perhaps part of

Brown’s ultimate legacy was his forthright ambivalence toward such a distinction.

In terms of philosophical thought, Deleuze himself attempted to assume the

unorthodoxy of the Idiot. Deleuze found it of fundamental importance to challenge a

history of philosophy in which thought has a “natural” orientation towards truth, and

where notions of common logic and reason will necessarily elaborate this truth.

Deleuze is sceptical about the validity of any will-to-truth that implies an a priori

nature of thought, with an assumed teleology, meaning and logic.

This is why using Deleuze to approach the music of James Brown is not so strange.

My initial attraction to Brown’s music was because of its flagrantly unconventional

nature. In fact, some of it is just downright bizarre (even today), especially if viewed

in comparison to contemporary musical work of the time. As I have argued in this

chapter, such unorthodoxy only further valorised Brown’s unique position within

black music, a demonstration perhaps, of his ability to stand somewhat “out of joint”

with regard to accepted lineage of the soul aesthetic.

Brown’s unorthodoxy gave him the ability to tap into broader existential forces and

catalyse them into a musical aesthetic such as funk. Brown’s musical break moved

away from the modernist, virtuosic tendencies expressed in the virtuosic soloing of

the modern jazz beloved by his musicians, perhaps because its mode of performance

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was too individuated and too virtuosic to continue to produce the grounds for a minor

becoming where, “…everything takes on a collective value”.564

However, I should add that this is the overriding compositional trend rather than being

absolute. In fact, there are more than occasional glimpses of cross-pollination between

the two genres to be heard in Brown’s music. For instance, Philip Freeman rather

astutely comments in Running the Voodoo Down (2005) that there are moments when

Brown’s music veered into the realm of the more avant-garde jazz styles:

One of the most shocking things, though, is the tenor saxophoneplaying of Robert "Chopper" McCullough. This is what takes JamesBrown into the realm of the secretly avant-garde. McCullough’ssaxophone solos are nothing like those of Maceo Parker, the man hereplaced. They’re screaming tirades, nearly on the level of the harshestblowouts ever mustered by players like Pharaoh Sanders or PeterBrötzmann. In fact, on “Super Bad" Brown can be heard exhortingMcCullough to greater heights, barking, “Play me some Trane, Robert!Play me some Trane!" That it seems weird, somehow, to think ofJames Brown being aware of John Coltrane says a lot: about howseparate jazz has been kept, as history is written, from other music -particularly other black music.565

Whilst Freeman rightly reminds us of the dangers of such false generic distinctions,

the difference perhaps is that Brown limited this type of unbridled soloing, and that he

made a particular provision for this new youthful set of recruits besides. 566 Whilst

McCollough’s playing does give Superbad an extraordinary urgency, the soloing is

more a garnish than a fully-fledged display of virtuosity. In fact one gets the feeling

that it is more a showcase to show off the versatility of his musicians, rather than as

part of the broader undercurrent of his music. 567 Indeed as Freeman says of the

opening segue of two rather distinctly rhythmically different tracks, Brother

Rapp/Ain’t It funky Now unbelievably fused into a seamless whole, “It’s that switch,

564 (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 17)565 (Freeman 2005: 123-124)566 As can be heard on the Live at the Olympia Paris album, Brown not only lets McCollough solo (ashe does on the studio version) but gives Catfish Collins room for a guitar solo and Bootsy room for abass showcase. It has been said that Brown was less autocratic with these young recruits, mainlybecause the vast majority of his last band walked out on him and even Brown couldn’t afford to havethis happen again after whipping the new blood into shape.567 Besides the McCollough "‘Trane” impersonation in Superbad (1970), St. Clair Pinckney will do hisown impersonation of that one in Escape-ism (1971) and guitarist Bobby Roach will become “B.B.King” for a few bars near the end of Make it Funky (1971).

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like a high-performance racecar taking a hard left turn…it’s a prime example of, and a

tribute to, the glory of collective music-making”. 568

Hence it is fair to maintain that Brown’s collective approach to composition, that of

treating his band as rhythm machine, was more reflective of the image of thought

behind minor becoming than that of the individual agency that drove the ideal of the

virtuoso still prevalent in, say, the accompanying be-bop jazz movement of the time.

However, whether Brown or be-bop, instigating such minor works requires a

philosophical leap and one that can only result from the unregimented perspective of

the naïve, those who have yet to master and majorise a language. As Deleuze and

Guattari have written in regard to minor literature:

…talent isn’t abundant…there are no possibilities for an individuatedenunciation that would belong to this or that "master" and that could beseparated from a collective enunciation. Indeed, scarcity of talent is infact beneficial and allows the conception of something other than aliterature of masters; what each author says individually alreadyconstitutes a common action, and what he or she says or does isnecessarily political, even if others aren’t in agreement.569

Whilst Brown was often the nominal “author” of his work, it was funk’s collective

approach of interlocking grooves that was so appealing. This approach, in turn, would

begin to influence the move away from virtuoso performances into the more abstract

forms of composition. An abstraction that might be heard in some of Brown’s most

nebulous arrangements, as recounted in the following anecdote by Mike D of the

Beastie Boys:

Adam was talking to this guy about the song The Payback by JamesBrown. And the guy was trying to say that the guitar was playingnothing. But see, I figure, well, if the guitar is playing nothing, thenthat means the entire band is playing nothing. But, then, that's the bestplaying ever on, like, any song. And they're all playing nothing.570

568 (Freeman 2005: 123)569 (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 17)570 (Mike D in Beastie Boys & Heatley 1999: 50)

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This is perhaps why other artists were watching Brown’s abstraction with interest and

taking notes. Perhaps the ultimate test of the artist was a willingness to put their

previous identities on the line, to become by a willingness to forget. The Miles Davis

of the late 1960s, who was listening to Brown with interest, would do just that.

In 1968, Miles Davis would publicly declare that “[m]y favorite music is

Stockhausen, Tosca and James Brown”571and funk would implore in Davis a

redefinition of his own approach to composition, as Bob Belden writes in the liner

notes of Davis’ On the Corner (1972):

Davis had moved closer and closer to the funk based sound of JamesBrown and Sly Stone, and the musicians he hired began to reflect thisdirection in his tastes. The first musician Davis would hire wasMichael Henderson, an accomplished funk bass player. Henderson’s“locked in” bass grooves simplified the ground that Davis wanted towalk on. Davis’ sound headed to the bottom of the band.572

As documented on albums such as Bitches’ Brew (1971) and On the Corner (1972)

Davis’ “radical” turn in the early 1970s marked by this stylistic shift to an emphasis

on groove rather than solos:573

Miles followed his interest in Brown’s experimental funk "down into adeep African- thing, a deep African-American groove, with a lot ofemphasis on drums and rhythm, and not on individual solos." WhenMiles added Brown’s funk, Sly Stone’s rhythmically innovative soul,and Hendrix’s rock to his musical mix, the results were spectacular.574

Given Miles attention to Brown’s work at this time, there is an acute irony in the fact

that a man who was maligned among his own band for his apparent musical ineptitude

would end up influencing the very musicians they looked up to. Whilst Brown’s

personnel were occupied with dreams of being recognised as “proper” musicians,

Brown’s innovations were to have direct aesthetic implications on the evolution of

571 (Davis in Werner 2000: 139)572 (Belden 2000: 6) see also (Werner 2000: 139)573 There were of course many different influences that had inspired Davis’ “electric period” and whilstfor the interests of my own argument I emphasise Davis’ new found interest in groove, I also take noteof other essays written on the albums including Jeremy Gilbert’s “Becoming-Music: The RhizomaticMoment of Improvisation” (2001) which for the sake of his own argument emphasises instead the raga,drone and Indian instrumentation on an album such as On the Corner (Gilbert 2004a: 132-133).574 (Werner 2000: 139)

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jazz itself and in the process helping to render any dogmatic image of the genre as

anachronistic.

In fact I would contend that Brown gave musicians such as Davis a way out of their

own musical habits, imploring in them a similar “idiocy”. As witnessed in regard to

his contestation of Wynton Marsalis over the jazz “image of thought” in chapter 3,

Davis is similarly renowed for his propensity to become, and his reputation is perhaps

forged upon his more wilful plunges into the chaosmos. However to make this plunge,

requires that one must be able to operate without presupposition, and it is in this

respect, that Brown’s success was similarly predicated on such naïvety, a reiteration

perhaps of Deleuze’s rationale that it is only the truly naïve that can ignore convention

so as to envisage the new world.

Brown as “Seer”

Deleuze similarly wanted to be seen as a naïve philosopher, to make new connections

through the appropriation of given concepts. Yet the maintenance of an environment

conducive to such “illogic” in human thought should not be perceived as a given.

Alternatively, if present, it is all too easily appropriated by the major (as in James

Brown’s TV appearance to quell the riots). We could, therefore, say, that it is

especially important to carve a niche of becoming so radical that it cannot be easily or

simply appropriated by macropolitics. This involves a belief in the world in its purest

sense, not a belief in the world as dogma, but a submission to the world for better or

worse. Such a submission to the world is here for those seeking an alternative to a

majoritarian political solution. The naïvety involved is a characteristic of the seer,

who will emerge from the shadow of the movement-image’s agency, to otherwise

affirm the potential of imminence by submitting to it. The seer is therefore a type of

“spiritual automaton”, in that seers are totally immersed in the present moment of the

world’s becoming:

The spiritual automaton is in the psychic situation of the seer, who seesbetter and further than he can react, that is, think. Which, then, is thesubtle way out? To believe, not in a different world, but in a linkbetween man and the world, in love or life, to believe in this as in theimpossible, the unthinkable, which none the less cannot but be thought:“something possible, otherwise I will suffocate”. It is this belief that

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makes the unthought the specific power of thought, through the absurd,by virtue of the absurd.575

This precisely describes Brown’s qualities as “seer”. He works towards bringing

previously unthought concepts such as funk, or “the one” for example into the world.

Wilful submission to the chaos of the becoming of the world allows his music to

emerge with the new percepts and affects produced in the attempt to apprehend the

chaos of life. Ultimately, as with Brown and funk, art deliberately invokes the

“chaosmos” in order to shake up the reiteration of the habit of the everyday.

Brown’s apparent ineptitude was therefore beneficial to music. His resolve to do

things “his way” – combined with a lack of standard musical mastery - ironically

requires a type of collective production. Looking at the production of art from the

perspective of minor art may be what ultimately distinguishes the great artist from

those who are simply technically proficient. In this respect the Idiot will show us,

…not only that philosophical thought is unlearned, but also that it isfree in its creations not when everyone agrees or plays by the rules, buton the contrary, when what the rules and who the players are is notgiven in advance, but instead emerges along with the new conceptscreated and the new problems posed.576

In presenting my case for Brown’s autodidactic musical pursuits, I should add that I

am not necessarily celebrating “poor” musicianship nor preferring a lack of training

to working within a tradition. At the same time, the point is that it is difficult, perhaps

more difficult, to work outside a tradition than it is to work within one, and maintain

the sort of acceptance that Brown had. In fact this is the factor that sets Brown apart

from his peers - his courage to affirm difference in the face of ridicule. This is the leap

one takes in order to apprehend a “minor temporality”, assisted only by a resolve to

believe in the world, but without maintaining an adherence to common sense. Such a

deliberate embrace of minority requires the removal of an overarching rule of

judgement that mediates a dogmatic image of thought. In doing so, however,

possibilities necessarily begin to open up.

575 (Deleuze 1989: 169-170)576 (Rajchman 2000: 38)

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Perhaps what makes an artist “cutting edge” is an ability to apprehend a minor

temporality and develop it accordingly. The affirmation of creative thought requires a

faith in being able to dispense with a self-consciousness based upon dogged

introspection. It also requires not succumbing to the illusion of what we should be –

perhaps understood more generally as the problem of identity. Perhaps we can say

that this is how stars become parodies - they lose that innocent sense of invention or

as Deleuze would say, thought without an image. Instead it becomes thought based on

habit of capitulating to dogma. In such circumstances, we require the disruptive force

of an Idiot.

In the case of soul and James Brown, if the dogma underscoring soul’s movement

image was on the decline then the best way to confront this was to challenge dogma in

general. If nothing else, this is the role of the artist. As the old narratives and the

music that reflected them were having less impact, a new music to represent a new

people for a new era would have to be made. At the same time, this implies that many

genuinely new artists cannot be understood in the context of their present and are

(somewhat monotonously) declared to be “ahead of their time”. A more accurate

description might be Deleuze’s concept of the “untimely”, of one who diverges from a

linear perspective on time and therefore is “neither temporary or eternal”.577 This

untimely nature implies not only an ongoing re-invention of “sense”, but also of a

work that is never finished. So, in spite of my fervent praise of Brown’s uncanny

ability, this is not tantamount to an affirmation of a teleological vision of the way

music should now always be made. Instead, the Idiot poses us a question, and the

answer can only be derived from a new musical discourse, or a new work of art that

will respond to the intolerable circumstances of any oppressive, dogmatic “logic”.

In turn, we could say that the great artist is one who is willing to undermine the notion

of the “common sense” of his or her own position. We have also learnt that the

movements – social or individual – best enabled by what we broadly categorise as

music, can sometimes be made by those who would be rather indifferent to accepting

577 (Deleuze 1994: 130)

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the role of “musician”. As hip-hop producer Hank Shocklee, once said, “Who says

you have to be a musician to make music”?578

This is against everything that is often expected as expert practice. Instead, here art

derives its power, through its ability to plunge its audience into a “chaosmos”579

necessary for becoming. To emerge from a wilful plunge into the chaosmos is liked

by Deleuze and Guattari as a “…return from the land of the dead”.580

One such "land of the dead" might be identified as the riot torn ghettos of the 1960s. I

have suggested in this chapter that it was down to music to express the intolerable

involved and to bring out what Deleuze has described as the uniqueness and

singularities that can be found in the any-space-whatever of these ghettos. Brown’s

music did this simply through feel rather than narrative; in the process, his appeal to

increasingly abstract compositional methods that would require a “people to come”.581

As Deleuze comments in Cinema 2, art “…must take part in this task: not that of

addressing a people, which is presupposed already there, but of contributing to the

invention of a people”.582

It’s the greatest artists (rather than populist artists) who invoke apeople, and find they "lack a people"… Artists can only invoke apeople, their need for one goes to the very heart of what they’re doing,it’s not their job to create one, and they can’t. Art is resistance: itresists death, slavery, infamy, shame. But a people can’t worry aboutart. How is a people created, through what terrible suffering? When apeople’s created, it’s through its own resources, but in a way that linksup with something in art…or links up art to what it lacked.583

578 This quote was attributed to Bomb Squad producer, Hank Shocklee, and witnessed by myself on atrip to the EMP (Experience Music Project) museum in Seattle, Washington, U.S.A in late December2001.579 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 313) “The milieus are open to chaos, which threatens them withexhaustion or intrusion. Rhythm is the milieus' answer to chaos. What chaos and rhythm have incommon is the in-between – between two milieus, rhythm chaos or the chaosmos” (Deleuze & Guattari1988: 313).580 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 202)581 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 345)582 (Deleuze 1989: 217)583 (Deleuze 1995: 174)

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In response to Shocklee I would contend, one does not need a musician to make

music, but requires only a missing people. One that might implore the artistic plunge

into the “chaosmos”.

As Deleuze and Guattari contend in What is Philosophy?, the fields of philosophy,

science and the arts invoke their own particular methods to plunge their audience into

the chaosmos. 584 In this respect, the role of the artist is to: “…[bring] back from the

chaos varieties that no longer constitute a reproduction of the sensory in the organ but

set up a being of the sensory, a being of sensation, on an anorganic plane of

composition that is able to restore the infinite”.585 Thus the artwork does not seek to

represent a coherent vision, but rather gives access to the diverse connections of affect

behind it. In fact it is impossible to represent the experience of the chaosmos because

the experience will always be too overwhelming. The artists will always necessarily

find themselves incapable of relating the full power of its intensity. It was this that

forced the “break” in the sensory-motor-link in the cinema. A new cinematic image

was occasioned by a return from the “land of the dead”.

For if the music of James Brown was tantamount to a series of scientific experiments

into what made people move, the act of movement itself, might be perceived a series

of relative connections with the chaosmos. In setting up the possibility for, and drive

within, this new experience of movement-connection, Brown would return to the

essence of the nature of being minor and providing an art, “… positively charged with

the role and function of collective, and even revolutionary, enunciation”.586 A

different kind of collectivity was the ultimate “message” of Brown’s music. Yet, as

we discussed in the previous chapter, Brown will quite openly testify that the dawn of

funk was stumbled upon rather than dreamed in advance. In short, Brown catalysed

the funk assemblage – even if somewhat accidentally and experimentally – rather than

invent it via some grand vision.

As for funk itself, we can perhaps see the rise of the funk assemblage as the birth of a

new “spiritual automata” that involved seeing better and further than one can

584 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 202)585 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 202-203)586 (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 17)

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immediately think.587 Funk emerges as a necessary shift that would reflect a decline

in the sensory-motor automata – of a world assembled so that it seemed one could

perceive and act decisively within it. If soul music expressed a being in the world in

exactly this latter sense, then the post-soul aesthetic will render any definitive notion

of time and space “indiscernible” by its wilful transformation of the soul narratives

that will necessarily obscure their relation to past and future in turn. Of course, whilst

funk may have introduced this new “spiritual automata”, then it must be said that

Brown himself was not averse to falling back on the older action-reaction automata,

even as he inadvertently brought in the new.

Perhaps it was the complex political position that Brown had to negotiate that

revealed him as a character of notorious contradiction. For all of the cutting edge

innovation of the funk years, Brown also maintained a sustained effort to model

himself as a crooner and as a serious interpreter of “standards” in the style of a Nat

King Cole or Frank Sinatra.588 It is important that Brown’s eclectic musical tastes are

taken into account, because it is the very schizophrenic nature of his albums, (in

particular those of the 1960s and 1970s), which are indicative of the disparate,

audiences to which Brown was attempting to appeal. Brown did make some

successful inroads into the “white” pop charts where his coverage of “standards” such

as Prisoner of Love (1963)589 would provide Brown with some vital “crossover”

success at a crucial stage in his career. However despite such attempts throughout the

years to model himself in the guise of the mainstream friendly crooner, Brown would

never have any kind of sustained success with the white audience in the sense of

sustaining the “crossover” visibility of a Ray Charles, or even a Motown, despite his

superstar status among African-Americans. It is Brown’s comparatively marginal, and

as I have argued, “minor” status that was perhaps so enticing to those other minor

musicians of electronic dance music and sampling cultures today. This of course

leads to my point that for all of his innovation, I cannot fully endorse the idea of

587 The concept of “spiritual automata” comes from Spinoza (Deleuze 1998), and as Deleuze discussesin Cinema 2, each new type of image produces new psychological automata in turn (Deleuze 1989).588 Brown teamed up with arranger and composer for the Erskine Hawkins Orchestra, Sammy Lowe inthe mid 1960s, “…to record several well-known ballads: “These Foolish Things”, “Again”, “So Long”and “Prisoner of Love”. It was Brown’s first multi-track session, and his first recording with stringsand a full chorus” (Weinger & White 1991: 21). Brown would subsequently team up with the LouisBellson Trio (Bellson an ex-Duke Ellington alumnus) for 1969’s Soul on Top (re-released on CD in2004)(Brown, Orchestra, & Nelson 1969/2004 (reissue)).589 (Brown 1963)

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Brown’s musical sensibility as reflecting of a “time-image” form of music. For whilst

Brown may have provided the refrains, it would require the existential condition of

the post-soul generation to make these refrains become in the way that they would.

Furthermore, Brown was too generically compromised in a musical sense to make

that his mode of operation. For example, take any James Brown album of the 1970s

and you can go from genius to kitsch in the space of two songs, which is perhaps one

of the many downsides to the disregard of conventional sense. For the plunge into the

chaosmos that comes with the innovative must necessarily eschew an orthodoxy

based upon opinion and judgement. As Deleuze and Guattari write: “…the struggle

with chaos is only the instrument of a more profound struggle against opinion, for the

misfortune of people comes from opinion”.590 As we have learnt, Brown was not the

type to give in to opinion, but rather he had the Idiot’s instinct for new orientations.

As Wesley would recount in an earlier interview with Brown biographer Cynthia

Rose:

He has no real musical skills…yet he could hold his own onstage withany jazz virtuoso - because of his guts. Can you understand that?James Brown cannot play drums at all. But he would sit down ondrums and get that look on his face like he’s playin"em and you wouldjust play along with him. Organ - he cannot play organ at all. Aguitar’s not an instrument you can bullshit on, you got to really knowhow to play a guitar. And I’ve seen him pick up a guitar and go#"£#”%”! and look at you just like he’s playin' it, you dig?591

Brown, as “Idiot”, could not, or rather, would not, uphold the “common sense” image

of thought. Nothing new can come from the appeal to a common sense predicated on

the fact that “everybody knows” - “everybody knows you don’t play a guitar like

that”! Brown’s music offers a pragmatic response embodying a resounding ‘says

who”? Such pragmatism demonstrates the embrace of difference-in-itself, one that is

necessary for any form of becoming to transpire.

590 (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1994: 206)591 (Wesley in Cynthia Rose 1990: 86)

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Musical Thought without Image

Deleuze makes plain his preference for the naïve thinker, citing the fact that it is only

the truly naïve that can forget the constructed truths of the past and allow the forces of

creation to emerge. We have also seen that this requires dispensing with the dogmatic

image of thought, as the presuppositions of common sense that restrict creative

thought or difference-for-itself. In pursuit of such difference, the overturning of the

intuitive or “common sense” image of thought, that Deleuze dedicates his work.

Deleuze prescribes the notion of “thought without image”592 in the place of the

dogmatic image of thought. Deleuze further describes this “thought without image” as

the pursuit of dangerous thought, because its object is no less than the vast chaosmos

of difference-in-itself. This is becoming-thought rather than inherited logic:

The thought which is born in thought, the act of thinking which isneither given by innateness nor presupposed by reminiscence butengendered in its genitality, is a thought without image. But what issuch a thought, and how does it operate in the world?593

Again, Brown’s music allows us to begin to answer this question of the production of

a thought without image. It is a very good example of the fact that the proper way is

not always one conducive to progress.

In fact, it is unfeasibility that often becomes innovation in retrospect. On the point of

Brown’s musical deficiencies, Cynthia Rose posits,

During the 1960s and early 70s, Brown’s touch seemed so certain itdazzled new recruits as much as his towering ego bruised them. Howdid he - a man who relied on "real" musicians completely to implementhis ideas - pick and choose his accomplices with such unwaveringsuccess? [Former bandleader] Pee Wee Ellis says he had "an innerear". Ellis drums a beringed finger on the desk before him and savoursthe very words. “James has this instant ability, this basic mother-wit,which allowed him to apprehend a certain combination of things. And

592 (Deleuze 1994: 167)593 (Deleuze 1994: 167)

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he could get close enough to accomplishing the spirit of it himself tofigure “if I can get this close, I can PUSH it the rest of the way”.594

The beauty of the Deleuzean concept of the Idiot is that it enables naïveté and

innovation to productively coexist. The Idiot brings new things together, as in

Brown’s idiosyncratic musical talent for the “…apprehending of a certain

combination of things”. For all Brown brought in terms of his enormous influence on

contemporary popular music, James Brown had to confront the prejudices of his own

musicians first and foremost. If he could make these guys believe then that was

indeed half the battle. Such a feat requires further elaboration of Brown’s uncanny

ability to take musicians from disparate musical fields and synthesise their talents into

a cohesive ensemble; no mean feat for a man considered a near musical illiterate.

The bottom line is that, if there really are no essential truths, life often boils down to

being just a matter of belief in the power of production in the present. Instantiating

such a belief requires pure force. As Fred Wesley remarks about Brown’s sheer

determination, “I never saw anybody play so bad with so much confidence and

determination”.595 This serves to emphasise the tenuous nature of “proper”

musicianship. Wesley’s maintenance of such a distinction attests to his incredulity

concerning Brown’s unorthodox musical ability.

Wesley’s surprising admission serves to illustrate how thought is reflected against a

“public” presupposition, in this case one of “proper” music. Our dogged faith in the

illusion of the transcendental categories merely obscures what we have actually

“become” in the case of Fred Wesley. This is why Deleuze calls our attention to the

immediate immanence of a belief in the world. Under the logic of “proper” music,

Wesley is subjected to the discomfort of being pigeonholed as Brown’s bandleader

and not recognised as a musician in his own right. In fact, most accounts from

Brown’s more notable ex-employees similarly offer such confessions of incredulity at

Brown’s compositional process mainly because such unorthodoxy was not actually

supposed to work. However, the fact that it did work is a point not lost on Wesley.

594 (Ellis in Cynthia Rose 1990: 60)595 (Wesley 2002: 111)

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“I’ve got to give James credit," says Wesley, "because he allowed meto be creative - he made it possible for me to be ultra-creative. Take atune like "Doin” It To Death" (in 1973). I would never, ever, in mywildest imagination have thought of doin' something like that. But himgivin' me a basic idea caused me to create that. It’s my creation, butit’s what he gave me to create with. He would give you these little,unrelated elements, sometimes not even musical, and say “makesomething out of it”.596

Despite the criticisms I have noted in the Wesley article, it must be pointed out that

Wesley is not one given to sour grapes and retains a balanced and ultimately sanguine

perspective throughout his memoirs. Despite an often rocky period of tenure, Wesley

is conciliatory when he describes James Brown’s inimitable depth of passion, which

he says brought the music a new level of energy and enabled it to “[take] on a new

power”.597

Brown’s challenge to Wesley illustrates that judgement about proper musicianship

can ultimately hinder conceptual progress. We have seen Deleuze’s championing of

the Idiot’s naivety as a vital force for the creation of the new. However there is

perhaps a darker side to the Idiot in all of this. The Idiot’s naivety in regard to the

“proper” way to think will also necessarily bring about confrontation over the proper

way to think. For this reason Deleuze has offered that the Idiot’s instincts for ruthless

survival can be perceived as cruel and callous, and by all accounts Brown reflected

such attribution in the dealings with his peers.

It is a question of someone – if only one –with the necessary modestynot managing to know what everybody knows, and modestly denyingwhat everybody is supposed to recognise. Someone who neither allowshimself to be represented nor wishes to represent anything. Not anindividual endowed with good will and a natural capacity for thought,but an individual full of ill will that does not manage to think, eithernaturally or conceptually. Only such an individual is withoutpresuppositions.598

The championing of such “immoral” characters as the Idiot has meant that Deleuze’s

critics have accused him of appearing as an apologist for this coldness and proceeding

596 (Wesley in Cynthia Rose 1990: 92-93)597 (Wesley 2002: 107)598 (Deleuze 1994: 130)

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with some “indifference”.599 Yet the main point for Deleuze is that the concept of

judgement itself is the problem, if only because judgement is based on

presuppositions and this not good for becoming. What is good for becoming is a

necessary indifference to dogma that offers liberation from oppressive regimes of

thought. This is the sort of naïve thought which we have attributed to Brown.

Although not completely excusing callous behaviour, the “ill will” attributed to the

Idiot is often inextricable from conceptual innovation.

So whilst it is lamentable that Brown treated his musicians so poorly, this “ill will”

was also part and parcel of the sheer force he wielded that transformed musical

concepts into a belief and a series of events. Having experienced the worst of the

African-American experience, Brown foisted this alternative musical reality upon the

shoulders of his peers, as his life literally depended on it. Brown’s musicians remain

incredulous about why he had to be so despotic. In accordance perhaps with Deleuze's

attribution of "Idiocy" “…in the most pressing situations, The Idiot feels the need to

see the terms of a problem which is more profound than the situation, and even more

pressing”.600

The Idiot is beyond common sense, which is good for new ideas and practices, but

less so in terms of maintaining the logic of normal social relations. Arguably, the Idiot

is not even an agent in this situation, but rather a seer, a portal for becoming. Brown’s

context was the failure of the civil-rights movement and the decline of soul, in

general. The seer’s ‘thought without image” perhaps develops out of the

disillusionment with narratives that promised an agency that was never to materialise.

In the next chapter, then I will describe how Brown’s music gave the generation of

African-Americans attempting to endure life in the aftermath of civil-rights, a

necessary belief in the world. For whilst the narratives driving soul may well have

599 “For we seem to have, at least in Deleuze’s more overtly political writings, a Nietzscheanismwithout reserve: Nietzsche’s ‘yes’ is raised to the ‘nth’ degree, and ‘no’ is erased. In the rush to avoidrepression and the negative in the interest of unfettered creativity, it is important to ask whether, assome psychoanalysts have suggested, the result of this creativity might be a decrease in war (organisedvertically) but with an increase in the potential for violence. The very importance of Deleuze’sphilosophy demands that such as issue be fully investigated”(Lechte 1994: 104)600 (Deleuze 1989: 128)

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declined, in the darkest hour, Brown’s music would return to produce affective

relations in the spiritual void.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

FROM COLD SWEAT TO NO SWEAT

This chapter will contend with the decline of soul and the emergence of the post-soul

aesthetic. In this chapter I will pursue the idea that a type of “time-image” music

would correspond with the emergence of the “post-soul” period. If soul’s movement-

image was generally based on the more orthodox, sequential narrative forms of

composition then the post-soul era will produce a music based instead around a more

serially constituted groove. Unlike the sequential forms of composition that courted

soul’s narratives, this groove based music of the post-soul era will be significant for

the fact that it will be characterised by an “indeterminacy” that ruptures a linear

causality of action-reaction.

Exemplary of this non-linear approach to compositional time is the way DJ and

sampling cultures would strip the “breakbeats” from old soul records and reassemble

them in a new and ambiguous fashion. The styles to emerge from this post-soul era

that would become manifest in genres from hip-hop to disco, techno and house, will

all, in some way eschew sequential composition to instead take up a musical montage

based on irrational cuts and the non-chronological assembly of pre-recorded material.

The historical genealogy of these electronic dance music genres have already been

dealt with in great detail, in particular in texts such as Ulf Poschardt’s DJ Culture

(1998), Brewster and Broughton’s, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life (1999) and Jeremy

Gilbert and Ewan Pearson’s Discographies: Dance Music, Culture, And The Politics

Of Sound (1999), all of which are exemplary and provide no reason to recount this

evolution once again. Within these final two chapters I am more concerned with

theorising how the aesthetic practices behind electronic dance music genres might

reflect a more intensive relationship to time rather than to sequentially based

compositional movement. In this way, I will show how these styles of music make the

transition from movement-image to time-image, where the latter will instead attempt

to build on the indeterminate repetition of the groove for a more immersive dance

experience. For such electronic dance musics work on the premise that their audience

will become “lost” in such repetitive grooves rather than concern themselves with

following the more linear trajectory of the more orthodox pop tune.

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The basis of this aesthetic change might be initially exacerbated as a creative reaction

to the any-space-whatever conditions, similar to that type of post-War reflexivity that

Deleuze contends drove the shift into a time-image cinema. I contend that the

apparent break in soul’s action-image is particularly important in driving the

electronic dance musics that would emerge out of the African-American musical

communities. This aesthetic shift is, of course, hardly limited to this population, and

to this end, I will also qualify how a similar existential malaise might have been

responsible for the more time-image based forms of music that would link the music

of Afro-America to sites such as Germany, the Caribbean and beyond later in the

chapter. The point of this chapter then, is to show how the forms of composition that

will be manifest in practices such as DJing and sampling, will enact a reversal of

movement and time similar to that which Deleuze defines as the shift from

movement-image to time-image. Within this reversal, “…time is no longer the

measure of movement but movement is the perspective of time”.601

The Decline of Soul’s “Action-Image” - The Post-Soul Aesthetic

The electronic dance musics that will emerge from the post-soul period are an

aesthetic reflection of the break in soul’s “action-image”, or that teleologically driven

idea that things would improve with time. The death of this “action-image” driving

the optimism of the civil-rights era might be symbolically traced to the assassination

of Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968. For it is not long after King’s untimely demise

that the broader political impetus that drove the civil rights agenda would begin to

unravel.

The breakdown in soul’s teleological impetus would translate into the rapid decline of

its commercial musical expression. As Atlantic Records’ Jerry Wexler comments in

the documentary, The Soul of Stax (1994), “What had been the soul era, on the high

road, suddenly, seemed to grind to a shuddering halt. There was frustration, there was

rage - but worst of all - the sprit seemed to have gone out of this particular movement

601 (Deleuze 1989: 22)

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of rhythm and blues music”.602 Evidence of this expedient decline of soul is remarked

upon by Gerri Hershey in Nowhere to Run, where the market for soul music

“…seemed to have reached its peak in 1968, when Billboard reported, R&B DISKS

SWING TO “BLACK HOPE”. Within a year it would declare, BACKLASH CUTS

SOUL ON TOP 40”.603 This backlash would perhaps reflect an irrevocable rupture in

the belief in the sense-making efficacy of the sensory-motor-schema that drove soul.

It is this post-1968 period that signals the beginning of what will become known as

the “post-soul” era. This concept of “post-soul” as noted in chapter 1, was first

proposed by Nelson George, and further elaborated by cultural theorists such as Mark

Anthony Neal to “…describe the political, social and cultural experiences of the

African-American community since the end of the civil rights and Black Power

movements”.604 Whilst the term “post-soul” was initially coined by George as a

general description of “…black popular culture after the blaxploitation era”,605 Neal

will instead place more emphasis on locating a “post-soul generation” around a more

refined set of events, namely:

…folks born between the 1963 March on Washington and the [Regentsof the University of California v. Bakke challenge to affirmative actionin 1978], children of soul, if you will, who came to maturity in the ageof Reaganomics and experienced the change from urban industrialismto deindustrialism, from segregation to desegregation, from essentialnotions of blackness to metanarratives on blackness, without anynostalgic allegiance to the past (back in the days of Harlem, or thethirteenth-century motherland, for that matter), but firmly in grasp ofthe existential concerns of this brave new world.606

In Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), Neal

outlines the emergence of this post-soul sensibility through specific examples to be

found in the music, film and television of this post-civil-rights generation. Neal’s

analysis of the 1970s sitcom, Good Times, is but one example he discusses of this

type of post-soul text, an example already canvassed in chapter 1.607 Good Times

602 (Wexler in Priestley 1994)603 (Hirshey 1985: 315)604 (Neal 2002: 63)605 (Neal 2002: 63)606 (Neal 2002: 3)607 Some of the other examples of post-soul texts and contexts canvassed by Neal, include the work ofR&B singer - R. Kelly, Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, African-American

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attains its status as post-soul text because of the acute existential disarray that

underscored the program and one that would have particular resonance with this

defeated civil-rights generation. The discontent of living in the wake of the civil rights

era is dramatised through the Evans family of Good Times, who were left to ponder an

uncertain social stasis in its aftermath. The Evans family reflected the increasingly

uncertain political trajectory that would mark the outlook of many African-Americans

in the 1970s.

For a working-class family struggling to make ends meet, the events of the soul

period of the previous decade would seem to have amounted to little real change in

living standards. Perhaps, even worse, they were denied the promise of political

change as well. For political options were all but extinguished as the soul era had left

a string of casualties in its wake, including a series of leaders systematically subjected

to either subordination or in the most extreme cases, assassination. This was the fate

of African-American leaders, including Medger Evers, Malcolm X, and of course, Dr.

Martin Luther King. Furthermore, the civil rights agenda had lost steam, increasingly

obscured by the political turmoil that surrounded the escalation of the Vietnam War.

The culmination of these events would conspire to bring about the decline of soul’s

narrative view of the world, or that presupposition of change through action. These

events are also uncannily reminiscent of the crisis of the action-image proposed by

Deleuze within the context of the Cinema books, as occurring at the end of World

War II:

Nevertheless, the crisis which has shaken the action-image hasdepended on many factors which only had their full effect after thewar, some of which were social, economic, political, moral and othersmore internal to art, to literature and to the cinema in particular. Wemight mention, in no particular order, the war and its consequences,the unsteadiness of the “American Dream” in all its aspects, the newconsciousness of minorities, the rise and inflation of images both in theexternal world and in people’s minds, the influence on the cinema of

centred sitcoms and TV shows of the 1960s-1980s, and the “post-soul intelligentsia” of the 1980s – agroup of artists and writers such as Greg Tate, Vernon Reid, the Black Rock Coalition, Jean-MichelBasquiat, George C. Wolfe, Darius James, Cassandra Wilson and Geri Allen – to name but a fewexamples(Neal 2002).

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the new modes of narrative with which literature had experimented, thecrisis of Hollywood and its old genres…608

Within the context of the Cinema books, the existential conditions of the post-War

period would result in a new type of cinema, one that would no longer depend on the

logic of action-reaction causality. If the movement-image cinema was founded upon

the neat order of action through the expectation of a perception-image naturally

leading to an action-image, the time-image of the post-War period would instead

reflect the breakdown of this order.609 The narrative driven cinema of the movement-

image will instead give way to the time-image form, where rational movement is

instead replaced by an emergence of ruptures in the sensory-motor-schema created by

situations such as the “trip/ballad”610 and the proliferation of any-space-whatevers:

The sensory-motor link was thus the unity of movement and itsinterval, the specification of the movement-image or the action-imagepar excellence. There is no reason to talk of a narrative cinema whichwould correspond to this first moment, for narration results from thesensory-motor-schema, and not the other way around. But preciselywhat brings this cinema of action into question after the war is the verybreak-up of the sensory-motor-schema: the rise of situations to whichone can no longer react, of environments with which there are nowonly chance relations, of empty and disconnected any-space-whateversreplacing qualified extended space. It is here that situations no longerextend into action or reaction in accordance with the requirements ofthe movement-image. These are pure optical and sound situations, inwhich the character does not know how to respond, abandoned spacesin which he ceases to experience and to act so that he enters into flight,goes on a trip, comes and goes, vaguely indifferent to what happens tohim, undecided as to what must be done.611

The resultant lack of coherent and determined time/space results instead in a new type

of image: “[t]his is the first aspect of the new cinema: the break in the sensory-motor

link (action-image), and more profoundly in the link between man and the world

(great organic composition)”.612 Deleuze contends that such spaces are characterised

by the disengagement of affective response from action.613 The populations living

amid the aftermath of the “goals” of World War II would not only contend with the

608 (Deleuze 1986: 206)609 (Deleuze 1989: 45-46)610 (Deleuze 1989: 3)611 (Deleuze 1989: 272)612 (Deleuze 1989: 173)613 (Laura U. Marks 2000: 28)

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decline in the presupposition of action, but this lack of causality is indicative of a

more dramatic break with the continuity of “organic” coordinates of time and space as

well.614 When action is no longer a given, the characters of this new cinema would be

rather more concerned with introspection based on the collapse of the “intuitive” idea

of the logical sensory-motor-link between perception and action:615

We hardly believe any longer that a global situation can give rise to anaction which is capable of modifying [space]- no more than we believethat an action can force a situation to disclose itself, even partially. Themost “healthy” illusions fall. The first things to be compromisedeverywhere are the linkages of situation-action, action-reaction,excitation-response, in short, the sensory-motor links which producedthe action image.616

These any-space-whatevers are thus responsible for the ruptures to the normal

sequential logic of the movement-image’s action-image and constitute the more

disjointed relationship to time/space of the time-image aesthetic. Furthermore, such

dislocated spaces will constitute the foundation of the production of this type of

cinema based around the more anonymous, transitional spaces of the any-space-

whatevers. I argue then that this relationship of the any-space-whatevers is one shared

by both post-War cinema as defined by Deleuze but also the time-image music

established in the ghettos (hip-hop) and the “disused warehouses” (house and “rave”

cultures) and provide a significant correspondence between the art forms:

This is in fact the clearest aspect of the modern voyage. It happens inany-space-whatever-marshalling yard, disused warehouse, and theundifferentiated fabric of the city – in opposition to action, which mostoften unfolded in the qualified space-time of the old realism…it is aquestion of undoing space, as well as the story, the plot or action.617

The Post-Soul Any-Space-Whatever

For in the examples of both post-War cinema and post-soul music, the

disenfranchised urban populations would have to live amongst the any-space-

614 (Deleuze 1989: 126-127)615 (Deleuze 1989: 45-46)616 (Deleuze 1986: 206)617 (Deleuze, 1986: 208)

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whatevers that arose as visible, everyday reminders of the failure of the political goals

of their respective periods. In terms of the soul era these any-space-whatevers arose as

the result of the riots that took place after the assassination of King:

US News & World Report noted on November 13, 1967, 101 majorriots had occurred in US cities, killing 130 people and injuring 3,673.The damage would total $714.8 million…King’s assassination quicklyupped the ante: more cities were paralysed, more people hurt, morehomes and businesses and communities destroyed. Meanwhile, thebody count from Vietnam was increasing.618

Another pertinent example of the any-space-whatever of the post-soul period is the

decimation of the South Bronx, which as Tricia Rose writes is “frequently dubbed the

‘home of hip hop culture’” .619 As Rose recounts in Black Noise (1994), under the

direction of “legendary planner Robert Moses…”, “[I]n 1959, city, state, and federal

authorities began the implementation of his planned Cross-Bronx Expressway that cut

directly through the center of the most heavily populated working-class areas in the

Bronx”. As once stable neighbourhoods were depopulated, property values

plummeted and the community economically and socially depleted.620 As the

conditions worsened in the late 1960s to mid-1970s landlords turned their properties

wholesale over to professional slumlords that only continued to exacerbate the erosion

of any kind of stable community. 621 Given that such “urban renewal” projects as the

Cross-Bronx Expressway could have been modified as to minimise the destruction, it

was otherwise designed to maximise the destruction of the ‘slums’ of the working

class community who occupied the area.622

Whilst the spaces would proliferate as a result of the perceived failure of promises in

the work of civil rights legislation, it must also be noted that I am not asserting that

the political activism of the civil-rights/soul era was in any way erroneous. The point

is that it was simply the culmination of a political teleology. What makes this

condition intolerable was that there was no other way of attempting another form of

politics unless the most obvious course had been taken (even if it was to fail). This is

618 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 67)619 (Tricia Rose 1994: 30)620 (Tricia Rose 1994: 30)621 (Tricia Rose 1994: 33)622 (Tricia Rose 1994: 31)

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the very nature of political movements, but also significant of how such political

gestures often do fail. This is why Deleuze and Guattari talk about the micropolitics

of desire rather than a macropolitical organisation. The micropolitical derives from a

liberation of desire that assists the process of becoming and transformation, 623 rather

than the more traditional form of State based macropolitics. Perhaps the ultimate

lesson of music is that there is nothing to believe in but the ethics behind specific

interactions with other bodies. So too in the aftermath of the decline of the universal

notions of movement does the emphasis shift instead to the ethical power of

individual bodily movement.

The post-soul generation is left to ponder the future because their political options (in

the traditional sense) are exhausted. The decline of the natural presumption of

affective response and political action has been denied them and now they must live

with the result of such action. With the activism of the soul period having taken its

toll, once vibrant communities would fall into ruin and furthermore be left that way,

based on the lack of any coherent policy to redress the destruction of infrastructure.

This situation would only worsen in the 1970s and in fact, by the 1980s things were

critical, as Reagan’s regressive social policies seemed to have been designed to

deliberately punish those who had dared rise up during the soul movement. Given this

situation, Nelson George would comment that the generation characterised here as

post-soul, grew up “…seeing negative change”.624 The post-soul malaise would only

be reinforced by these most visible reminders of their apparent failure and continue

the proliferation of disconnected spaces that would exacerbate this decline in action

motivation, again correlative with the example given by Deleuze:

…after the war, a proliferation of such spaces could be seen both infilm sets and in exteriors, under various influences. The first,independent of cinema, was the post-war situation with its townsdemolished or being reconstructed, its waste grounds, its shanty towns,and even in places where the war had not penetrated, itsundifferentiated urban tissue, its vast unused places, docks,warehouses, heaps of girders and scrap iron. Another, more specific tothe cinema as we shall see, arose from a crisis of the action-image: thecharacters were found less and less in sensory-motor “motivating”situations, but rather in a state of strolling, of sauntering or of rambling

623 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 213 )624 (George in Barrett, Thomson, & Corporation 1996)

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which defined pure optical and sound situations. The action-image thentended to shatter, whilst the determinate locations were blurred, lettingany-spaces-whatever rise up where the modern affects of fear,detachment, but also freshness, extreme speed and interminablewaiting were developing.625

In Mark Anthony Neal’s, Soul Babies, many of the texts he refers to, for instance, will

encompass a similar spiritually disconnected state characteristic of the post-soul

experience. To understand such disconnection, I shall briefly return to the example of

the Evans family of Good Times. Rather than being involved in action – think for

example of the very presupposition of action that drove the narratives of a 1950s

Leave It to Beaver scenario – the Evans were always immersed in pondering how they

were going to survive, or why life has treated them so cruelly, a different type of

existential condition than that which would characterise your average sitcom. This is

perhaps why Good Times resonated with audiences in the post-soul period, as the TV

family represented the reality of many African-American families that were once

spiritually bolstered by the dreams of the civil-rights generation: for instance, that all

that one needed to achieve social justice was belief and perseverance. The reality of

course was that the African-American population were particularly prone to the

logistics of a prejudicial economics. Far from being able to ever enjoy a vision of life

as agents, many were playing a game of mere survival. This was a condition common

to many families that migrated to the cities of the North in search of a better way of

life, but were left to ponder the decimation of both their individual and collective toil.

The discussion of Good Times as a post-soul text is just one of the many examples

that Neal uses to argue that African-American audiences would attribute their own

particular significance to texts. This would in turn affect contemporary aesthetic

practices for the post-soul generation as they attempted, “…a radical reimagining of

the contemporary African-American experience, attempting to liberate contemporary

interpretations of that experience from sensibilities that were formalized and

institutionalized during earlier social paradigms”.626 There is no doubt that this change

in sensibility can be found in the musical expression of the time, although as I

contend, this is not to be found so much in the meanings of the music, but rather,

625 (Deleuze, 1986: 120-121)626 (Neal 2002: 3)

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indicated in the way they would express time. A legacy of DJing and sampling, with

new aesthetic forms, seems to take on time in a new way, one extricated from the

linear historical logic that one could associate with Deleuze’s movement-image or the

common sense understanding of the sensory-motor-schema as uncomplicated agency

with a linear history.

Whilst Neal provides a set of illuminating examples of changes in sensibility of the

post-soul experience, one example conspicuous by its absence was the music of James

Brown. Given that Brown is considered the most famous exponent of soul, and that he

maintained his stature as Afro-America’s most celebrated performer both throughout

the soul movement and also in the early stages of the post-soul period, evaluating the

impact of his music on the existential circumstances of the time surely warrants

further discussion. Brown is important because aesthetically his music would emerge

to catalyse the spirit of the situation and perhaps mastered the apprehension of a

minor temporality, for not only the soul generation, but would maintain a distinct

presence into the post-soul era as well.

Whilst it is true that Brown’s career faltered at around the same time as the post-1963

generation were in their adolescence, one might have reason to believe that the post-

soul generation escaped the clutches of the Godfather’s influence. Yet this was not the

case and this will become evident through the sampling of Brown’s work in the late-

1980s to early 1990s, much of it at the hands of artists born into the post-soul period.

These were the kids who came into their teens after the decline in Brown’s popularity

in the mid-1970s who were obviously still intimately acquainted with his catalogue if

the sampling of his work is anything to go by. In this chapter, I will discuss Brown’s

enduring influence within the post-soul generation and provide some reasons as to

why Brown’s music would be able to maintain its relevance to this new generation.

Tougher Grooves For Tougher Times

For at the beginning of the 1970s, Brown was still riding high on a wave of

commercial success and was thus crowned The Godfather of Soul around this time.627

627 So named after the movie The Godfather (1972).

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Perhaps part of this continued success was due to his special relationship to these

affected populations, predicated on the fact that his emphatic style was an affirmative

force amid the general existential malaise, a force for becoming, where few continued

to exist. The power of Brown’s music, as we have discussed in previous chapters was

its ability to catalyse broader existential circumstances. Indeed, it is probably little

coincidence that Brown’s funk became tougher and more unrelenting in the late 1960s

and early 1970s and that the rhythms became harder as times for this post-soul

generation became increasingly tougher. Brown’s music articulated a sense of force

needed to bolster one through this almost perpetual malaise. His ability to apprehend a

minor temporality and reproduce it into musical expression was a skill that he

managed to hone at least until the mid-1970s. In fact, Brown’s work would continue

to live on in the hearts of the DJs of the block parties long after his commercial cache

had waned, a point made here by Afrika Bambaataa:

[Record companies] were just shoving disco down our throats. For thefirst two years, we were playing it, and that was cool. But the dancersin the black and Latino community change every three months. Thenafter the third and fourth year, they were trying to get rid of the funk.You weren’t hearing James [Brown] and Sly [and the Family Stone] onthe radio much, so to keep the -audiences kicking with the funk, westarted adding all their stuff, and other funky beats, to our musicalrepertoire.628

This continued pursuit of Brown’s music is testament to how “untimely” Brown’s

rhythms were –they could maintain their longevity and potency with a self-

acknowledged fickle audience. Brown’s rhythms would continue to connect with a

population living in a time of relative immobility629 as it might be understood in the

political sense. The importance of rhythms is that they promote a belief in the body,

and by extension, offer the potential of a becoming-world during the most stagnant of

political environments. Deleuze himself ascribes a similar capability to the time-

image cinema, as it attempts to re-conceive the body as a product of a revised relation

with time and space.

628 (Afrika Bambaataa in Reighley 2001: 45)629 Or to cite a relevant malapropism by rapper Raekwon, Immobilarity. (Raekwon 1999)

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Part of Brown’s perennial popularity was because of the untimely nature of his

compositions. Funk’s groove had established its own break with the more sequential

forms that had characterised popular music composition – such as faith in melodic

progression and its teleological progress. The radicality of Brown’s own approach to

the production of musical time was an affront to the more hegemonic constitutions of

temporal logic. Not only would this distinguish funk from the compositional methods

that had characterised soul, which were relatively orthodox from a compositional

point of view, but it would make Brown a political figure, and thus enticing to later

generations. In fact, Brown’s music seemed to have anticipated the decline in simple

sensory-motor driven songs long before. For Brown’s funk, even in its early stages,

had already begun to show signs of this shift in existential conditions reflected for

instance in Brown’s rather ambivalent relationship to the orthodox verse/chorus/verse

forms of composition. As such, funk indicated an attempt to apprehend an alternate

sense of time and space that might be seen to exist outside the narratives of a more

orthodox idea of temporal succession to give way to his extended grooves and

minimalist polyrhythmic approach.

Furthermore, Brown was able to maintain his stature within minor communities, due

to his ability to apprehend a minor temporality and to articulate the existential

conditions of the minor through the musical. Thus, as times got tougher it would

appear that his funk became progressively sparser and more aggressive. This is

something that one can find in making a comparison of the musical progression of

Brown’s music that might be heard through the course of three of his best-known

albums. One need only to listen to the original 1962 Live At the Apollo, to 1968’s Live

At the Apollo 2, and finally 1971’s Revolution of the Mind: Live At the Apollo 3 to

hear how Brown had completely redefined the approach to black music in the space of

less than a decade. If the original Live At the Apollo had Brown generally pleading

over lost love, the style of composition that contained such paeans were still relatively

orthodox (although a taste of things to come can be witnessed in the extended

vamping of Lost Someone). Live At the Apollo 2, however, marked the beginning of

extraordinary one chord jam workouts more characteristic of Brown’s funk style,

witnessed for example in the twenty-plus minute tour de force medley of There Was a

Time/I Feel All Right/Cold Sweat. By 1971’s Live at the Apollo 3, the funk groove

was the rule with only the odd, brief flashback to his late 1950s-early 1960s soul

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canon. Furthermore this third record of the Apollo series had Brown deliberately

conversing with his musicians on “black consciousness”, Brown particularly pleased

with Fred Wesley’s black trombone. The Live at the Apollo 3 album was completely

removed from its original predecessors not only in terms of composition but also in

general existential outlook, there was no chance that Brown could have launched into

jokes about the Ku Klux Klan back in 1962 as he does on the latter album.

Each instalment of the Live at the Apollo series presents a radical stylistic

development reflecting the very evolution of the groove that the post-soul, electronic

dance musics would court and subsequently build upon. The groove oriented funk

style, pioneered by Brown in the late 1960s and early 1970s, would take precedence

over soul’s predilection for projection and become the pre-eminent music genre of

that decade, expressed not only through funk but through disco and beyond. One must

only compare the stylistic development that Brown made between these albums to see

how the new musical regime would instead reflect a new expression/experience of

time, “…rather than motion”.630

This emergence of a rhythmically driven groove might also be constitutive of an

alternate form of temporality, that notion of Aion concerned with becoming, and thus

substituting for the sequential “motion” of chronos. This becoming is no longer to be

found through political movement but is instead a utopia promised through the

groove. Whilst it is fair to argue that all music is an apprehension of a minor

temporality, to my mind Brown’s music presents a persistent and superlative example

of this pioneering of long, unrelenting and intricate grooves that would court

becoming based on the ecstasy of dance and bodily movement. The importance of the

funk groove is that it sets out to create an aesthetic that would enable the renegotiation

of bodily relations, but a set of relations to be accessed only when a more sequential

chronological composition of action-reaction was thrown into disarray. It is fair to

credit Brown with this pioneering style, for it was only later in the 1960s that funk

would become a genre of its own, a subject already covered in some detail in Rickey

Vincent’s Funk, for example.631

630 (Deleuze 1995: 59)631 (Vincent 1996)

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The groove is anything but deterministic - that’s how one gets lost in it. The longer

the duration of the groove, the better chance its audience had of finding this utopia

within the duration of the composition. Which is perhaps why the long and

increasingly incessant nature of Brown’s grooves really took flight around the very

time that soul narratives were in decline. In fact, it was post-1968 that Brown’s tracks

took on an increasingly minimalist aesthetic, as indicated by tracks such as Ain’t It

Funky Now (1969)632 or Give It Up or Turnit a Loose (1969). 633These tracks were

increasingly stripped down, even compared to the titles that had appeared no more

than a few years prior. Melodic structure was dispensed with, and the tracks would

increasingly rely on a single chord sustained ad infinitum, with perhaps only the

briefest of bridges to “cut” the groove and strengthen the anticipation within the track.

The new prominence afforded repetition through funk reflected the shift away from

the linear progression inherent in the verse/chorus/bridge structure of popular

music.634 Brown’s music might be seen to have been more open to an engagement of

a more “probabilistic” rather than “deterministic” 635 universe, whether this was in the

areas of music or social change. For funk would become a converging of both these

things at once, as Brown’s groove might be seen to provide an alternative to the

decline of narrative that was the overriding existential condition of the social. When

Brown put his faith in the groove, he put his faith in the specific and immediate

interaction of bodies and the becoming that would transpire. Brown’s music was

632 (Brown 1969a)633 (Brown 1969b)634 James Brown did of course attack his fair share of the more conventional “standards” and they havealways been a staple of both albums and live shows. Although it is Brown’s penchant for syrupyballads and straight out kitsch, that often gets the best of his audiences. For example, in hisautobiography, Brown talks about his preparation for a series of shows at the International in LasVegas where Elvis had recently had such success (Brown and Tucker 1986:215). Brown assumed thatas the “Vegas audiences were a lot older and mostly white” that he would expand the band “…addingsome strings and other things, and put in more ballads and songs like If I Ruled the World and sometraditional show songs” (Brown and Tucker 1986:215). The booker responded that “If I’d wantedFrank Sinatra…I would’ve hired Frank Sinatra”, yet Brown proceeded with a set list that included It’sMagic, September Song and his late 60s/early 70s staple, If I Ruled the World (Brown and Tucker1986:215). It was bombing. “They thought I was crazy to sing those songs. They didn’t want that fromme: They wanted the gutbucket thing” (Brown and Tucker 1986:215). Brown continues to sing oldiessuch as Prisoner of Love and Georgia on My Mind to this day.635 This is based on the following quote on the shift from movement-image to time-image as discussedby D.N. Rodowick: “…change in the order of sense implies change in the nature of belief. The organicregime believes in identity, unity, and totality. It describes a deterministic universe where events arelinked in a chronological continuum: one believes retroactively in a past that leads inevitably to thepresent; one has faith in a future that emerges rather predictably out of the present… Alternatively, theregime of the time-image replaces this deterministic universe with a probabilistic one.(Rodowick 1997:15)

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pragmatic in the sense that it brought bodies together in new ways, and an affirmation

of the possibility of a belief in probabilistic futures that begin now - despite what was

otherwise occurring in the macropolitical world.

The Proxy Politician

Of course whilst I make lots of claims for Brown’s ability to inspire belief in the

world, Brown’s strange orientation to traditional politics has always clouded his

legacy. For Brown had maintained a fairly apolitical stance before and after that

fateful year of 1968, much to the chagrin of political activists, such as the Black

Panthers. In the immediate aftermath of Dr. Martin Luther King’s death, Brown was

willing to go on TV to play concerts, most notably the famous Boston Garden

performance, to keep the people at home and to quell any further riots. Brown was

subject to much criticism636 for this assistance in the “cooling off” of the ghetto

uprisings.

This criticism was compounded by the fact that Brown subsequently made a trip to

Vietnam, a few months later, to play for the troops. For political activists this was

tantamount to complicity with the government and Brown was increasingly labeled an

Uncle Tom.637 However, Brown would comment, “I knew that black soldiers were

complaining that the USO didn’t send enough acts they could identify with, and I

wanted to change that”.638 They were doing their bit for their country and then

rewarded with “entertainers” such as Bob Hope.639

As provocative as it may sound, I do not believe that Brown’s TV appearances, nor

Vietnam tours do anything to discount Brown’s minor status. As regards the Vietnam

636 Not only was Brown challenged for being a “sell out”, but also it has been said that the Panthersleaned on him to make Say it Loud! I’m Black and I’m Proud. For example, Brown’s friend and fellowKing recording artist, Hank Ballard, claimed that the song was written as a direct result of Brown beingthreatened by sub-machine gun toting Black Panthers (Vincent 1996: 78). However in his recentsecond “autobiography”, I Feel Good (2005), Brown has also said he found a hand grenade with hisname on it outside his hotel room on the night of this recording. In this case, however, the partiesinvolved were unknown to Brown (Brown & Eliot 2005). Whether or not these cases forced Brown toreconsider his political stance, the main point of these stories is the ambiguity of James Brown’spolitics at the time. In fact during the preparation of this thesis I have been questioned about Brown’sapparent complicity with the State and how this might undermine my argument637 (Maycock 2003: 68)638 (Maycock 2003: 70)639 (Maycock 2003: 68)

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tours, if anything, one can think that Brown’s performance at Vietnam, would not

only have connected the troops to thoughts of home, but in doing so, presented an

alternative to the agenda of death and destruction that the troops were forced to

follow. As Ronald Bogue has commented, minor writers must attempt to articulate the

voice of a collectivity that does not yet exist, and yet this task of the invention of a

“people to come” is not achieved through the promotion of, “… specific political

action or by protesting oppression (although such actions do have their own value),

but by inducing processes of becoming-other, by undermining stable power relations

and thereby activating lines of continuous variation in ways that have previously been

restricted and blocked.640

As regards the quelling of the riots, the fact of the matter is that riots had ravaged

black communities such as Watts (1965), Newark and Detroit (1967). Brown perhaps

knew that the black community were only cutting off their nose to spite their face,

seeing as they were up against overwhelming odds. In fact Nelson George has

subsequently written, in The Death of Rhythm and Blues (1988), the quality of life for

African-Americans after the riots of the 1960s only worsened. 641 Many main streets

in black capitals never recuperated and fell into a state of permanent disrepair,642 and,

as the 1970s pressed on, the situation was not rectified.

Acknowledging that economics was the ultimate language of majoritarian culture,

Brown also decided, somewhat controversially, to become an advocate of “black

capitalism”, and it was on the promise of such economic development that Brown

supported Nixon. Whilst Brown’s commitment to “black capitalism” might be seen to

conflict with many of the more socially progressive attributes that I have credited to

Brown, if anything capitalism requires a disengagement from, rather than a belief in

the world at hand. In addition, there is the problem that not everyone can possess the

sense of conviction that Brown was gifted with, and this dogged sense of self-

sufficiency was flaunted conspicuously via his mini-empire of Lear Jets, restaurants

640 (Bogue 2005: 114)641 (George 1988: 98)642 (George 1988: 98)

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and radio stations.643 Brown himself hoped that such achievements against the

overwhelming odds would demonstrate to African-Americans what could be attained.

In fact, as he sang in the song funky President (1975), he thought African-Americans,

should stick together “…and do like the mob”.644

Yet if one listens more closely to Brown’s calls to mobilise economic power in the

black community, these calls always very much came from a knowingly minor point

of view. For instance, when Brown was to sing, You Can Have Watergate, But Gimme

Some Bucks and I’ll be Straight (1975), during one of his bands, the JBs’ solo outings,

this does not sound like someone who actually believed in integrating with the

dominant culture. The fact is that Brown knew he was marginal and events such as

Watergate were of little or no consequence to a people that were often engaged in a

more pressing agenda of everyday survival. Hence, the attitude of such tracks to

traditional politics was one of general nonchalance “what does it matter as we are not

part of your system anyway”.

As I have discussed in previous chapters, much is made about Brown’s more political

narratives such as Say it Loud! I’m Black and I’m Proud (1968) or I Don’t Want

Nobody to Give Me Nothing, (Open Up the Door I’ll Get it Myself) (1969). However,

to merely perceive the political message of Brown’s music through his lyrics would

hardly do the man’s political legacy adequate justice. For Brown’s real political

legacy is that his music would provide a belief in the world as an exploration of

affective possibility. It was the politics of bodily action found in the tightly integrated

music and choreography that made Brown such a presence on stage, such as was

discussed in relation to the T.A.M.I show in chapter 5. It is as this arbiter of bodily

affect that kept Brown in stead with later generations.

Give It Up or Turnit a Loose

Given the malaise felt through the disconnected sensibility of the post-soul

generation, any force that might strengthen affective relations would obviously be

643 Brown discusses his business activities including the James Brown Golden Platter Restaurants andhis own version of Soul Train called Future Shock in his autobiography (Brown & Tucker 1986).Footage of Brown’s enterprises can be seen in (Barrett, Thomson, & Corporation 1996).644 (Brown 1975)

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enthusiastically embraced. Hence art forms that promoted such affectivity in these

any-space-whatever situations, such as dance in particular, would provide the

affective basis for the compositional expression of the electronic dance music genres

to follow. It is no coincidence then, that all of the pioneering DJs for instance, Francis

Grasso in disco,645 and Kool Herc,646 Afrika Bambaataa647 and Grandmaster Flash648 -

the last three, hip-hop’s pioneering triumvirate - were all initially dancers.649

Brown’s stature in the area of dance is merely another reason that he would remain at

the forefront of post-soul consciousness and also why the DJs would feature Brown’s

music so prominently in their sets:

In manifold ways, hip-hop is his child. No 1, Brown’s beats providemuch of the whole art’s foundation. Before sampling made it possibleto repossess Maceo’s soulful squeal, Jabo’s different strokes or JB’spersonal shrieks, when the whole hiphop experience was still live onclub turntables or hot-wired out of lamps in the parks and streets(early, free electric sources) b-boys would scour New York in searchof old Brown 45s. Stuck onto larger vinyl - for better mixing grip -these copies of “Sex Machine”, “Funky Drummer” or “Get Up, GetInto It and Get Involved” would be mixed with sounds as diverse asThe Incredible Bongo Band’s version of "Apache" or Grand CentralStation’s ‘the Jam".650

Via this pre-recorded material, the ghetto DJs devised their own methods to emulate

in their own way a groove that once kept a whole group employed. The more skeletal

grooves and breakdowns, in records such as Brown’s, provided them with a

foundation for their own irrational approach to composing or remixing, mainly

because there was no melody to get in the way of maintaining the intensity of the

groove - a groove that would become vital to such pursuits as breakdancing. It is of

645 (Brewster & Broughton 2000: 145)646 To attribute my sources - As KRS-One has commented: “Herc was a graffiti artist. He was part ofthat community that was freestyle dancing to James Brown, doing Capoiera martial arts, developingthis thing called breaking”(KRS-One in Batey 2002: 59).647 “Bam declared his party-minded friends to be Zulu Kings and Queens, and formed the Zulu Nation,a group of b-boys and b-girls” (Brewster & Broughton 2000: 239). “No one is entirely sure of theidentity of the first New York breakdancer, but it was certainly popularised by members of the ZuluNation”(Ogg & Upshal 1999: 15)648 (Ogg & Upshal 1999: 37)649 “That new generation of DJs, most of whom were ex-breakdancers, and all of whom were Hercfans, took up the mantle. Herc, for his part, was impressed by the vitality that they brought to the scene,especially Afrika Bambaataa” (Ogg & Upshal 1999: 37).650 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 147)

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course in the legacy of dance that Brown was also instructive, as many of his famed

dance moves were often shown on TV on shows such as Shindig and The Ed Sullivan

Show in the 1960s and Soul Train in the 1970s.651 If Brown was on top of the latest

dance trends, it was because he spent a lot of time engineering them, such as his own

“James Brown”.652 Brown’s dance moves required an intense athleticism, which itself

was not unprecedented (the Nicholas Brothers had been there long before), but

Brown’s dance became less choreographed and more indeterminate bouts with

exhaustion. His goal was to maintain the twirls, splits and the lightning fast

combinations all undertaken whilst directing the music of the band at the same time

and instantly this interaction back into his stage work. This is where Brown differed

from the athletic dancers that had preceded him. His fragmented approach to

choreography, at once musician, then turning the beat on a dime, Brown suddenly

emulating a robot, or becoming-indeterminate, all the while feeding this intensity

back into the music, would significantly impress the new generation of hip-hoppers.

As Kool Herc attests: “Breakdancing started with James Brown. He was the king, A-

1, B-boy, way back in ‘69! People started going off, dancing like that to particular

records because they had a hype to them. I tagged the name of B-boy to the dancers. I

used to call them ‘break boys’”.653

Whilst Brown’s trendsetting dance styles had been impressing the kids of the soul

generation, the level of his enduring success would provide him contact also with

those kids who would grow up to become part of the later post-soul generation. For

Brown’s latest dance steps were something that many African-Americans kids in

particular, had been engaged with since the schoolyard. For instance, Public Enemy’s

Chuck D reminisces about dancing on ice in the school grounds “During the slippin’

and slidin’ a few of us had to turn it into the customary challenge, ‘try this move and

swing like JAMES BROWN.’ To do the JAMES BROWN you had to start off with ‘I

Feel Good, Duh-DUH-dah dah dudda dat’”.654 Brown’s music was a means of

becoming for many black children, of a certain age. A generation of kids grew up

651 James Brown’s Internet Movie Database Page lists these appearances and more,http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0113768652 Footage of Brown going through a whole slew of these dances can be seen in the rare 1978documentary, James Brown: Soul Brother No.1.653 (Herc in Batey 2002: 59)654 (Chuck D 1995)

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with James Brown in the schoolyard and it is a gauge of Brown’s iconic status that his

name was invoked in everyday activities such as adolescent skipping games:

I went downtownTo see James Brown.He gave me a nickelTo buy a pickle.The pickle was sour.He gave me a flower.The flower was dead,So this is what he said:Hopping on one foot, one foot, one foot.Hopping on two foot, two foot, two foot.Hopping on three foot …Hopping on four foot…655

This early adoption further indicates how Brown would maintain his influence over

the hearts of the post-soul generation.

Brown was synonymous with pioneering dance moves that were so tightly integrated

in his routines that he had always engineered his records to provide the necessary

stops, starts and gaps of anticipation, which he would duly fill in with his carefully

choreographed moves. It was this more “irrational” negotiation of time and space that

energised his dance routines, that would be reflected compositionally. For many of

Brown’s peers were singers who may have also danced, whereas Brown did not

differentiate these activities and they were part of an integrated whole and reflected

back into the intensity of the rhythm of the composition. This is probably why

Brown’s work would have such an impact on the new aesthetics such as hip-hop. For

the rise of hip-hop placed significant emphasis on the then contemporary Brown

singles such as Give it Up or Turnit A Loose were seminal influences on earlier break

beat culture. 656 The practice of responding to these isolated breaks with the intensity

they deserved would culminate in what would eventually come to be known as

“breakdancing”. It was called “breaking” or “breakdancing” because the dances were

based around the record’s “break”. The “break” - short for breakbeat - refers to a short

655 (Riddell cited in Gaunt 2004: 255) As Gaunt explains, “Although this game-song does not literallyquote James Brown’s music, the lyrics are clearly playing ideas about the “Godfather of Soul” with hisemphatic dance and stage persona – “Dance on the good foot!” Brown is the epitome of coordinatingmovement with a range of vocal expression, rhymes and speech about movement” (Gaunt 2004: 256).656 (Fernando Jr 1999: 15)

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section of a record where the other instruments are stripped from the sonic picture,

leaving the rhythm section to maintain the groove unaccompanied.

DJing and sampling culture in turn have been built on fragmenting of the records that

carried the former narratives of soul, electing to rearrange them serially into new non-

linear relations with the purpose of making a musical piece a newer, longer music

experience. This practice came about as a means of isolating the most danceable

sections of the record, allowing the DJs to dispense with the artifice and hone in on

the most affective part of the record. As Jamaican-born hip-hop pioneer, Kool Herc

explains:

I used to hear the gripes from the audience on the dance floor. Evenmyself, “cause I used to be a breaker (breakdancer). Why didn’t theguy let the record play out? Or why cut it off there? So with that, megathering all this information around me, I say: "I think I could dothat". So I started playing from a dance floor perspective. I always keptup the attitude that I’m not playing it for myself, I’m playing for thepeople out there.657

Another Brown track that is directly implicated in the genesis of breakdancing is

Brown’s 1972 recording, Get On the Good Foot (1972).658This has been reiterated on

numerous occasions by Old schoolers such as breakdancer Crazy Legs from the Rock

Steady Crew, who replies in response to the question “What would you say marks the

birth of breaking?”:

It’s like Bambaataa says, it’s an extension of ‘the Good Foot.’ WhenJames Brown put that record out, brothers would dance to it and addother moves to it. People would say, “Oh, he’s goin' off!” So, theywould call it “goin' off.” Or they would call it ‘the boi-oi-oing.'Eventually Kool Herc labeled it “B-Boying.” He would say, “B-Boys,are you ready?” And that would signify that the break beat was comingon, so break boys and break girls, everybody knew to tie up yourlaces.659

The breakdance movement spread rapidly as part of the global Hip-Hop movement, as

mentioned here by U.K. DJ Tim Westwood, “We were playing Brown for the

657(Herc in Ogg & Upshal 1999: 13)658 (Brown 1972a)659 (Legs in Lascaibar 1998: 27)

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dancers, the breakers and the bodypoppers-from the very earliest, streetstyle British

jams. Stuff like “Get on the Good Foot”; breakdancing used to be called ‘goodfoot’,

after that record”.660

The Breaks

Hip-hop has been cited as the great marriage of Afro-Caribbean and African-

American cultures,661 yet it is not often pointed out that Brown played a key role in

bringing the cultures together. For example, with reggae failing to catch the attention

of Bronx youth, hip-hop pioneer DJ Kool Herc turned to playing Brown’s records

instead.662 This included now seminal Hip-Hop tracks such as the album version of

Give it Up or Turnit a Loose (1970).663 Herc was a long-time James Brown fan. Prior

to his emigration to the US in 1967, “… his mom, who was living in New York,

regularly sent him the latest James Brown and Motown 45s”.664 Whilst it has not

received much attention, Brown’s influence on the music of the Caribbean also

deserves credit, a situation that was brought to my own attention when legendary

producer, Lee “Scratch” Perry cited Brown as his major influence in the March 2002

edition of music magazine, Mojo. 665 This makes sense, as the rhythms of funk are

prominent in the shift from ska and reggae to the more indeterminately constructed

forms such as the relatively avant-garde sounding “dub”. 666 It should also be pointed

out that the evolution of hip-hop is perhaps not as clear as it is usually described. In

660 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 149)661 (Szwed 1999: 8-9)662 (Brewster & Broughton 2000: 229) “In his early parties Herc even played Reggae and dub,although, he says, “I never had the audience for it. People wasn’t feelin' reggae at the time. I played afew but it wasn’t catching”. New York’s West Indians have remained surprisingly separate from thecity’s main currents of black culture (possibly because they can distinguish themselves as voluntaryimmigrants). Certainly, as hip-hop was being formed in the Bronx, reggae was either disliked orseldom heard. So instead, Herc moved to the funk and Latin music his Bronx audiences were used to:“I’m in Rome, I got to do what the Romans do. I’m here. I got to get with the groove that’s here”(Brewster & Broughton 2000: 229)663 (Brewster & Broughton 2000: 229)664 (George 1999: 16)665 (Perry & Bradley 2002: 61). Perry says, “From when I started in the music business in Kingston…itwas James Brown that inspire me…James Brown was the best showman. Everything that man did wasto put on a show for the people…He take trouble to make sure everything perfect everytime…Everything going into that show. It what the people want, and I wanted to put on a show likethat” (Perry & Bradley 2002: 61).666 The influence of James Brown’s music on Jamaican music can be heard through many of the reggae“knockoffs” of his tunes such as Make It Reggae (a straight lift of Brown’s Make It Funky) by SharkWilson & The Basement Heaters, and available on the album, 300% Dynamite: Ska Soul RocksteadyFunk & Dub in Jamaica (Various Artists 1999).

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fact Kool Herc himself has denied the connection between the Jamaican sound system

culture and his own contribution to hip-hop.667

Perhaps Herc’s denial is based on the fact that break beat culture did not exist in the

Caribbean sound system. This aspect of hip-hop was definitely something new. Herc

does indeed deserve the respect for initiating the practice of this re-engineering of

breaks. The break was the most “affective” part of the track and hip-hop was founded

around this turning of the affective “break” into structure. By eliminating the

conventional song structure, DJs can capitalise on this most “affective” part of the

track. As David Toop has explained: “[t]his appropriated music was then edited on

record turntables in real time, in order to eliminate the verse, chorus, verse, bridge

structure of popular song, leaving only repetitions of an internally complex percussive

cell, a fragment and memory trace of the history of a track known as the break”.668

Herc would famously take the re-recorded version of Give it Up or Turnit A Loose

found on Brown’s 1970 album Sex Machine (1970) and break it up and “reassemble

it” according to his own logic.669 The album version of Give it Up or Turnit A Loose

featured the more predominant Clyde Stubblefield break and “…Herc noticed that

when he played, for example, James Brown’s ‘Give It Up or Turnit A Loose,’ people

went especially wild during the ‘break’ segment of the song, when just the drums or

percussion took over “.670 Herc decided to extend this break section in order to

embrace ‘the moment” extended as long as possible through repetition. The practice

had emerged from the days when the DJs took a 45rpm record that they would stick

onto LPs for better manipulation of the break:671

667“Early influential hip hop DJs such as Jamaican-born Kool Herc have sometimes denied directJamaican influence on rap, but their audiences must have least been indirectly prepared for rap before itappeared here full-blown” (Szwed 1999: 9). Although Szwed writes that this influence may well havecome from performers such as Brown, “Toasts sometimes turned up completely intact in raps, as onJames Brown's "King Heroin" in 1972, or in Schoolly D's first recordings. But more often they wentthrough transformations before they returned in pop form, as in Jalal Nuriddin's influential 1973recording of Hustler's Convention. Nuriddin was a member of the Last Poets, a group that joined thepoetry of the prison to black militant rhetoric and processed it through beatnik and jazz sensibilities,against the crack of conga drums. Nuriddin's own solo efforts had even more direct influences onmodern rap” (Szwed 1999: 8).668 (Toop 2000a: 92)669 (Fernando Jr 1999: 15)670 (Fernando Jr 1999: 15)671 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 147)

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Herc wondered what would happen if he got two copies of the samerecord and cut back and forth between them in order to prolong thebreak or sonic climax. Unwittingly, Herc had stumbled upon thebreakbeat, the starting point for much hip hop, dance, techno, andjungle (drum ‘n’ bass) today.672

This form of “irrational” composition was at the heart of break culture, but also

concurrently in Disco world where a similar effect was achieved through tape edits.

Common to both of these examples, is the attempt to capitalise on a form of

composition that would assemble privileged instants into new non-sequential forms of

composition. Brown was not the only one responsible for this. Brown’s songs were

only part of a broader canon that is now well recognised, including other more

obscure examples such as It’s Just Begun by The Jimmy Castor Bunch, Apache by the

Incredible Bongo Band, Shack Up by Banbarra and Babe Ruth’s The Mexican.673

However, unlike the more isolated tracks of other artists, Brown’s entire catalogue

would be pilfered. It is testament to how it would stand up over time that he would

provide one of the most enduring influences, on this style of artistic production, from

the late 1960s to the present day.

Perhaps the hip-hoppers just thought to remove the parts of the song rendered

redundant by their dancing needs: “Why do we have to put up with the artifice of

structure and melodic ornamentation when we are really looking forward to the most

affective part of the song - breakbeat?” or as Method Man, member of Hip-Hop

collective Wu-Tang Clan once asked in the track Method Man (1993), “How many

licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll centre of a break”?674 This is an important

chapter in the shift from movement-image to time-image composition, as it suggests a

concentration on the present through the break rather than playing the record in its

entirety. Furthermore this irrational cutting of the records to extricate the break

emphasised the relationship with Aion, described as the time of becoming, rather than

one of chronological time.

It was perhaps the “irrational” nature of extending the break that inspired a form of

dancing just as irrational to accompany it. I say irrational because by extracting the

672 (Fernando Jr 1999: 15)673 (Brewster & Broughton 2001)674 (Wu-Tang Clan 1994)

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break and leaving its reiteration to the whim of the DJ, the breakers had no idea when

that particular section of the record would stop, and the inherent uncertainty of this

situation had the effect of cranking up the intensity level. This uncertainty of the

irrational cut takes precedence over the certainty of the straight playback of a record

that proposes a more navigable linear trajectory. Again, Brown had already

anticipated this by making uncertainty and anticipation part of his musical oeuvre –

“When will he take the band to the bridge”?675

The main point to be made here is that the courting of the irrational cut had the effect

of throwing the “common sense” linkages associated with the more traditional forms

of composition into disarray. The process of extracting breaks would also have the

added effect of symbolically dislocating the narratives of the records in which they

were contained, along with the “rational” movements that were now so overtly given

over to a series of irrational connections.

The irrational composition of this musical style reflects the propositions of Deleuze’s

cinematic time-image in the sense that this post-soul derived musical form was

dedicated to a more open form of composition in comparison to the more closed form

of the traditional pop song that might be understood as a “whole” (verse/chorus/bridge

etc). When we say the irrational cut opens up time, this means opening up to the chaos

of the “outside”, this outside might be perceived as the virtual pool of time in all of its

potential juxtapositions of past, present and future. This openness to the virtual

possibility of time might be compared against the more sequential and logical linear

unification of chronological time, where the open, serial relationship is promoted

through these irrational cuts and indeterminate relationships. For the open

composition is full of virtual temporal alterity, a process that might be seen in the cut-

up technique of William S. Burroughs’ 676 who says: “Perhaps events are pre-written

and pre-recorded and when you cut word lines the future leaks out”.677

675 This is a reference to Brown’s famous exhortation for the band to take him to the bridge in his 1970hit, Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine Pts 1&2 (Brown 1970b)676 Burroughs’s cut-up technique refers to the aleatory process of cutting up articles and re-assemblingthem into new texts, a Dadaist technique inherited by Brion Gysin who passed it onto Burroughshimself.677 (Burroughs in Odier & Burroughs 1974: 28)

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The irrational cut beckons this opening up of virtual temporalities that might exist

outside of the “totality” of sequential, privileged instants. The reason why this new

irrational relationship to time will become so central to electronic dance music

practices, rather than the more individual, subjective forms of duration, is because it is

in irrational connection that becoming emerges:

Time’s direct image is not time in itself, but rather the force ofvirtuality and becoming, or what remains both outside of, yet inreserve and immanent to, our contemporary modes of existence. Theirrational interval does not signify or represent; it resists. And itrestores a belief in the virtual as a site where choice has yet to bedetermined, a reservoir of unthought yet immanent possibilities andmodes of existence.678

This direct-image of time will also produce a subject who is more amenable to the

process of making connections among such “irrational” image relations, and is more

open to the heterogeneity that might also result from it.

From Sequence to Series

As I have demonstrated in previous chapters, James Brown’s music had displayed the

power of the rupturing “cut”, perhaps most famously indicated through his

punctuating of his music with shrill, irrationally placed screams. The trademark James

Brown scream is indicative of this new type of composition where the music no

longer attempts to caress the listener, but instead will launch a type of sonic assault on

the senses.

The James Brown scream is perhaps indicative of the type of overwhelming op-signs

and son-signs that Deleuze argues would exacerbate the break with the action-image

of the movement-image regime.679 For these op-signs and son-signs are direct

presentations of time, forming non-localizable relations to the general composition

thus bringing an aberration that will break the continuity of an action-reaction

schema. 680 Deleuze says that these pure optical and sound situations lead to the

“recollection-image”, a concept that will be central to the direct experience of time

678 (Rodowick 1997: 204)679 (Deleuze 1989: 44-48)680 (Deleuze 1989: 41)

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because such “recollection-images” have the effect of fragmenting the simple flow of

linear movement-image composition. As Deleuze says, “…the optical (and sound)

image in attentive recognition does not extend into movement, but enters into relation

with a ‘recollection-image’ that it calls up”.681

Within the context of cinema, for example, this “recollection-image” is the

actualisation of an unrealisable past that exists only virtually, and this process of

actualisation is actually a form of creation for as Deleuze contends, “[m]emory is not

in us”.682In this context of the time-image cinema such recollection distorts and

distends the narrative flow of the cinematic text as its recalling of unrealisable pasts

causes the story to slip between indiscernible actual-virtual temporal relationships and

the present of the image becomes increasingly ambiguous in the process.

Within a musical context then, we might question, for instance, how the much re-

sampled James Brown scream might prompt such a “recollection-image” and how this

might operate within the logic of the composition. For the James Brown scream as

sample source, provides a series of concurrent temporal dimensions - as an

actualisation of an unrealisable past – the virtual past or the present that it once was

(when recorded) – but also as a musical component of the present itself as musical

composition.

In fact the James Brown scream is tantamount to a type of hallucination, the way he

punctuates the music in this apparently irrational way, beckons one to ask, just what is

it that is making him scream this way? What is the point? One usually has a laugh at

such idiosyncrasy, but the point is that these punctuations break the flow of the

composition and for this reason perhaps operates in a fashion similar to the

“recollection-image” attributed by Deleuze as central to the composition of the time-

image regime. The pure affective relations instigated through such irrational, and

idiosyncratic vocal techniques are also perhaps the reason why James Brown samples

have become a staple of DJ and sampling culture. Within these post-soul

compositions, the James Brown scream will, for instance, begin to appear in places

within the composition that one would not normally consider rational in a normal

681 (Deleuze 1989: 45-46)682 (Deleuze 1989: 98)

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everyday experience of events. This strange juxtaposition of sounds through new

types of musical montage will instead lead to such recollection-images, which in turn,

might conjure up the emergence of “op-signs” and “son-signs” - the catalysts for this

plunging of the audience into pure recollection of the time-image. However, this use

of a segment of a James Brown record is not just a “flashback” in the sense that a

flashback in terms of cinema is like a subordinate back-story that will justify the

“present” of the film. Within the time-image, past, present and future co-exist in a

non-hierarchical relation, not one that privileges “reality”. The musicians operating

with a time-image music perhaps share the same concern and they do not make these

old records subordinate to the present. Instead they become a thoroughly integrated

study of co-existent time.

The time-image form of musical composition would also appear to be aware of the

power of temporal disorientation as an affective experience, as such irrational cuts

and sampled “recollection-images” will deliberately rupture the simple succession of

a past, present and future moving sequentially. This is what gives the time-image a

“chaosmotic” relationship between actual and virtual poles of time, a new found

relationship to time that will require that the audience enter into thought with these

images, and that they might, in vain perhaps, attempt to make sense of the signs

thrown up by the texts, where thought is not the object itself, but rather, “…an act

which is constantly arising and being revealed in thought”.683

Within the context of the time-image cinema, this newfound relation to thought

signifies a thinking cinema, and one that readily works against the “common sense”

logic that would constrain it aesthetically. Deleuze, for instance speaks about the

“camera consciousness” that is to be found in the work of Antonioni and Godard684

and perhaps might be understood similarly to a postmodernist cinematic self-

reflexivity which ruptures the story space.

As I discussed in the previous chapter, Brown had demonstrated a reluctance to

follow any logic and in doing so had readily opened up to the possibilities for the

music that lay “outside” of musical thought. Much of this integration of “irrational”

683 (Deleuze 1989: 169)684 (Deleuze 1986: 74-75)

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elements of the music is exhibited through his compositional style. This can be seen

for example in the way Brown self-reflexively composes his music and how he

converses with his musicians, joking and laughing (or even chiding them) in the

process. Take for instance the track, Get it Together (1967) where Brown seems

impervious to the audience’s critical judgement of the track “if you hear any noise it’s

just me and the boys” (a line that would be appropriated as the basis of a whole track

by George Clinton’s P-Funk) or Brown teasing his musicians about playing their solos

“have another – no, be cool”. These idiosyncrasies of Brown’s compositional methods

of indeterminacy being captured as it is recorded ruptures the idea of a hermetically

sealed composition of the type that had been fetishised under previous notions of

composition.685

The Crystalline

Instead of thinking of a musical totality based on logical continuity and flow the new

time-image oriented music is instead less concerned with this continuity of passing

presents, but more concerned with the interplay of time through rupture.686 The

introduction of such irrationally placed elements as the James Brown scream, for

instance will threaten to punctuate the flow of the music going on underneath it. Such

overwhelming affective elements will thus break the circuit of action-reaction as we

enter into the ambiguity of the image’s virtual-actual relations. In short we have

difficulty distinguishing between past and present.

This inability to discern between virtual and actual images is what Deleuze refers to

as the crystal-image, again a central feature of this manifestation of the more

fragmented time/space relations that characterise the time-image. For Deleuze this

fragmentation of space (and time also as this will affect memory, as I shall document

shortly) is exacerbated through the proliferation of these any-space-whatevers. The

685 See earlier footnote that discusses in detail, the objections raised by Jeremy Gilbert over the use of“composition” rather than “improvisation” (Gilbert 2004a: 118-139)686 In his article, “Hiphop Rupture” (2000) Charles Mudede argues for Hip-Hop’s deliberate courting ofan ‘aesthetics of imperfection’. Hiphop’s embrace of rupture, he writes, renders it, “…the trueimperfect art”. As Mudede writes, “…instead of retaining the beauty of a sample, keeping its rigid formintact, hiphop breaks the sample, disrupts it, jams it (literally). It's as if a perfect thing was made onlyto be broken, fragmented, paused, denied its moment of fulfillment. Hiphop does not avoid errors; itmakes them, mimics them. And the most gifted producers are masters of mistakes” (Mudede 2000).

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indeterminate, fragmented space is a manifestation of these spaces impinging on the

“organic” presupposition of a linkage of space through action, and an understanding

of time as a product of a rational succession of movements. For the populations living

under these circumstances, those in the post-war, but also in the post-soul, the

apparent unity of “rational” space fragments into these “any-space-whatevers” which

are dominated by the irrational and disconnected.

This time-image is a product of this breakdown in simple rational explication of time

and space. Hence the time-image is instead constructed around an “inorganic” or

“crystalline” image of thought, Deleuze’s description of this newly skewed set of

relations of time and space. The crystal image is indicative of the multi-faceted and

indiscernible real that emerges from this breakdown in rational time and space. As

such the crystal will provide a system of exchange between “…actual and virtual, the

limpid and opaque, the seed and the environment”687 all of which maintain their

indiscernability even though they remain distinct:

In fact the crystal constantly exchanges the two distinct images whichconstitute it, the actual image of the present which passes and thevirtual image of the past which is preserved: distinct and yetindiscernible, and all the more indiscernible because distinct, becausewe do not know which is one and which is the other.688

For Deleuze, the crystal image, is “the coalescence of an actual image and its virtual

image, the indiscernability of two distinct images” 689 and “…stands for its object,

replaces it, both creates and erases it”. 690 This coalescence will encompass the

movement between “de-actualized peaks of present” and “virtual sheets of past”.691 It

is like the camera describing an existential property. For example, a crystalline image

of people will not just depict an action, but use the medium itself to 'carry out a

primordial genesis of [them] in terms of a black, or a white, or a grey [or] . . . of

colours'.692 The crystal image integrates the manipulation of the properties of the film

itself as affect. This is what Deleuze refers to as “crystalline narration” and which is

687 (Deleuze 1989: 74)688 (Deleuze 1989: 81)689 (Deleuze 1989: 127)690 (Deleuze 1989: 126)691 (Deleuze 1989: 130)692 (Deleuze 1989: 201)

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concerned with pure optical and sound situations, which take over after the collapse of

the sensory-motor form of sequence.693

We can argue that this re-assembling of such virtual “sheets of past” into new

temporal configurations is precisely at the heart of thought behind the electronic

dance musics to emerge from this time. The new techniques honed by the DJ’s, such

as scratching and mixing, deliberately solicited new relations with time (and even

narrative). These practices deliberately solicit the power of the irrational cut. In doing

so, they help to bring the possibility of new textual relations and connections to an

“outside” that had not previously existed. This style of composition veered away from

dialectical narrative and brought about a process of additive synthesis694 or that which

Deleuze and Guattari referred to as “nomad thought”.695 Such nomad thought,

“…replaces the closed equation of representation, x=x=not y (I=I= not you) with an

open equation: …+y+z+a+… (…+arm+brick+window)…[i]t synthesises a

multiplicity of elements without effacing their heterogeneity or hindering their

potential for future rearranging”.696 Maintaining a serial perspective between relations

is no less than a proposal for a new ethics, in the sense that it suggests the very

importance of such constant reassembling of life. The reassemblage of images as

sounds in this “irrational” way unleashes their virtual potential, although the efficacy

of this method requires the right environmental conditions if this virtuality is to be

properly actualised. By this I mean that the immanent existential conditions of the

post-soul experience meant that the climate was right for such new relations of

time/space to take hold. One does not will chaos when one is contented.

693 (Deleuze 1989: 128)694 Deleuze’s extrapolates on additive synthesis in his book on the painter, Francis Bacon, FrancisBacon: The Logic Of Sensation, using the example of the analogue synthesizer: “Analogicalsynthesizers are "modular": they establish an immediate connection between heterogeneous elements;they introduce a literally unlimited possibility of connection between these elements, on a field ofpresence or finite plane whose moments are all actual and sensible. Digital synthesizers, however, are"integral": their operation passes through a codification, through a homogenization and binarization ofthe data, which is produced on a separate plane, infinite in principle, and whose sound will be producedonly as a result of a conversion-translation. A second difference appears at the level of filters. Theprimary function of the filter is to modify the basic color of the sound, to constitute or vary its timbre.But digital filters proceed by an additive synthesis of elementary codified formants, whereas theanalogical filter usually acts through the subtraction of frequencies ("high-pass", "low-pass,"...). Whatis added from one filter to the next are intensive subtractions, and it is thus an addition of subtractionsthat constitutes modulation and sensible movement as a fall. In short, it is perhaps the notion ofmodulation in general (and not similitude) that will enable us to understand the nature of analogicallanguage or the diagram” (Deleuze, 2003: 95).695 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 379)696 (Massumi 1988: xiii)

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The “Seers” of the Turntable

This “nomad” thought alleviated by the irrational cut allows thought to break free of

the strictures of identity, and to create irrational links, which are necessary for

creative connections. Alleviated of a narrative version of the world, a time-image

aesthetic will opt instead for a belief in the world, rather than the subjectively

reiterated knowledge of a represented world. This is important because it is only

through breaking free of identity that more heterogeneous musical connections can be

made, and within this time-image music this will allow the rhythms of Brown’s

groove to link up with the electronica of Germany and even outer space in the case of

Afrofuturism.

It may be the very failure of representation that is the most affective weapon in the

DJs arsenal, although to look beyond the common sense relations of narrative and

sequence, the DJs act as a type of ‘seer’, a character that will emerge from this any-

space-whatever situation. These seers say Deleuze, “…cannot or will not react, so

great is their need to ‘see’ properly what there is in the situation”.697 We might find a

correlation between the ‘seers’ of the cinematic any-space-whatevers and the DJ of

the post-soul generation, who must contend with the existential malaise of the decline

in logical action. These are the seers who see life before them but unable to react in

the normal way to such situations, are stimulated to find new ways of dealing with

them. Hence the need to “see” (or in the case of our musical example to think with

musical images) clear of the situation which implores them to put images together in

new ways, as a way of proposing a possible way out of the overwhelming sense of

powerlessness experienced after the break in the sensory-motor-schema:

[n]ow this sensory-motor break finds its condition at a higher level anditself comes back to a break in the link between man and the world.The sensory-motor break makes man a seer who finds himself struckby something intolerable in the world, and confronted by somethingunthinkable in thought.698

697 (Deleuze 1989: 28)698 (Deleuze 1989: 169)

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To alleviate this break with “common sense”, or to approach the unthinkable in

thought requires the naïvety of the “seer”.699 Thus we might account for these new

aesthetics and creating a particular relationship with the existential situation of post-

soul, and the any-space-whatever, as a manifestation of the DJs/samplers’ attempts to

“see”. This in turn implores the compulsion to keep replaying the sample or break in

an attempt to make sense of the situation at hand. So “desperate” are they, that they

do not mind turning to “absurd” methods to “see”. But given the circumstances this

failure to make adequate causal sense of events means that they will attempt to

recombine images over and over as a result.

Whilst this might be a frustrating endeavour it also gives rise to the productivity of the

any-space-whatevers which forces such seers into a relation with the vast potential

connections that might be made. It is being in this seer-like position that requires DJs

to continually return to the records, to enter and leave them in such a seemingly

irrational fashion. In this effort to “see” the DJ tries, of course, to give this break beat

its “real” context, only for that context to be compromised by the broader existential

paradigm in which the seer is immersed. The musical narratives cannot be played in

their entirety anymore, perhaps because the seers can no longer see the connection of

the old record to the chronological sense of the world that once existed. Which brings

the whole notion of chronological time into some disrepute. As Deleuze writes, “[t]he

visionary, the seer, is the one who sees in the crystal, and what he sees is the gushing

of time as dividing in two, as splitting. Except, Bergson adds, this splitting never goes

right to the end”.700 In the crystalline regime, the past, present and future become both

irreconcilable and increasingly indiscernible701 and “…what indiscernability makes

visible is the ceaseless fracturing or splitting of nonchronological time”.702

The irony of the situation is that whilst the failure of connection of the virtual past and

present circumstance will rupture the sensory-motor-situation, it also forces the seer to

contend with the “chaosmos” of relations that emerge as perspectives of the

crystalline-image. As Deleuze says, “there is no doubt that attentive recognition, when

it succeeds, comes about through recollection-images: it is the man I met last week at

699 (Deleuze 1989: 126)700 (Deleuze 1989: 81)701 (Deleuze 1989: 81)702 (Rodowick 1997: 92)

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such and such a place…But is precisely this success which allows the sensory-motor

flux to take up its temporarily interrupted course again”.703 This “attentive

recognition” procured through the recollection-image “informs us to a much greater

degree when it fails than when it succeeds”. 704 Deleuze ascribes to Bergson, the idea

that this failure of attentive recognition will “haunt cinema”, 705 yet it will also inspire

it to new dimensions of creativity.

This perhaps explains why the beauty of music is to be found in its apparent

dysfunction. For some James Brown’s music is precisely that, and I have been privy

to many criticisms from others who think that Brown’s music nothing but banal

repetition, and often a vamp on a single chord to boot. Yet this repetition, like the

example of minimalism discussed in chapter 4, creates the chaosmotic situation of

being in the middle, and staying there. A situation that evokes that idea attributed by

Deleuze of the chaosmos as the “labyrinth without a thread”.706 Yet the James Brown

groove, predicated on repeating a rhythmic pattern with minimal variations, over and

over again, might restore a belief in the virtual, as any predetermination based on

traditional sequential linkages is plunged into this chaosmos.

A minor music should be open to alternate constitutions of duration precisely because

such apprehension of a minor temporality resists the more majoritarian logic of the

movement-image, which is about reiterating a sense of agency through control over

the outside. The serial relations based on the irrational cuts of the time-image will

instead offer potential for reconnection to the vast virtual possibilities that might exist

“outside” common sense. Although we should also keep in mind, as Samira Kawash

has commented, that “[w]hile this outside cannot, by definition, be represented,

Deleuze suggests that it can nevertheless sometimes be perceived”.707 It might also be

translated into corporeal becoming as well, a point made in regard to breaks and

breakdancing by Félix Guattari himself to Charles J. Stivale:

703 (Deleuze 1989: 54)704 (Deleuze 1989: 54)705 (Deleuze 1989: 54)706 (Deleuze 1994: 56)707 (Kawash 1998)

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…[h]owever, there is one that immediately occurs to me, it’s breakdancing and music, all these dances which are both hyper-territorialized and hyper-corporal, but that, at the same time, make usdiscover spectrums of possible utilization, completely unforeseen traitsof corporality, and that invent a new grace of entirely unheard-ofpossibilities of corporality.708

Whilst Guattari does not elaborate upon this corporality in the interview from which it

was taken, I might attempt my own extrapolation. Dancing, and in particular, highly

stylized forms such as breakdancing are attempts to capture these forces in sensation

and translate them. To speak in terms of these “possibilities of corporality” reminds

us of the empiricist conversion, that belief in the world, as the sum of its possibilities

of movements and intensities, “…so as once again to give birth to new modes of

existence”. The artistic response to living with such an intolerable set of

circumstances, is to seek out new methods of connecting with the world. In this

circumstance, dance would provide an economical way to forge the creation of new

relationships, both of the body and also between bodies, in such circumstances. The

music to emerge from this situation was obviously so affected by contemporary

circumstances that its musicians could not go back to the older, more orthodox

compositional precedents. Things are now predicated on the changing of the body,

removing it from its commonsense relations to commonsense time and space,

probably stripping the body of preconceived notions more than anything. The

“caterpillars” and “robots” of breakdancing and other forms of a becoming-

corporeality are formed in response to the new music that called them forth.

Through the musical use of the irrational cut, the DJs would take the affordances that

emerged from the incommensurable relations between “sound images” and make

them something liveable. They gave old records totally new actualities by bringing

out a virtual potential. Who knew that such records could inspire bodily becomings

such as breakdancing? Furthermore, the work of DJs and breakdancers indicate a

commitment to a belief in the world in which the forms of dancing are so overtly

different from the logical postures of the determined world. This might indicate

708 (Lascaibar 1998)

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“…the erasure of the unity of man and the world, in favour of a break which now

leaves us with only a belief in this world”.709

The Medium of a New Duration

The material evidence of a belief in these new forms of composition was perhaps

signalled through the emergence of the 12-inch record. I would contend that the 12-

inch record is a direct consequence of this increased emphasis on the temporal nature

called for by the groove resulting in the birth of the 12-inch single in the mid-

1970s.710 The medium was the culmination of several years of experiments in groove

taking place in the late 1960s-early 1970s in discotheques by DJ/producers such as

Francis Grasso, Walter Gibbons711 and Tom Moulton. All of these would experiment

with their, “…favourite tracks to make them longer and more danceable”.712 Each of

the dance artists in their own way contributed to the pioneering of this practice of the

artificial extension of the duration, often by editing sections of tape.

The virtues of Grasso, Gibbons, and Moulton et al. have previously been described at

length in books such as Brewster and Broughton’s Last Night a DJ Saved My Life

(1998). The process of early remixing, was, as they described it, re-editing.713

709 (Deleuze 1989: 187-188)710 This emergence of the twelve inch is discussed at length in Brewster and Broughton. As theyrecount in their book, the first 12-inch single, was So Much For Love by Moment of Truth. “It wassomething which Moulton made for a very select group of his DJ friends and although Roulette laterreleased it on 7-inch, the larger format was never commercially available”. (Brewster & Broughton1999: 170)711 Gibbons work on remixing may well have been inspired by dub if Brewster and Broughton’sdescription is anything to go by: “Gibbons was much more radical in his approach, stripping songsright down to their most primal elements and reconstructing them into complex interlocking layers ofsound. Like his wild, tribalistic DJing, his remixes emphasised the rhythmic essence of a track. WalterGibbons loved his drums. (Brewster & Broughton 1999: 171) The success of Moulton and Gibbonsresulted in the eventual adoption of the format by both the record companies and the public at large.712 See (Brewster & Broughton 1999: 167) Although Brewster and Broughton make the distinction that,‘strictly speaking, these tapes were re-edits and not remixes. A re-edit is a. new version made bycutting up and splicing together chunks of the original song in a different order, usually using a taperecorder, a razor blade and some sticky tape. A remix is a more involved process where the originalmulti-track recording of the song is used to build a new version from its component parts. If you thinkof re-editing as making a patchwork version, then remixing is where you actually separate theindividual sonic fibres of a song - i.e. separate the bass track from the drum track from the vocal track -and weave them back into a new piece of musical fabric”. (Brewster & Broughton 1999: 168)713 (Brewster & Broughton 1999: 167) Rather uncannily, Tom Moulton began his career in the early1960s as a promotions man at King Records, home of James Brown (Moulton, Brewster, & Broughton1998) As Brown was King’s biggest artist, it is perhaps interesting to consider just how Brown’s musicinfluenced Moulton in creeping up the length of the records. There is another link between Brown andre-editing experiments. It is also interesting to note that some of the first recognised tape editing

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Brewster and Broughton note that Moulton was one of the first people to gain

notoriety for remixing, credited with remixing cuts as early as 1972. 714 Moulton had

“…the idea of producing a tape specifically made for dancing”715 and remarked that

he “…thought it was a shame that the records weren’t longer, so people could really

start getting off”.716 Moulton then set about the laborious task of putting together such

a tape. Whilst the culmination in the invention of the 12” single was just as much

accident as anything else, as the story goes, Moulton, having run out of 7” blanks,

took up the offer of the mastering engineer to press the track on 12”.717 Yet the form

of the music had already long anticipated the method of its capture and it would have

happened sooner or later.

This was another innovation that Brown had created the necessary affordances for.

For Brown had long pushed the limitations of the old 7” single. Unable to be

contained by the limitations of the 7” single Brown instead began to use both A and B

sides for tracks, split into “parts 1 and 2”,718 and when that wasn’t enough, used

further singles to complete the track. For example, 1971’s Make It Funky was initially

released on one single with “Part 1 and 2” covering A and B-side and with “Part 3”719

experiments were also associated with Brown and King Studios. In 1969, King Records released asingle, by an artist going by the name of "Steve Soul”, who was in fact, James Brown. The title of therecords was A Talk with the News, and rates a mention in discussions of early tape editing experiments.The record was really just a promotional single with different cuts of James Brown tracks mixed in toanswer the questions. As Neil McMilan says of the record in his article on the history of cut and pastewhich appeared in Big Daddy magazine, “…despite occasional comic misfires, it’s easy to see how thehumorous interplay between spoken word and sampled excerpt sets the blueprint for the satirical andnarrative elements not only of Steinski’s cut-ups but, even if unconsciously, many a scratch DJ’sacapella routines” (McMilan 2002). In fact in the notes to a double CD of early break beat classicscalled Break Sessions, it credits James Brown with the first “break”. “What was the first break? That’sa moot point. James Brown put together a couple of records credited to "Steve Soul” in the early 1970s(sic), which were basically edits of many of his records with an announcer talking over them” (McCann2002). I think this is probably drawing a long bow (even as a James Brown fan) because it doesn’treally have the same purpose as the later break edits would.714 (Brewster & Broughton 1999: 167)715 (Brewster & Broughton 1999: 167)716 (Moulton in Brewster & Broughton 1999: 167) Brewster and Broughton then discuss howMoulton’s “…forays into editing soon led him to studio-based remixing” (Brewster & Broughton 1999:168) giving BT Express an R&B No.1 single with his re-edit to Do It ‘till You're Satisfied in mid 1974.(Brewster & Broughton 1999: 168)717 (Brewster & Broughton 1999: 170) The first 12-inch singles were limited to test pressings made byMoulton of his mixes, although as Brewster and Broughton add, “Eventually, though, the recordcompanies got wise to the benefits of the 12-inch and started using the format for DJ-only promotion.No one is exactly sure when these label-sanctioned promotional 12-inches arrived on the streets,though the general view is that the first was Dance Dance Dance by Calhoun, in spring 1975”(Brewster & Broughton 1999: 170).718 (Brown 1971b)719 (Brown 1971c)

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(another section of the same track) on the next single. This type of staggered release

was also used for two separate single releases to come from the 1973 remake of

Think.720As Cynthia Rose has commented, Brown’s idiosyncratic use of 7” singles

would foreshadow later innovations such as the 12 –inch of the disco period. 721 As

Cynthia Rose writes, “What Brown’s circular, extended vamps really needed was that

12" single format brought to prominence by disco (and dominant throughout the”80s

via soul hits, rap releases and club remixes)”.722

Brown’s groove based funk tore away from the more conventional and linear

compositional structures of R&B and would result in R&B’s gradual displacement by

the more groove-oriented genres such as funk and disco. The non-linear, serial

repetition of rhythms, which were so important to Brown’s oeuvre, would have a

dramatic effect on music as they called for a new form of response, one that might be

characterised as one of immersion rather than attention to linear structure. We can

find the new non-linear forms that courted the groove in the DJ mixes that were

artificially extended in the discotheques:

In disco the musical pulse is freed from the claustrophobic interiors ofthe blues and the tight scaffolding of R&B and early soul music. Alooser, explicitly polyrhythmic attack pushes the blues, gospel and soulheritage into an apparently endless cycle where there is no beginningor end, just an ever-present "now." Disco music does not come to ahalt . . . restricted to a three-minute single, the music would berendered senseless. The power of disco lay in saturating dancers andthe dance floor in the continual explosion of its presence.723

Disco’s emphasis on the ever-present “now” might indicate a more vital relationship

with the affective pleasure to be found in the music rather than in the broader political

environment. This of course, shifts the focus to an emphasis on the politics of

affective relations rather than action predicated on the previous action-image idea of

narrativised events. Although the very physical nature of dancing might appear to be

about action and hence related to the action-image, in fact the opposite is true – as

understood from an existential point of view. The image of thought behind dancing

720 (Brown 1973c) and (Brown 1973c) which came out in April and June 1973 respectively.721 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 103)722 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 103)723 (Chambers in Werner 2000: 207)

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and its lack of determination of its gestures is the very opposite to the logic of action-

reaction and agency. The beauty of dancing is of course in the process of losing one’s

self in an undetermined form of space/time. Hence its appeal to those who have the

least power in regard to agency in relations to majoritarian politics – which is why it

had perhaps an inordinate appeal to the marginalised in the community, such as its

black and gay audiences, or to those “Idiots” for whom there was another way of

being outside hegemonically constructed time and space.724 The necessity of

developing events for such becomings gave rise to the block parties and discotheques

and would allow the minor cultures to attempt to connect with the world again. By

connecting, I mean a way of connecting with the world outside of the limitations of

imposed time/space, and to do so also required the development of aesthetics that

would bring out the possibilities of new relations to time.

Even if Brown’s commercial status would eventually decline in the mid-1970s, his

iconic status would prevail. The innovations of the groove so central to Brown’s

music would be further extrapolated by other funk and disco groups throughout the

1970s through groups such as the Ohio Players, Kool and the Gang, the Meters and of

course Parliament-Funkadelic. George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic would indeed

go as far as to poach many of Brown’s disenchanted ex-musicians, emancipating them

from Brown’s autocratic leadership and generally giving them a chance to express

themselves on the one in their own way.725 As history has it, the groove would further

evolve into disco through the music of Parliament-Funkadelic or The Sound of

Philadelphia.726 The link is of course the minor communities, such as those of black

725 Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, George Clinton fronted two groups by the names of Parliamentand Funkadelic. Whilst both based their music around funk rhythms, Funkadelic was the decidedlymore acid-rock inspired of the two. Although it was perhaps acid as well as members that werecommon to both groups. The splitting of the groups was to allow Clinton to work for two separaterecord labels. Thus the groups operating under the broader Clinton umbrella collectively are referred toin the singular as Parliament-Funkadelic. Clinton’s gift for mythology gave Parliament-Funkadelic anextraterrestrial connection (later linked to what would be called Afrofuturism) and producing a musicalsub-genre that was referred to as "P-Funk”. Also, in distinction to the James Brown of the 1960s and1970s (but not the 1980s) who was vehemently anti-drugs, Clinton was anything but, and Parliament-Funkadelic was literally a James Brown band on acid, given that Clinton had been recruiting Brown’sdisgruntled musicians from the early 1970s. For example Clinton took on the members of the originalJBs of the early 1970s including Bootsy and Catfish Collins and Frank Waddy. This exodus continuedduring the 1970s and Clinton absorbed other prominent James Brown band members such as FredWesley and Maceo Parker, in turn.726 See for example the episode, Make it Funky from the television series, Dancing in the Street (1996)for a full account.

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and gay cultures who attempted to emancipate themselves from the constraints of

hegemonic time for as long as possible.

Irrational Cuts and Existential Statements

The continuing development of these emphatic groove-oriented forms of composition

would occur concurrently in other any-space-whatevers such as the discotheques and

the block parties not only of the United States but elsewhere. Whilst I will shortly

discuss the example of Kraftwerk, there are many individual movements that would

emerge from this courting of the groove, all significantly occurring with a similar

historical time span. Other examples would include the sound system culture that

emerged from the ghettos of Trenchtown and in particular the rise of an irrational

music par example, namely dub, at around the same time in the late 1960s.727 It

perhaps goes without saying that any such places of becoming were dedicated to the

transcendence of the banality of common sense time and space and the distinctly

chronological time that marked the menial, low paid jobs that many of those people

had to endure between trips to the dance floor.

I think it is fair through all this to emphasise the foundational nature of Brown’s funk

in helping to emancipate the groove like no other music before. Its message was that a

groove would always be of importance to any minor culture whose everyday life was

so overwhelmingly imposed upon by the dominant forms of hegemonic time. The

groove was vital to this undoing of space, which was achieved through the groove’s

shift from a compositional concentration on “movement” within the composition to a

more temporal orientation.

727 The style referred to as “dub” evolved from the creation of new “versions” of previously recordedtracks, produced mainly through a liberal coating of effects such as reverb and echo. An interestingpoint that once again draws upon the influence of James Brown is made by Lloyd Bradley who writesin Bass Culture (2001), that this practice of creating new instrumental version sides may well havebeen influenced by the Godfather’s practice of putting an instrumental “Part 2” of the B-sides of hissingles (Bradley 2001: 313).One of the most feted of these early dub producers, is King Tubby. KingTubby put his sound system rig “Tubby’s Home Town HiFi” together in 1968 (Bradley 2001: 314).“He introduced echo, reverb and sound effects to the dance by bringing a range of specially built ormodified outboard gear to his control tower” (Bradley 2001: 314). Tubby’s sonic experimentation hada lot to do with the development of the dub style, and the issuing of instrumental reggae "versions"would become standard practice evolving into the sub-genre of “dub” reggae(Bradley 2001: 314-320).

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Increasingly innovative compositional approaches were deployed in service of the

maintenance of the groove and it was the differences in these approaches that

produced the generic distinction between electronic dance music cultures. Most of the

styles to emerge from this period would alleviate a determined sense of time from its

totalisation or rational projection through a system of “irrational cuts”. The electronic

dance music genres to emerge from this period involved myriad manifestations of the

application of such irrational cuts, although they were also common to both disco and

hip-hop:

Beatmatching, cuts and blends (or “running” records, as Pete calls it)were required skills on the gay scene thanks to pioneers like TerryNoel, Francis Grasso, Steve D’Acquisto and Michael Cappello.Grandmaster Flowers, who’d been playing since 1967, as well asPlummer, Maboya and Pete Jones himself, deserve credit fordeveloping the same skills at the same time and - crucial to our story -for showing them off to the wide world of greater New York. ‘theywould say that Flowers was a mixer and I was a chopper,” says Pete,describing Grandmaster Flowers” style as being closest to the DJs inthe gay clubs. “Flowers was an expert mixer. He didn’t chop too manyof the records, he would blend. Plummer was a mixer also, but I likedto chop, I liked to get the beat BANG! BANG! - I loved to chop. Evenbefore I had a cueing system, I liked to chop them records up”.728

It is in service of the ever present “now” or a series of “presents” that informs such

“mixing and chopping”. This wilful cultivation of the irrational cuts coalesces into a

sense of immersion rather than imploring the action required by the linear logic of

narrative.

This requires the kind of circular, hypnotic rhythms that Brown elicited from his

finely honed rhythm orchestras, although it perhaps goes without saying that the

intricacy and precision required to maintain this rhythmic lineage, let alone the

stamina, meant that such grooves were generally impossible for lesser mortals to

muster. If Brown set a precedent here, the intensity of that precedent would call for

the subsequent emancipation and transformation of the synthesizer, from an

instrument of progressive rock into a dance music instrument.

728 (Brewster & Broughton 2001)

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From Cold Sweat to No Sweat

Brown’s pioneering work with rhythm took popular music from a linear logic of

verse/chorus/verse structure into groove-orientated musics within the space of a

decade. The intense nature of Brown’s rhythms not only began to dominate popular

music composition, but also in doing so began to anticipate the appropriate hardware

to take up such affordances, which is why I believe that the ensuing convergence of

the electronic with the rhythms of dance music culture is the product of the rhythmic

intensity set up by Brown’s bands. Brown set high standards when it came to

maintaining a particular level of intensity and from there on in, it would require dance

music producers to come up with some rather innovative ways of keeping up. This

point is confirmed by Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones who says that Brown was:

The precursor to all modern dance music. James tried to get his band toplay like a machine. The rhythm section just kicked over all the time.When machines did came intro dance, music people complained thatthe sound wasn’t real or soulful, but here was James Brown pushinghis band into playing as tightly as a machine. He was a tyrant as abandleader- he forced his band to play exactly what he wanted wherehe wanted it ...It was a groove machine! I liked his other tunes likePapa’s Got A Brand New Bag but this was the future. Kids todayunderstand how to put a groove together like they didn’t in my day andit’s all down to James Brown.729

Electronic invention would go on to assist in an aesthetic so difficult to achieve

without several drummers and years of hell on the chitlin circuit, let alone Brown’s

despotism and the vast reserves of funk musicians on hand. The intricacy and

precision required to maintain this rhythmic lineage was almost impossible to emulate

without the type of finely honed rhythm orchestra that few could easily muster.

The much vaunted influence of Kraftwerk on electronic dance music in the 1970s was

perhaps due to their ability to maintain the speed, accuracy and intricacy that was

expected on the dance floor, post-Brown, but finding a more efficient way of doing

so. Their method was not only more efficient but also a product of the aesthetics of

the Protestant work ethic as much as anything else. As former drummer Wolfgang

Flür has commented in the documentary Better Living Through Circuitry, trying to

729 (Harrington & Jones 2002: 9)

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maintain the appropriate rhythms via a conventional drum kit is hard work and made

you sweat, so an electronic kit was, “...very elegant you know, without sweating...”730

Groups such as Kraftwerk had also tapped into the aesthetic possibilities of previous

movements in twentieth century music via the European avant-gardes, and the

German postwar legacy such Stockhausen and the Cologne school as well as Cage

and Musique Concrete. This was also part of a broader popular music lineage that

went from Stockhausen into Kraftwerk and into Euro disco through producers like

Georgio Moroder.731

Just as was occurring simultaneously on the other side of the Atlantic, Kraftwerk too

were on the vanguard of addressing the type of “powerlessness” of thought that

Deleuze discusses in relation to Artaud. For the young post-war German youth had to

bear the weight of a history that they did not want to inherit. In his book, I Was A

Robot (2003), former Kraftwerk member Wolfgang Flür discusses the difficulty of

identifying with being German as the post-war generation. It was through new

rhythms and approaches to composition that they could potentially transform this

relationship to their immediate history:

Our immediate past was haunted by the Second World War, anightmare which brought incomprehensible suffering to the nationsaround us and to our own, provoked by the dreadful mass stupidity andrepulsive military fanaticism of a generation submissive to orders.What did we young people have to be glad about when we thoughtabout our country and about our parents, who had caused it all,participated in it or had at least looked away like cowards? There wasnothing for our generation to look back on; there was only thefuture.732

Perhaps one of Kraftwerk’s most endearing and successful attributes was their

adoption of the most exaggerated of German stereotypes, yet adopting this difference

730 (Flur in Reiss 2001)731 As Brewster and Broughton tell us: “Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte were two transplantedforeigners set down in Munich; one Italian, the other English [who] produced Donna Summer’s “Loveto Love You Baby” (Brewster & Broughton 1999: 185). Moroder was “…inspired by, of all things,Iron Butterfly’s prog-rock epic “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” (Brewster & Broughton 1999: 185). So the acidfuelled epics of progressive rock, “…lengthened what had originally started out as a four-minute songto fill one whole side of an album, nearly 17 minutes in all. It became one of disco’s first worldwidehits” (Brewster & Broughton 1999: 185).732 (Flür 2003: 241)

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through repetition, successfully enabled their transcendence of the limits of what these

stereotypes represented. Their self-mythologizing also enabled them to selectively

acknowledge the past without being subsumed by it – enabling them to concentrate

not on the narratives of their immediate environment – but rather the audience “who

were missing”:

Kraftwerk’s great theme is - and was- their fascination with the realmodern world. Raised in industrial Dusseldorf, Hutter and Schneiderflirted briefly with vague classical tunes and then had a go atreproducing the clank and clatter of factory towns in the early ‘70s.Soon, they moved on to embrace technology in all forms.733

Technology presents itself, not only to Kraftwerk, but also in the case of African-

American communities and the discotheques as an allegiance to a future,734 a

synthesis created in order to move ahead without the preconception of maintaining the

“reality” of a lineage.

Testament to the productivity of these irrational connections was the way in which the

music of what might have appeared to be two incongruous worlds residing on either

side of the Atlantic would be so readily synthesised by an Afrika Bambaataa, with a

track such as Planet Rock (1982)735 in which the stoic calculation of German

electronica, met the ravages of the ghetto and the post-soul gangs of the Bronx.

Such irrational connections were made just as readily in the techno to emerge more

generally from Detroit as well. This was a musical connection of future oriented

sounds that looked for a “people to come” and one that might emerge from the “any-

space-whatevers”, whether the Bronx, Detroit or Dusseldorf. Bambaataa’s star rose

through his “appropriation” of Kraftwerk,736 but he was also quick to bring Brown

733 (Quantick 1991: 4)734 Afrofuturism provides such an example of the creation of a future. As Mark Dery writes in theessay/interview “Black to the Future: Afro-Futurism 1.0” (1994): “Speculative fiction that treatsAfrican-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th centurytechnoculture- and more generally, African American signification that appropriates images oftechnology and a prosthetically enhanced future - -might for want of a better term, be called "Afro-futurism”' (Dery 1994: 180)735 (Afrika Bambaataa and Soul Sonic Force 1982)736 It was undoubtedly a difficult prospect for the older artists to accept how their music had “returned”in its repetition. For instance, in his autobiography I Was a Robot former Kraftwerk member, WolfgangFlür lambasts Afrika Bambaataa over the latter’s appropriation of the group’s work. Flür discusses theuse of unauthorised sampling as a form of “theft” (Flür 2003: 247), and by example recounts his

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into the picture. For instance, Bambaataa acknowledged his debt to Brown when the

two went into the studio together to do a 12" single collaboration, Unity (1984). This

track saw the two musicians rapping over a medley of Brown beats and was an early

acknowledgment of the proliferation of the currency of his music on the street.737

Interestingly, Bambaataa’s single came at a time when James Brown’s profile needed

some bolstering, especially for the 80s post-soul generation who had not been

particularly aware of the seminal block parties, or of how much of hip-hop’s musical

culture was based on James Brown’s music.

Brown’s Crystalline Refrains

Brown has provided many affordances in the creative evolution of electronic dance

music cultures and the continuing popularity of James Brown’s music as a sample

source, such as one of his screams, remains powerful, because it conjures up that pure

affective relation that Deleuze describes as a “son-sign” that punctures the rational

time and space of hegemonic domination.

Brown’s squeals and grunts have indeed become ubiquitous, as a grunt or a well-

timed “Good God!” can be conveniently inserted into the sampled work as a work of

affective intensity, one that can stand for itself, that is not tied to narrative.

Furthermore, this is usually an intensity to which the majoritarian culture remains

blind. Brown’s voice takes on a crystalline quality based on the way that it fragments

the sequential logic of the music as it solicits a form of recollection that transcends its

more benign virtual status. Many of the elements of his music, such as the punctuating

experience of Bambaataa’s and Arthur Baker’s Planet Rock as an “American-style piece of music”(Flür 2003: 247), although one wonders how Planet Rock could be considered “American-style” seeingit was based on a hybrid of the group’s tracks, Numbers and Trans-Europe Express (and itselfevocative of the transitional space of any-space-whatever). Flür continues to criticise the samplers suchas Bambaataa and writes, “They didn’t even ask in the first place whether Kraftwerk was in agreementwith this, let alone pay for the use of the samples. This is the nastiest kind of theft! Since theintroduction of sampling technology, this has happened on a daily basis in the music industry. Artistsare continually robbed of their intellectual property. It’s impossible to take something like that lyingdown…I have nothing against sampling in general, if the owner is asked before and acceptableconditions are negotiated” (Flür 2003: 247-248). In the time-honoured tradition of “never ask apoliceman”, negotiation of course is untenable in this circumstance, as most experimentation wouldbecome impossible under such circumstances. This is why Deleuze so steadfastly rejects any reiterationof moralism that will only impose upon the more pressing philosophical task at hand and which alsobeen half the battle with popular music theory. This merely demonstrates that the dominant populationwill always by nature be blind to the cutting edge of the minor and in fact serves becoming.737 The single was only reasonably commercially successful and thus perhaps reinforcing Brown’scontinued “minor” status.

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screams, take over where language fails. Yet a James Brown sample extricated from

the past and reiterated through the music of DJ or sampler provides a temporal

juxtaposition that calls the construction of time itself into question.

The crystal will allow for a series of transversal relations that transforms any punctual

or static past into the flow of the past. Emphasising the difference between the

punctual and the transversal is the best way to pursue the ensuing shift from the

sequential to the serial, or from representation to nomad thought. We could cite this

compositional process as the shift toward the non-linear and the serial found in remix

culture. Through their aesthetic practices, the problematic takes precedence over the

space of determination. This reminds us of a relationship between minor art and

seriality as Rodowick notes, “Few have noted that most of Deleuze’s examples of

‘serial’ cinema come from ‘hybrid’ and postcolonial filmmakers, including Pierre

Perrault, Glauber Rocha, Ousmane Sembene, the Los Angeles school of African

American filmmakers, and many others”.738

The music of the post-soul will rely on these relationships of falsifying official history

through the juxtaposition of recollection brought into the present. As I will discuss in

the next chapter, it will bring these times into a relationship between the crystal and

its virtual image in relation to the productive powers of the false. Thus it is important

here to note the characteristics of the crystal: the indiscernability of the real and the

imaginary, the inexplicability of differences in the present, the undecidablity of truth

or falsity of different versions of the past and finally the incompossibility of the

image.739 This final characteristic, which Deleuze borrows from Leibniz, refers to

decisions pertaining to the contingency of possibility. These essential elements of the

time-image, are expressed more clearly by Rodowick:

...sequences are formed not through linear succession in space andchronological succession in time. The "will to falsehood" of the directtime-image draws all of its powers from this quality ofincommensurability: indiscernability of the real and the imaginary inthe image; inexplicability of narrative events; undecidablity of relativeperspectives on the same event, both in the present and in the relationof present and past; and, finally, the incompossibility of narrative

738 (Rodowick 1997: 140)739 (Rodowick 1997: 179)

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worlds, which proliferate as incongruous presents and not-necessarily-true pasts.740

The “seers” are perhaps more applicable to a minor cinema because of the need to

“see” and in our example to “hear”. In this chapter I have attempted to show how the

DJ as “seer” has attempted to extract the alterity from past narratives by breaking

them up and subjecting them to the “irrational”. This allows connectivity to the

outside of “common sense” as a given logic. The discovery of this outside brings

about a new belief in the world because it presents connections rather than accepting

the narratives that once led to totalising structure. If crystalline narration is

deliberately “ problematic”,741 in this way, so too is the music of the post-soul

generation, although I should also point out that for Deleuze the “problematic” is

always productive. Each time a break beat is emancipated, for instance, it allows the

line of time from which it emerged to be emancipated in the process. The past

becomes free again. In this respect, the old soul records can be seen as part of a big

pool of virtual past. Each moment out of all the old records also alludes to a potential

future that can be brought out through the overturning of the past in this way. Rather

than maligning or judging the past, the images of the past are delivered back as pure

blocks of pragmatic potential. To do this requires strengthening relations with the

virtual. Art brings out the power of the virtual. This is of course the very power of the

music, but is also a reflection of what Deleuze attributes to a will-to-power that was

once expressed in the determined time/space of the narrative and which will in turn

become the powers of the false.

As I will discuss in chapter 8, it is falsity that is far more interesting to creative

thought. It is through false relations that might emerge through the juxtaposition of

representation and appearance that unleash the power of the simulacra and the powers

of the false. We might consider musical samples as such “powers of the false”, a

positive form of simulation that departs from “established truth” to produce its own

reality. In fact, the seriality that was a product of the time-image image in this chapter

has an intrinsic relationship to the simulacra, which is used by the minor to extract a

co-existent temporality from the constraints of a chronos. These powers of the false

740 (Rodowick 1997: 179)741 (Deleuze 1989: 174)

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will be examined in the next chapter because they show how the irrational

connections of the time-image might pursue a “people to come” who are perhaps at

odds with the given “truths” of the current political situation.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

WHEN HE RETURNS

In the last chapter I suggested that the music of the post-soul might correspond to the

“crystalline” regime of the time-image in Deleuze’s Cinema 2. I also suggested that

the soul aesthetic corresponded to the “organic” movement-image. The last section of

the previous chapter proposed that the powers of the false of the crystalline time

image offer much potential for theorising DJ/sampling culture. In this chapter, I will

argue that the powers of the false are central to the emergence of the time-image

because they demonstrate the creative power of time. As quoted in chapter 1, Deleuze

has explained that the powers of the false might make possible a process of

“becoming rather than stories”, leading to an ontological shift from movement-image

to time-image. Through the powers of the false, becoming is able to eschew the

common sense notions of time/space that we have come to associate with

“movement”. Becoming is no longer framed within the narrative forms of a

teleological time.

Twentieth century musical composition also reflected this existential shift

aesthetically. The more avant-garde composers of the fine music tradition are most

often cited as responsible for these changes in composition. They saw fit to move

away from the closed totality of composition and to affirm chance and indeterminacy.

John Cage is one such figure, famously making use of chance operations, such as in

the consulting of the I-Ching, to determine the compositional process. This type of

indeterminacy is central to his compositions, including Music of Changes (1951)742

and Williams Mix (1952). 743 In the latter case, chance operations were used to

determine the choice and length of the tape splices that would make up the piece.

Further indication of the world of music opening up to chance were other experiments

concurrent with Cage’s, including the work of composers such as Pierre Schaeffer and

Pierre Henry of the musique concrète movement (1951).744 An early precursor to

sampling, the musique concrète method involved an assemblage of tapes of “found

sounds” which, having been subjected to various forms of manipulation such as

742 (Morgan 1991: 362)743 (Morgan 1991: 467)744 (Morgan 1991: 463-464)

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variable playback speeds, or reversal, were then composited into new electronic

compositions.745 The legacy of these more avant-garde streams of the fine music

tradition affected production of the more mainstream styles of popular music, through

artists such as The Beatles, David Bowie and Brian Eno, to name but a few.

The innovations of these artists have already been subject to much commentary,

academic and otherwise. Rather less covered, however, are some of the chance-

affirming devices introduced through African-American music practice, and

throughout this thesis, I have attempted to give Brown his rightful place among such

musical liberators of thought. By way of example, I have discussed the legacy of the

irrational cut derived from the gospel tradition as one of these less celebrated chance

affirming musical strategies that made use of indeterminacy to provide a vital form of

tension to the musical event. The highly repetitive aesthetic of funk’s groove might be

seen to demonstrate an affirmation of chance through repetition, where devices such

as the “irrational cut” throw any simple chronological time into disarray.

Much of the tension involved was created by the music’s subversion of the more

“common sense” function usually attributed to repetition (here taken as repetition of

the predictable). A differently repetitive music such as funk has the effect of

disorienting the listener as it plays with the vagaries of time. It provides an undulating

repetition that diverts its audience away from teleological “goal” and devoid of any

specific guide as to where they are exactly in the musical trajectory, which would

otherwise be lost in the groove. For repetition can be quite mysterious. Indeed,

contrary to common sense, the object (musical or otherwise) that is repeated does not

produce similitude, but difference. The certainty that the repeated has an intrinsic

relationship to the object it is repeating is never guaranteed. I have previously detailed

this idea in chapter 2, where Deleuze has argued that repetition does not change the

object of contemplation so much as it changes something in the mind that

contemplates it.

Brown embraced chance as a compositional aesthetic, and from the late 1960s onward

he would increasingly improvise his way through many of his funk compositions,

745 (Morgan 1991: 463-464)

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lyrically and instrumentally. However, I am less concerned with the manifestation of

chance in improvisation as I am with funk’s repetition as chance’s most overt

expression. The funk groove’s underlying tension through chance in repetition was

also found in Brown’s musicians who were gripped by the anxiety of uncertainty as

they clung onto Brown’s hand signals and winged their way through the track as best

they could.

What might be so liberating about this affirmation of chance? As I will argue in this

final chapter, it is better to accept this chaos of the “outside” and harness its power as

a form of expression, rather than be subsumed by a fear of it. I have previously

suggested that if chaos is the inherent existential condition of the post-soul period, a

politics of the post-soul might have to work with it. By chaos, here, I mean the

imminent existential social conditions described by concepts such as the any-space-

whatever or the schizophrenia of the double consciousness of the Black Atlantic

subject. Taken together, a chaos of heterogeneous temporal dimensions related to the

any-space-whatever is synthesised as the inner durational experience of the post-soul

subject. Given the ongoing condition of the fragmented minor subject, an embrace of

chaos is vital, as it provides the possibility of empowerment.

Art, such as funk, provides a productive strategy that enables the minor subject to

brace itself against the indeterminate chaos, by using it to their advantage. So, the

DJing/sampling culture inherent to the artistic expression of the post-soul generation

can be seen to apprehend chaos and indeterminacy as an aesthetic force. This is

perhaps a musical correlate to the type of ritual undertaken by those who go

swimming in mid-winter for “health reasons”. Only by actively embracing potential

death can one overcome imminent conditions as a source of fear. In fact, such an

activity can become refrain from which further rituals and mythologies can be built,

all necessary steps for the production of “a people”.

Within this context, the sampling of Brown’s music might be seen to be the reworking

of refrains for a people to come. The post-soul generations indulge in Brown’s

refrains with the bracing effect of cold Siberian ice water – a wilful plunge into the

chaosmos in order to ward off its ill effects.

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In the reworking of Brown’s refrains, there is a very different relation to the past. In

this respect, DJs and samplers might be seen to engage with the Brown sample as

“recollection-image” , a concept which Laura Marks make use of in relation to

postcolonial cinema,

[a] recollection-image embodies the traces of an event whoserepresentation has been buried, but it cannot represent the event itself.Through attentive recognition it may provoke an imaginativereconstruction, such as a flashback, that pulls it back intounderstandable causal relationships.746

Brown’s refrains will take on a ritualistic power for the post-soul generations because

of their capacity to inspire such imaginative reconstruction, a new assertion of a

history, and an escape from subordination to the dark shadow of an unrecallable past.

Accounting for Brown’s Return

We have reached a point where many of Brown’s refrains - the screams, the horn

stabs, the “funky drummer” samples - seem to be sampled so often as to have become

part of the public domain. However, I have decided not to weigh the chapter down

with a mass of examples of what James Brown samples have been used or where and

when they have been used. I do not think that a sustained citation of specific examples

would amount to more than “sample trainspotting”. Lists of the many thousands of

Brown samples used in electronic dance music genres are the subject of excellent

websites that keep comprehensive databases of such things, such as The Breaks.com

site,747 acting as the content for the legions of “breakbeat” compilations – including

the recently released James Brown’s Greatest Breakbeats (2005).748 As

comprehensive references of the use of Brown samples can be found elsewhere, and

in abundance, my examples are necessarily limited.

I will now account for the return of James Brown’s refrains via the turntable, the

pause-tape or the sampler. This return has provided a musical staple for the music of

746 (Laura U. Marks 2000: 50)747 (The-Breaks.Com 2005). In fact to get an idea of how much James Brown has been sampled, oneonly has to do an artist search for James Brown on said site.748 (Brown 2005b). There is also the accompanying Funky People’s Greatest Hits dedicated to artistsfrom the Brown Production stable(Brown 2005a)

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the post-soul generation.749 In fact, the ongoing fascination of electronic dance music

producers with Brown’s work has contributed to whole genres of music. Referring to

himself as an “overall product of the post james brown music generation”, Ahmir

“?uestlove” Thompson, from hip-hop group The Roots, comments:

it would be redundant for me to remind you of mr. Brown’s anchor inclassic hip hop (“funky drummer”), new jack swing (lyn collins'immortal ‘think (about it)”), drum and bass (‘soul pride” accounts forat least 40 per cent of the genre’s drum breaks) – or any of theoffspring that these offspring offsprung.750

Thompson’s comment is but one testament to the legacy of Brown’s refrains within

contemporary electronic dance music culture. Indeed, as I will recount later in the

chapter, by the late 1980s to early 1990s, the sampling of Brown was so widespread

that one particular Belgian Techno group sought fit to declare James Brown “dead”751

– perhaps the ultimate testament to his impact on contemporary dance music culture.

In relation to this pervasive influence within DJing and sampling culture, Cynthia

Rose has written that Brown might be seen as, “…the Andy Warhol of twentieth-

century sound: a talent without whom it is simply impossible to try and imagine

popular music”.752 Perhaps we might examine this relationship between Brown and

Warhol more thoroughly.

For Deleuze, “Pop Art” demonstrated the power of the simulacrum, a point made in

the following quote by Brian Massumi:

…the point at which simulacrum began to unmask itself was reachedin painting with the advent of Pop Art. In film, it was Italian neo-Realism and the French New Wave. Perhaps we are now reaching thatpoint in popular culture as a whole. Advanced capitalism, Deleuze and

749 This of course is not just Brown, but his individual musicians have become famous for theircontribution. For instance Clyde “Funky Drummer” Stubblefield would later release his own sampleCDs and midi drum beat packages (Stubblefield 1993). The release came within a few years ofnewfound acclaim and on the back of the mass sampling of his work that was occurring. This includedcollaborations with contemporary rock musicians such that with fellow Wisconsonian, Butch Vig onGarbage’s debut album, Garbage (1994).750 (Ahmir '?uestove' Thompson 2001: 16)751 I refer here to the single, James Brown is Dead (LA Style 1991) the details of which I will cover indetail later in the chapter.752 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 16)

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Guattari argue, is reaching a new transnational level that necessitates adissolution of old identities and territorialities and the unleashing ofobjects, images and information having far more mobility andcombinatory potential than ever before…The challenge is to assumethis new world of simulation and take it one step farther, to the point ofno return, to raise it to a positive simulation of the highest degree bymarshaling all our powers of the false toward shattering the grid ofrepresentation once and for all.753

Contributing to this shattering of representation, the aesthetic practices of DJ and

sampling cultures have reconceived the simulacrum in their own way. I would argue

that it is only through this subversion of the “common sense” of representation that art

can maintain an active campaign of the becoming of a “people”. I have suggested that

the post-soul generation itself might be seen as an emergence of such “a people”, one

made possible through a shattering of representation.

Mark Anthony Neal contends that the post-soul aesthetic is characterised by its active

“bastardisation” of the memories of soul past. As I have described it in the previous

chapter, the narratives of soul records were discarded as a source of narrative

potential. Soul music was instead stripped back to its breakbeats. The bulk of their

musical “message” was left unrecalled. This practice demonstrates Neal’s contention

that such tactics are the, “…components of post-soul strategies that willingly

“bastardise” black history and culture to create alternative meanings, a process that

was largely introduced to the post-soul generation via the blaxploitation films of the

1970s”.754 Neal’s concept of “bastardisation” is an important concept, but I would

like to take this idea further. For post-soul “bastardisation” might also be considered

as a freeing of the simulacrum, or, to quote Brian Massumi, to provide a “means

rather than an end” for the past it pulls apart. 755

This notion of a positive use of the simulacrum is somewhat removed from that

identified with the postmodern analysis favoured not only by Neal, but other

academic analyses such as those by Richard Shusterman,756 George Lipsitz,757 and

753 (Massumi 1987)754 (Neal 2002: 22)755 (Massumi 1987)756 See “The Fine Art of Rap” (Shusterman 1991).757 For example, George Lipsitz’s Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism And ThePoetics Of Place (1994)

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Russell Potter.758 An acceptance of what is now traditional postmodern analysis

requires an implicit acceptance of the Platonic form of the simulacrum759 (even if it is

critical about its results). A Deleuzean simulacrum, on the other hand, does not accept

any implicit relationship to an original model at all.760

The Simulacrum

Instead of categorising the simulacrum in a Platonic fashion - as the poor copy -

Deleuze’s theory gives the simulacrum a reality of its own. I will shortly provide

some relevant examples, from what might be described as “postmodern” artistic

practice. However, prior to doing so, I will briefly discuss the reasons why Deleuze

was so inspired to “overturn Platonism” – and, by extension, previous ideas about the

simulacrum - in texts such as Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense .761

Deleuze believes that through this overturning of Platonism we might begin to

overcome the conceptual problems that have arisen as a result of our fixation on the

concepts of the Same or Similar taken as the primary points of analysis.

In the section of the Logic of Sense (1990) entitled “Plato and the Simulacrum”,

Deleuze analyses the hierarchy of images that continue to pervade our contemporary

sensibilities as a legacy of Platonic thought. The “common sense” understanding of

representation involved is one dependent upon a hierarchy that starts with the original

as model, the copy as the faithful reproduction of the model, and finally, external to

this relationship, the simulacrum as the bad reproduction of the original model.762

Plato considers the simulacrum to be nothing more than third rate in relation to the

original, and second rate in relation to the copy.

758 (Potter 1995). For instance, in his Spectacular Vernaculars (1994), Russell Potter will subsequentlydescribe Hip-Hop as a form of “…highly sophisticated postmodernism” (Potter 1995: 13). Potter’sbasic argument is to show how hip-hop is a self-conscious political practice, hence the “ludic resistancepostmodernism” (Potter 1995: 13). However, I would argue for giving precedence to becoming ratherthan speaking of things in terms of postmodern “resistance”, particularly as the latter begins to steerclose to an assimilation into the dialectical (Deleuze, 1994: 263).759 For example, in his essay, “Realer Than Real: The Simulacrum According To Deleuze andGuattari” (1987), Brian Massumi critiques the notion of simulation as theorised by Jean Baudrillard,which requires an acceptance of a Platonic theory of representation and where the simulacrum isperceived as a copy of a copy and this giving way to the “hyperreality” of contemporary society(Massumi 1987).760 Deleuze’s discussion of the Platonic form of the simulacrum appears as an appendix in The Logic ofSense (1990) (Deleuze 1990b: 253-265).761 (Deleuze 1994: 126)762 (Deleuze 1990: 253-265)

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Deleuze, of course, seizes on this point, arguing on the one hand, that the simulacra

should be untied from “originals” and “copies” and, on the other hand, that we might

use the simulacra’s powers of falsity - of production of difference in a disturbance of

representation - to its own ends. Whilst the simulacrum possesses an extrinsic

resemblance to the model, it is never intrinsically or absolutely connected to it and

thus the simulacrum will maintain its own reality instead. Thus contrary to the way

we might normally regard the simulacrum, the Deleuzean simulacrum has its own life.

It is not merely a shadow of a more authentic model. This entitles it to generate

becomings away from hierarchies of representation. Deleuze will contend that the

becomings that emerge on behalf of the simulacrum are all just as real and valid as

any “original”, and thus proposes, “…that if the simulacrum still has a model, it is

another model, a model of the Other (l'autre).763

As I have just mentioned, the Deleuzean simulacra often maintains an extrinsic

relationship to the model, but this is very different to the intrinsic one implied by the

faithful copy. In his “reversal of Platonism”764 Deleuze denies the hierarchical

relationship that gives the “original” a primacy over the copy, and instead attempts to

bestow simulation the power of its own subversive becoming, “In short, there is in the

simulacrum a becoming-mad, or a becoming unlimited…a becoming always other, a

becoming subversive”.765

As Deleuze also contends in this essay “Plato and the Simulacrum”, there is an anti-

Platonism which is always at the heart of Platonism and as such, “…the different, the

dissimilar, the unequal – in short, becoming-may well be not merely defects which

affect copies like a ransom paid for their secondary character or a counterpart to their

resemblance, but rather models themselves, terrifying models of the pseudos in which

unfolds the powers of the false”.766 Deleuze will mobilise these pseudos so that they

are given a life of their own, one unencumbered by subordination to some notion of

originary identity.

763 (Deleuze 1990: 258)764 (Deleuze 1990b: 253)765 (Deleuze 1990: 258-259)766 (Deleuze 1994: 128)

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This Deleuzean emancipation of the simulacra will thus underscore a basic

incompatibility between his work and the way the simulacrum is conceived within

most postmodern analysis. Hence, Deleuze will stand apart from the lineage of

scholars that have lamented the wicked ways of the simulacrum, including

Baudrillard, Jameson and Attali, all of whom assume an implicit Platonic point of

view.767 Many critical postmodern theories have a general tendency to treat repetition

with scorn, being as it is characteristic of the mass reproduction of the commodity

form that distinguishes life under late capitalism.768

Much postmodern theory might be considered an expansion of the social effects of

mimesis first questioned by Benjamin in his seminal Work of Art in the Age of

Mechanical Reproduction (1936/1977).769 It should be noted that Benjamin was

actually rather optimistic about the potential of the copy to undermine the authority of

the “superstructure”.770 However, Benjamin also veers into Platonic thought when he

begins to lament the effects of mechanical reproduction on the “aura” of the

original.771 Whilst Deleuze makes no specific mention of Benjamin’s famous essay,

he would have undoubtedly shared the latter’s optimism concerning the ability of the

copy to undermine the power of the “superstructure”, although one would think that

Deleuze would stop short at claiming any degradation of an “aura”,772 as it relies on a

767 For Baudrillard’s inherent Platonism see footnote 733. For Jameson see footnote 740 below. Thefinal section (and general outlook) of Attali’s Noise (1985) such as that found in “Chapter 5:Composing” is optimistic about what music might do for society. Attali will comment, “A new noise isbeing heard (a new way of making music), suggesting the emergence of a new society” (Attali 1985:133). However on the way through, Attali will write about how, “[r]ecording introduces a new networkfor the economy of music, encouraging ‘the individualized stockpiling of music . . . on a huge scale’”(Attali 1985: 32). This is particularly prevalent in “Chapter 4: Repeating”, which says that repetitivemass production is indicative of broader social relations. Hence we learn that collective consumptiongives way to individualized accumulation where the jukebox replaces the concert (Attali 1985: 95).Music stops being a social event and instead the audience will stockpile music for individualsatisfaction (Attali 1985: 100-101).768 For a negative repetition is intimated in the Jamesonian idea of postmodern culture as pastiche. ForJameson, pastiche merely recycles the modern cultural styles of the past to the point of stagnation.Pastiche in this sense being merely an imitation founded upon the copy of an original. In an interviewwith Anders Stephanson, Jameson speaks of the need, “[t]o undo postmodernism homeopathically bythe methods of postmodernism: to work at dissolving the pastiche by using all the instruments ofpastiche itself, to reconquer some genuine historical sense by using the instruments of what I havecalled substitutes for history” (Stephanson & Jameson 1989: 59).769 (Benjamin 1977: 384-408)770 (Benjamin 1977: 384-385)771 Whilst Benjamin is generally optimistic about the effects of mechanical reproduction in creating amore egalitarian relation to the work of art within the “substructure”, his work also betrays somelingering romanticism about the dissipation of the object’s uniqueness that is a necessary effect of the“decay of the aura” (Benjamin 1977: 388).772 (Benjamin 1977: 388-389).

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notion of a primal, original image. As John Rajchman comments in relation to

Deleuze’s ideas, “…in a modern world of stupefying banality, routine, cliché,

mechanical reproduction or automatism, the problem is to extract a singular image, a

vital, multiple way of thinking and saying, not a substitute theology or ‘auratic

object’”.773 As the mass commodification of images tends to be judged against

“reality”, the postmodernist will lament the very type of “crystalline” characteristics

that Deleuze will find so productive. These are characteristics I have discussed in the

previous chapter, including the indiscernability of the real and the imaginary, the

inexplicability of differences in the present, the undecidablity of the truth or falsity of

different versions of the past and, finally, the incompossibility of the image. The

inability to discern what is real and false is for Deleuze the key to a production of

difference.

Such indiscernability is indeed anathema to the type of postmodern perspective

espoused by Baudrillard, who stakes his intellectual claim on the fact of the simulacra

maintaining a second rate relation to an “original”:

Indeed the very idea of appropriation, and of what Jean Baudrillardcalled ‘the simulacrum” is fully impregnated by the tradition ofmelancholy and panicked reaction to loss or absence; in this respect itis quite unlike the idea of the simulacrum that a forgetful Baudrillardhad appropriated from Deleuze, which involves not a loss but anintensification of the real, linked to a condition of things prior toForms.774

This panic is reflected in much debate and discussion around electronic dance musics

and their “appropriation” of other artists’ music. Many commentaries on the subject

spend most of their time concerned with the morality behind such practices, rather

than the pragmatics.775 Yet all of this equivocation keeps us away from examining

how the musical text actually works. Contra critical postmodern theories then, it is not

the authenticity of the work of art at stake, its meaning in relation to an origin. Rather,

773 (Rajchman 2000: 125)774 (Rajchman, 1997: 59)775 Such as the aforementioned exchange between Mtume and Nelson George where Mtume lambaststhe use of sampling (George 1999: 99)

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as Deleuze and Guattari will say, the question posed by desire ‘…is not “What does it

mean?” but rather “How does it work”?776

This philosophical position requires the simulacra be understood as a means rather

than an end. Massumi provides an example, “…an insect that mimics a leaf does so

not to meld with the vegetable state of its surrounding milieu, but to reenter the higher

realm of predatory animal warfare on a new footing…It constitutes a war zone”. 777 It

is only embracing the notion of a simulacrum existing for itself that will allow us to

join the battlefield and wage war against “official” memory. Rather than represent, the

role of art is to create this “war zone”.

Powers of the False

One aspect of this “war” might be the attack on representation, in which a power of

the false is mobilised into battle. Such a war has some strange qualities, however. The

war may never have a discernible time/space to be carried out in, as the powers of the

false plunge the battle back into the chaosmos of virtual alterity (contained in the

present’s co-existent past). In Deleuze’s Cinema books it is through these powers of

the false, that the time of a time-image cinema will begin to be “opened up”.

Deleuze had already alluded to the appearance of the powers of the false in Cinema 1,

as exacerbating the shift from movement-image to time-image cinemas. Here the

“[m]aking-false becomes the sign of a new realism, in opposition to the making-true

of the old”.778In Cinema 2, the powers of the false become based upon a re-evaluation

of the relation of truth to will-to-power. Deleuze attributes this re-evaluation to

Nietzsche, who “…under the name of “will to power”, substitutes the power of the

false for the form of the true, and resolves the crisis of truth, wanting to settle it once

and for all, but, in opposition to Leibniz, in favour of the false and its artistic, creative

power”.779

776 (Deleuze & Guattari 1983a: 109)777 (Massumi 1987)778 (Deleuze 1986: 213)779 (Deleuze 1989: 131)

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The new realism that Deleuze alludes to is found, for example, in the “empiricist

conversion” expressed through the neo-realist style that was to emerge after the events

of World War II. This style of cinema would mark the decline of the more

“revolutionary” pre-war cinema, exemplified in the dialectical montage of

Eisenstein.780 Perhaps what the neo-realist cinema had learned from the events of the

Second World War is that there was no point fighting over truth because time will

always overturn the truth claims behind it. For example when Deleuze writes in

Cinema 1 that the various crises that led to the break the action-image, “only had their

full effect after the war”781 this is because the action-image reflected, “…an image of

Truth as globalizing or totalizing apperception, linking humanity and the world as

commensurable points in a sensorimotor whole…in an indirect image of

time”.782Hence Deleuze says the break in action-image reflects what “Nietzsche had

shown, that the ideal of the true was the most profound fiction”.783 This signals the

importance of creative thought in opposition to the dogmatic thought that would lead

to fascism - an extreme, but very real, example of what happens as a result of any

dogmatic pursuit of truth. To avoid this dogmatically driven destruction, one might

instead remain open to the productive power of falsity.

The “powers of the false” is a concept that is not only found in Deleuze’s Cinema

books. It had initially appeared in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983), and is further

extrapolated in Difference and Repetition. The concept is based on a Deleuzean

interpretation of Nietzsche’s eternal return:784

Metaphysical reiteration of the ideal is founded on the death of Godand on the dissolution of the ego. Recurrence in the Dionysian worldmust not be understood as the return of something that is, that is one,or that is the same. What recurs is not being, but becoming; notidentity, ideality, but difference.785

780 (Deleuze 1986: 36-38)781 (Deleuze 1986: 206)782 (Rodowick 1997: 184)783 (Deleuze 1989: 149)784 (Deleuze 1994: 299)785 (Lingis in John Marks 1998: 58)

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Deleuze uses the powers of the false to construct a kind of perspectivist position that

might develop from allowing one to remain open to the conceptual instability of

identity that results from this eternal return of difference.

To apply this concept to the practices of DJing and sampling culture, the James

Brown sample is submitted to its own form of eternal difference, rather than being

perceived as distinctly real or true in any ideal sense. Just as in Deleuze’s explication

of Nietzsche’s “eternal return”, any musical repetition of difference should be seen as

positive, and is thus not subject to the type of negation that has been traditionally

attributed to repetition. Such positive difference continues to inspire contemporary

sampling culture even as it competes with the Platonic ideals of State sanctioned

copyright as reflective of the “common sense” of law.

The Deleuzean idea of the powers of the false should not, however, be understood as

the pursuit of the untrue, as a simple negation of value, or even as in a dialectical

relation to an established truth. Instead, difference itself provides the necessary means

to open up the conditions for self-determination and becoming. D.N. Rodowick has

summarised these ideas rather concisely in the following passage:

In the organic regime, truth can only be found, discovered, ordescribed. But there is a "falsifying" narration, Nietzschean ininspiration, which does away with the opposition of true and false andinstead creates truth positively. The primary question for Deleuze ishow thought can be kept moving, not toward a predetermined end, buttoward the new and unforeseen in terms of what Bergson calls theOpen or "creative evolution". Thus the organic and crystalline regimesare qualitatively different with respect to how they answer the question"What is thinking?" For the former it is the discovery of conceptsthrough negation, repetition, and identity toward ever more self-identical Being; for the latter it is the creation of concepts throughdifference and non-identity in a continually open Becoming.786

Representation and Appearance

786 (Rodowick 1997: 85)

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The embrace of the continually open becoming is perhaps the ultimate task of the

artwork, as to create is to essentially diverge from an adherence to identity or truth

and instead take up falsification. As mentioned previously, however, the powers of

the false can often work by mobilising extrinsic resemblance, or appearance, against a

deeper sense of meaning to “faithful” representation. As Paul Patton discusses in his

essay, “Anti-Platonism and Art”,787 much postmodern art “works” through this type

of play on representation and appearance. As Patton remarks, “[m]uch postmodernist

art is explicitly concerned with the reproduction of appearances. The shock value in

some cases derives from the fact that what is reproduced is the appearance of earlier

artwork themselves”.788 Here is a “productive” account of postmodern practice,

somewhat at odds with postmodernist critics such as Baudrillard. By way of

illustration Patton will discuss the work of artist, Sherrie Levine, whose oeuvre

consisted of the rephotographing or repainting of all or part of works by earlier artists.

This type of approach is shocking for the reason that it deliberately subverts the

traditional notions of a meaningful original and less meaningful copy. Yet it also

brings the “original” into a new relationship with its copy, one that will directly

challenge our concepts of representation and appearance. Patton comments here on,

“…the conception of the artist’s task: the reproduction of appearances rather than

their representation”.789 This type of artistic practice juxtaposes what become just

different appearances, not “appearance and representation”. The effect is to create a

serial relation between the works rather than emphasise the hierarchy of

representation. The artwork now revolves around Plato’s exiled simulacrum. The

original will not necessarily maintain a hierarchical relationship with the copy any

more but instead form part of a series drawn into correspondences.

Patton’s discussion of this play of representation and appearance can be instructive for

thinking about another apparently postmodern phenomenon such as sampling in a

new way. For the digital replication at the heart of sampling practice will necessarily

transform the history and context of the music that is repeated. As Clare Colebrook

comments here, “the essence is repeated or affirmed, not by a repetition of something

that is the same; repetition is difference. For what we repeat is the power of each

787 (Paul Patton 1994)788 (Paul Patton 1994: 142)789 (Paul Patton 1994: 142)

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event to affirm itself over and over again in different ways. Art is crucially tied to

difference and repetition”.790 The artwork that embraces such difference should not be

conceived in terms of a divergence from an original model but should instead be

considered as that power to repeatedly produce new forms:

For production, at least in one of its senses, essentially involves thetransformation of a raw material into a product. It is thereforeinseparable from the creation or the institution of a difference wherenone existed before. The means of production, which include theartist’s conceptual as well physical materials and techniques, are themeans by which this difference is created. By contrast, representation,at least in one of its senses, essentially involves the maintenance of anidentity; the reappearance of that which appeared before.791

This is why representation is not at the heart of artistic endeavour, but as already

proposed in chapter 1, is instead concerned with the production of affects and

percepts, or the bloc of sensations found within the artwork. These sensations create

relations that connect bodies rather than divide them. The powers of the false are in

such ways dedicated to the creation of new perspectives and new thoughts that might

arise out of the juxtaposition of representation and appearance.

Deleuze discusses the powers of the false at work in a cinematic context in Cinema 2.

Using the example of Welles’ F For Fake (1974),792 Deleuze cites the example of the

forger who will make the “copy” to the specifications of the art dealer. The art dealer

cannot tell the painting is a fake because the forger makes it avoiding all the mistakes

that he learned from the dealer.793 As such, these forgeries have taken on a status that

cannot be reduced. Instead they now exist for themselves. The rather arbitrary nature

of the different statuses of repetition is proved by the dealer who will happily accept a

collapse of reality and falsity when it is financially advantageous to do so. Deleuze

celebrates this “forger” who gives the simulacra its own pragmatic existence and

exhibits how powers of the false will so easily make a mockery of an adherence to

truth, dependent upon the situation in which it emerges. The re-appearance of the

790 (Colebrook 2002: 92)791 (Paul Patton 1994: 142)792 (Welles 1974). In Cinema 2 Deleuze refers to F For Fake as It’s All True, which is actually another(uncompleted) film by Welles. This may have been a simple mix-up by either Deleuze or in translation.The movie known in English as F For Fake was titled Vérités et Mensonges (Truth and Lies) in France.See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072962/ for further details.793 (Deleuze 1989: 146)

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work as simulacrum brings out a newfound serial relation. The original must now

contend with its copy, but also both become simulacra. Through the unleashing of the

simulacra, the forger creates a new plane of time where the copy exists as an accepted

original and forges new relations around the “copied” work.

This scenario may well be familiar to those who have witnessed the re-appearance of

recorded works in break beat or sampling culture. Rather than being perceived as the

poor copy, the sample should be seen as the means to free the alterity and

transversality inherent in the musical assemblage of the “original”. In terms of the

pragmatics of the sample as simulacrum for itself, the point is, who cares – does it

work? That is, does it make us respond, react, dance? For example, an album such as

Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back is considered the

greatest hip-hop album ever,794 even though just about every track on the album is

based on the past refrains of James Brown.795 Such a positive reception can only be

the result of a suspension of judgement of the simulacrum. That the simulacrum is

often unconditionally embraced is why Deleuze will argue that we need to maintain a

more pragmatic perspective on the return of such refrains. Instead of negating the

connections made, or assimilating them back into an originary identity, we might

instead look at productive relations to emerge from this process.

In some respect Deleuze’s ideas do apologise for what we might refer to as

“plagiarism” – which in itself might be seen as taking the egalitarian relations created

794 As Hip-Hop Magazine, The Source, writes in their special 100th Issue special, Public Enemy’s ItTakes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, which takes the title of hip-hop’s “best album”, “…is notonly the greatest hip-hop album of all time, it’s one of the greatest albums in all the world ofmusic”(The Source 1998: 174). The album continues to enjoy the title of the best hip-hop album amongthe more rock-oriented magazines as well, for instance it was the top ranked hip-hop album in RollingStone's “The Rolling Stone 200 The Essential Rock Collection”(Nathan Brackett 1997: 70)795 As Musik was to remark in its 2002 article on “The Top 50 Dance Albums of All Time”, PublicEnemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (the highest rated hip-hop album on the list atNo. 19) was “…the sound of the apocalypse, as orchestrated by James Brown”(Musik 2002: 45). Hereare some of the James Brown samples used on the album. Rebel Without A Pause (samples from JamesBrown's Get Up Offa That Thing and Funky Drummer). Bring The Noise (samples James Brown'sFunky Drummer).Don't Believe the Hype (samples James Brown's Escape-ism and I Got Ants in MyPants). Terminator X To The Edge of Panic (samples James Brown's Funky Drummer and Get Up, GetInto It, Get Involved). Night of the Living Baseheads (samples James Brown's Soul Power Pt. I and GetUp, Get Into It, Get Involved). Caught, Can We Get A Witness? (Samples James Brown's Soul PowerPt. I and James Brown produced - Bobby Byrd track Hot Pants... I'm Coming, I'm Coming, I'mComing). Prophets of Rage (samples James Brown's Cold Sweat). Party For Your Right To Fight(samples James Brown's Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved and James Brown produced - Bobby Byrdtrack I Know You Got Soul). Cold Lampin' With Flavor (samples James Brown produced - Bobby Byrdtrack I Know You Got Soul). See TheBreaks.com for myriad other samples (The-Breaks.Com 2005)

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through the copy to its logical degree. However, the real fear of plagiarism is the fact

that it works, and this is why appropriate measures are taken to control its

preponderance.

In sum, despite a common sense morality telling us otherwise, the most productive

perspective to take in regard to the simulacrum is that of the forger. An embrace of

simulacra will always provide a more favourable intellectual position than

maintaining a slavish adherence to truth for its own sake. As Deleuze will remind us,

we should keep in mind the Nietzschean idea that the pursuit of truth is folly because,

if we were to apprehend such truth, life would have no point.796 To think in terms of

truth is to be implicitly bound up in the dogmatic maintenance of identity. Forgers

and outlaws are necessary to aid the construction of the new but only because they

operate outside the law, where the latter concept is encompassing of common sense

and moral judgements, and even ‘truth” itself. As Deleuze will write, “[t]he truthful

man in the end wants nothing other than to judge life; he holds up a superior value,

the good, in the name of which he will be able to judge, he is craving to judge, he sees

in life an evil, a fault which is atoned for: the moral origin of the notion of truth”.797

Becoming Rather than Stories

In fact, the seeking of the “truth” of an event can only serve to create more problems

than it solves. By way of example we could look to the ambiguities surrounding the

“biopic” or the biographical movie. Whilst its creators may attempt to faithfully

represent some prominent life story, they invariably do no more than provide a

surface representation of a life. At the same time, the biopic’s attempts to imitate or

emulate the life of its subject will actually – within this surface - create more

difference in the life of its subject.

By way of example, Laura Marks compares two films detailing aspects of the life of

Malcolm X - Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992) and the Black Audio Film Collective’s

796 In Cinema 2, Deleuze argues that one of the main points of Nietzsche’s critique of truth is that “the‘true world’ does not exist, and, if it did, would be inaccessible, impossible to describe, and, if it couldbe described, would be useless, superfluous” (Deleuze 1989: 137)797 (Deleuze 1989: 137)

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Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993).798 Marks criticises Lee’s “biopic” approach

because she believes that it represents, “…a teleological Malcolm whose life is

validated in the official context of history”. 799 Marks’ criticism is based on the

observation that Lee’s attempts to faithfully reproduce the chronological events of

Malcolm’s life do not provide us with the same affects of, say, alienation and minority

of which he was a product. It is only in comprehending, one might say feeling, these

affects, that one is drawn into the struggles surrounding power and becoming (of a

people). On the other hand, Seven Songs for Malcolm X, whilst also attempting to

comment on his life uses a very different technique, instead making use of a jarring

juxtaposition of images that might get the viewer to feel the same affective force that

produced a Malcolm X in the first place. Marks does not necessarily criticize Lee’s

direction as deficient. Rather the problem is in fact that it conforms to the limits of a

more conventional biographical approach.

For Marks, the problem of the biopic lies in the fact that by giving the representation

of the subject precedence, one tends to elevate the model/copy relationship to the

point where it distracts the audiences from the more important question of the power

of affect. The viewer of the biopic might be more inclined to attend to the fidelity of

the represented character than engage with the affect that gave rise to the subject in

the first place. In short, the biopic leaves many viewers cold. Any attempt to directly

represent the subject as a sum of movements through history will never successfully

capture the singular nature of the affects that comprise the subject. In fact, what

generally happens when we see biopics is that we spend time picking flaws in such

films. This diverts one’s attention from the affective politics involved. One cannot be

immersed in the experience of the affects of a person’s life if one is being directed

instead towards “inconsistencies” in the depictions of history.800 Of course,

filmmakers claim to represent the truth about a particular subject, but as the truth is

ultimately inaccessible then the biopic becomes an attempt to represent the

unrepresentable.

798 (Laura U. Marks 2000: 67)799 (Laura U. Marks 2000: 67)800 For this very reason I hope there will never be one about James Brown!

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Sampling and the Subversion Of Representation

The use of exiled simulacra has now been discussed in relation to the visual arts and

cinema. I believe that it might be beneficial for music to be evaluated in this way.

Deleuze’s powers of the false are a more than appropriate conceptual device for

discussing contemporary electronic dance music practices. For instance, we might

begin to understand that each time a sample re-appears it reveals an affective

intensity, and if this intensity “works” it will be powerful enough to return again. We

could suggest that just as in the cinematic example of Seven Songs for Malcolm X

proposed by Marks, a DJ could create a similar relation to affect through the

heterogenous operation of the “irrational cut”.

The aforementioned cinematic example of Malcolm X has musical correlates. These

provide a fresh perspective on his recollection. We might look to the ways DJs have

used samples of his voice as reclaimed musical content in an early hip-hop track, like

No Sell Out (1983).801 Malcolm’s voice is used in such a way that it takes on an

alienating quality because these sound bites are placed within time/space assemblages

that they were never previously envisaged to be in. By extension, the track

demonstrates the difference between linear time and a more heterogenous

reassemblage of time. The re-appearance of these appropriated fragments of time can

subvert the dominance of a history that holds power over the description or

“meaning” of these “events”. A track like No Sell Out provides a minor engagement

with, and subversion of, official reminiscences, suggesting that a figure of such

cultural importance deserves a form of enunciation that transcends mere cliché. More

generally, DJing and sampling culture have often made use of new economies of the

musical refrain to overturn majoritarian control of the truths of history. They replace

the falsity of official discourse with their own. New forms and approaches to music

beckon to the invention of a people who have no affective representation – or only

official representation – available to them.

It is in the pursuit of becoming in wake of official histories that forgers have become

so prevalent, and no more so than in the last couple of decades in popular music. The

801 (LeBlanc & Malcolm X 1983)

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minor must “forge” if only because their representation is always in the hands of the

State. As Deleuze will say: “…the moment the master, or the colonizer, proclaims

‘there have never been people here", the missing people are a becoming, they invent

themselves, in shanty towns and camps, or in ghettos, in new conditions of struggle to

which a necessarily political art must contribute”.802

The potential application of the powers of the false in overturning colonised memory

have been discussed in works such as Samira Kawash’s essay, 415 Men: Moving

Bodies, or, The Cinematic Politics of Deportation (1998) and as well as in Laura

Marks’ studies of “Third World” political cinema in the aforementioned The Skin of

the Film (2000). Using their own unique examples, these authors pursue the use of the

productive powers of the false in relation to the studies of minor and post-colonial

politics and cinema.803

The minor subject attempts to render visible “a people” through the power of their

own myth making, an idea that Deleuze suggests in Cinema 2: “What is opposed to

fiction is not the real; it is not the truth which is always that of the masters or

colonizers; it is the story-telling function of the poor, in so far as it gives the false the

power which makes it into a memory, a legend, a monster”. 804 This observation

might further elucidate the uses of DJing and sampling as a means of “the poor” to

counteract “official” truths, or official representation. Should not a minor people

commit “the flagrant offence of making up legends” as a means of their own

becoming?

In this regard, of course, electronic dance music cultures are no strangers to such

mythmaking, of which such examples have been referred to during the course of this

thesis – “gangsta rappers”, Zulu Nations, Teutonic robots, Afrofuturists and Wu-Tang

Clans. Such mythologising is of course a mandatory practice for any self respecting

electronic dance music producer, from the elaborate pseudonyms used by the early

DJs (many such examples referred to in this thesis) to the creation of hyper-hybrid

stage personas drawn from a range of disparate and deceptively congruous sources

802 (Deleuze 1989: 217)803 See (Kawash 1998: 132-134) and (Laura U. Marks 2000: 65)804 (Deleuze 1989: 150)

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such as comic books, kung-fu films, technoculture, Eastern philosophy and notorious

gangsters which are brought together and rendered significant with a requisite

linguistic flourish.805

As discussed in chapter 5, Deleuze attributes the directors of the cinéma vérité style

with the power of a falsification correlative to any other fictional cinematic style. In

this way the “reality” of the sample too, similarly falsifies as it repeats. From another

angle, the return of the sample might also suggest its own type of antagonism of

history as it affirms the similitude between the conditions that caused it to repeat, and

the conditions of its creation. For example, we might think of the return of the James

Brown sample, even as it occurs decades after its creation, as indicative of a

similitude between the conditions of the environment that produced it in the first

place, and that which exacerbated its return. The question here would be, what does it

say about the experience of the African-American musician who allows Brown to

return in the mid 1990s, in the form of a refrain from a record that originally came out

in the early 1970s?806 We are able to deduce something from this juxtaposition – a

correlation that could only be made through the simulacrum. The re-appearance of

James Brown himself is also a necessary part of the potential antagonism and

juxtaposition that is delivered via repetition.

Given the power of the false to take on the truth of history, it comes as little surprise

that technical machines such as the turntable or sampler are so readily mobilised to

the assistance of such becomings. For a minor people must use everything at their

disposal, to circumvent their subordination to an official history. Here again there is

difference in repetition, wherever the techno copy is turned against its “common

805 The undisputed champions of self-mythologising are the Staten Island group, the Wu-Tang Clanwho probably brandished the most elaborate personas of all. The group would liberally weave togetherall manner of such constituents – comic books, kung-fu flicks, Eastern philosophies, notoriousgangsters (and much more) into some of the most finely honed (and often downright wacky) personalfictions ever devised. Furthermore, an extended account of such mythologising in electronic dancemusic cultures can be found in Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures In SonicFiction (Eshun 1998).806 There are so many examples of James Brown samples from the early 1970s re-appearing at thistime, but I have in mind here, a popular one – the use of the sample of James Brown speaking thewords “I don't know” from the introduction of 1971’s Make It Funky. This use of the James Brownrefrain as a voice from the past speaking to a contemporary commentator was used for instance in ATribe Called Quest’s track, What Really Goes On? from the album Beats, Rhymes and Life. The rapperQ-Tip asks, “What really goes on?” and the James Brown sample responds: “I don't know”? Thissample was also subsequently used in a similar way on Slum Village’s I Don’t Know (the track namedafter the Brown sample) which appeared on the album, Fantastic, Vol. 2 (Slum Village 2000).

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sense” use. As Nelson George says on the popularity of the sampler to the hip-hop

generation:

We love to take things that were once out of reach - the saxophone, thesampler, the pager - and reinvent the technology in our own image.The sax was invented by Adolphe Sax in the mid-nineteenth century,yet it didn’t become a valued instrument until brothers got their handson it in the ‘30s. The sampler was invented by sound scientists in the‘70s but it was via the ears of hip hop producers that this technologyfound its deepest use.807

George also makes the interesting point here that the sampler would be diverted from

its “scientific” future, one originally envisaged by the creators of the Fairlight in the

late 1970s as a future based on using digital sampling to recreate reality.808 However,

instead of being used to recreate reality, it became even more important in

supplementing reality and to inspire new challenges to history through the

“recollection-image” which was described earlier in the chapter, as the process of the

recapturing of traces of an event whose representation has been buried.

Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music

Technology thus comes into its own as the means to produce alternatives to the

official, represented side of history. In the case of Alexander Weheliye, technology

will help to undermine a black humanist legacy that was inextricably linked to a

hegemonically determined representation of the body. In his article, “Feenin:

Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music” (2002), Weheliye argues

that African-American musicians in contemporary dance music genres deliberately

make use of dehumanising musical technologies such as the vocoder as a way of

undermining the embodied legacy of “black humanism”.

Weheliye begins his essay arguing against the presumptions of N. Katherine Hayles’

version of the post-human as one relevant only to a dominant white culture. She,

807 (Weheliye 2002: 53)808 The 1979 release of the Fairlight CMI (Computer Music Instrument) gave the world the firstcommercially available, polyphonic sampling instrument (Hamer 2005).

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“... preserves the idea of the liberal subject, represented as having a body, but not

being a body”.809 This situation, Weheliye argues, is not applicable to Afro-America

due to the fact that they were never considered “human” in white liberalist sense in

the first place.810 Weheliye says that African-Americans had long endured the state of

being reduced to just “a body” and their value to a dominant society is based on this

synonymous relationship with embodiment, such as the singing voice:

Black sacred and later secular music took on two simultaneousfunctions: proving black peoples’ soul and standing in for the soul ofall U.S. culture, keeping the racially particular and national universalin constant tension. Thus spirituals ushered in a long history of whiteappropriations of black music, ranging from the “slumming” patrons ofthe Cotton Club, Norman Mailer’s "white negroes," to today’s hip hop“whiggers.” All of this goes to show that while the black singing voiceharbors moments of value, as suggested in Barrett’s scheme, it canhardly be construed as a purely authentic force, particularly oncedelocalized and offered up for national and/or internationalconsumption. The “soul,” and by extension “humanity,” of blacksubjects, therefore, is often imbricated in white mainstream culture,customarily reflecting an awareness of this very entanglement.811

Weheliye will go on to argue that blacks could never be considered part of the liberal

humanist ideal and as such, were always posthuman.

Evidence of the African-American’s ongoing post-human condition, Weheliye

contends, can be glimpsed in the widespread use of technologies such as cell phones

and pagers in contemporary music production. The re-purposing of these devices

might be seen to deliberately undermine the legacy of embodiment of the black

humanist tradition, because this technological treatment of the “natural” black voice

will obscure its link to an essentialist, humanist tradition, and even perhaps its

mainstream commodification. Weheliye also examines the importance of technology

in musical-political movements such as “Afrofuturism” and “Hypersoul”, the latter

concept having strong correlations with the post-soul dealt with in this study, in that

809 (Weheliye 2002: 22)810 Weheliye takes exception to Hayles notion that one has to be “free from the will of others” in orderto mutate in to the heterogeneous posthuman state and writes that “Certainly, New World blacksubjects cannot inhabit this version of selfhood in quite the same manner as the “white boys” ofHayles’s canon due to slavery, colonialism, racism, and segregation, since these forces render the veryidea that one could be “free from the will of others’ null and void”(Weheliye 2002-24).811 (Weheliye 2002: 28)

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soul music itself was very much part of the black humanist tradition. Through the re-

purposing of musical technologies and techniques, Brown is delivered a new context

of enunciation, as technological oracle rather than song-and-dance-man.

Here we might also consider the way in which the James Brown sample enables

Brown himself to transcend his own history, and by extension, many of the

constraints of the black humanism of the soul tradition with which he might otherwise

have been shackled. In fact we can suggest that integrating – and transforming - the

memory of Brown with the technical machine allows minor people to show “what a

body can [really] do”.

Yet if all of this becoming of a minor people is rather radical it must be delivered in

measured doses for long-term effect. That is why I believe that the way DJing and

sampling make use of the simulacrum is along the lines of the adage, that “…if you

are going to tell people the truth, you’d better make them laugh…Otherwise they’ll

kill you”.812 The humorous statement delivers a repetition of a series of words but the

manner in which they are delivered makes all of the difference. To my mind the way a

James Brown refrain is delivered back to the world via DJing or sampling culture is

like making someone laugh in a dangerous situation. It introduces difference through

the back door of the apparently familiar. This is how hip-hop was so significantly able

to mobilise the affect that it did. Ease the ranting and raving against oppression on the

back of a James Brown refrain, and you can get away with all sorts of statements, and

may even call off the attack on yourself for a while in the process. Yet there is also

the point to be made that once the current ruse has been discovered it is time to move

on.

James Brown Becomes Cliché

In fact, with the domestic affordability of the sampler in the mid to late 1980s, the

sampling of James Brown became so widespread that within a few years it would

become a cliché. An example that is typical of the attitude of post-soul generation

might be the 1988 Stetsasonic track Talkin’ All That Jazz (1988), a track which has

812 Quotation by George Bernard Shaw (attributed: source unknown)

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become something of a trope among academic writing about hip-hop.813 The track is

usually paraded as a defence of sampling,814 especially as it exposes artists that might

have otherwise been forgotten: “tell the truth, James Brown was old/ ‘til Eric and Rak

came out with “I Got Soul”/Rap brings back old R&B and if we would not/ people

could have forgot”.815 At the time of the song’s release, Eric B and Rakim had had

some major hit singles which had depended heavily on James Brown samples, in

particular the Bobby Byrd sung, James Brown produced, I Know You Got Soul.816

From the evidence otherwise presented in this study, it would be fair to argue that

James Brown was never “old”, as suggested by Eric B and Rakim, but in fact the very

opposite, his music would accommodate the future, and the post-soul generation

would come along and integrate his “untimely” refrains accordingly. Brown’s refrains

could be considered untimely precisely because they would contain within them

enough of their own virtual alterity that they could be readily re-integrated into

contemporary music production again and again.

This is precisely what continued to happen for most of the late eighties and early

1990s, until the record companies started to realise what was going on. When they

did, they initiated high profile court cases bringing lawsuits against De La Soul,817 Biz

Markie818 and the Beastie Boys819 with the effect of making the samplers scurry for

rather more obscure sample sources. The result of the flurry of court cases to emerge

at the time caused the sampling of Brown, although still widespread, to decline rather

813 For a close reading of this very song see (Shusterman 2004: 459-479)814 (Shusterman 2004: 459-479) (George 2004: 438).815 (Stetsasonic 1988)816 (Brown 1988)817 De La Soul was sued over the song, Transmitting Live from Mars, from the album 3 Feet High andRising. Their track sampled a song titled, You Showed Me by the 1960s band The Turtles. This isdocumented on the “Illegal Art” site, “The Turtles sued De La Soul in 1989 and won a judgment of$1.7 million. For its next album, De La Soul made sure to clear all samples, which cost a total of$100,000” (Farnsworth, Hise, & McLaren 2002).818 Also documented on the Illegal Art Site/CD, “Gilbert O’Sullivan’s 1991 lawsuit against Biz Markiefor the uncleared use of 20 seconds from O’Sullivan’s, Alone Again (Naturally). The case proved amajor turning point in the evolution of hip-hop. Markie lost the case; the judge told him, verbatim,"Thou shalt not steal." With that, the era of carefree sampling was over. Sample-heavy albums in thevein of Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back or the Beastie Boys’ Paul’sBoutique became impossibly expensive and difficult to release. Many artists continued to sample butretreated into using more and more obscure source material”(Farnsworth et al. 2002).819 The Beastie Boys were also involved in one of the earliest sampling cases, as Adam Horowitz tellsWired, “You know, I'm pretty sure we were actually the first court case that used the word sampling init. It was in a lawsuit involving a sample of Jimmy Castor's The Return of Leroy (Part One) on our firstalbum”(Steuer 2004).

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sharply. Perhaps the samplers were also put off by the stories of an entire floor of

lawyers at Polygram, Brown’s record company, dedicated to keeping track of the

copyright infringements of Brown’s work alone.820 Whilst this story turns out to be

apocryphal, it does serve to indicate the level of engagement with Brown’s catalogue

in this new and controversial form of music making.

The subsequent pressure placed on the samplers may in fact have been a good thing

because by the early 1990s the use of James Brown samples had become so

widespread that it no longer constituted the expression of a minor temporality it once

did. Instead it had become a cliché.

As a way of protesting the widespread use of James Brown samples that had

dominated dance music around this time, the Belgian techno group, LA Style would

achieve great commercial success with the “happy hardcore”821 track, James Brown is

Dead822 (1991). This curious single had the distinction of being one of the first of the

more “hardcore” techno tracks to reach the mainstream charts. Despite raising the ire

of James Brown fans, the track was actually somewhat of a backhanded compliment.

To deem James Brown “dead” was to give further credence to his towering influence

on electronic dance music genres. Whilst, to my mind, the record was an elaborate in-

joke, it also had the more inadvertent effect of a subcultural gesture towards

demarcating that fine line between the eternal return of difference and cliché. 823

820 During my research I made email contact with renowned producer, archivist and researcher on allmatters soul - Harry Weinger of Universal, and Harry explained to me that he could not confirm nordeny the 'floor of lawyers' story. (Personal Correspondence, email 15th May 2002 - available uponrequest).821 Here is a particularly erudite explanation of the “happy hardcore” style: “…at the base of everyHappy Hardcore track was a breakbeat - a fast, complex, flowing, synthesised drumbeat. The drumsused do not sound like real drums and are not meant to. There is always a bass drum, usually distorted,every beat (4 beats to the bar, hence Happy Hardcore's alternative name of 4-beat). Over this breakbeatcan be a variety of things. There can be pianos, strings, stab patterns (sequences of quite hard synthysounds), uplifiting female vocals, bass (anything from an acid squelch to a deep rumbling sine wave),etc. Most Happy Hardcore tracks are around 160 to 180bpm, but 175bpm seems to be the mostcommon speed. Any faster and it starts becoming Gabba, and slower and it starts becoming house”(Mark White 1996).822 (LA Style 1991)823 For instance as DJ Lethal says here, “When I first started, I was buying all the James Brown andStanley Turrentine records, all the jazz stuff, the Headhunters and the Meters. I got done with theclassics pretty fast. Those records were already pretty played out back in ‘89. So I started getting weird,bugged-out records” (DJ Lethal in Kurt B. Reighley 2000: 86).

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The work of art, whether a sample of James Brown or otherwise, might be seen to

become cliché when the repetition of the simulacrum is no longer constitutive of “the

means” of the “war zone” but rather becomes an end in itself. That is, it is used as a

representation of a practice rather than being a residual effect of the apprehension of a

minor temporality. As Deleuze says in Cinema 2, “[a] cliché is a sensory-motor

image of the thing”824 – that is the cliché helps us move through our daily lives with

ease and without thought. In this circumstance, the use of a James Brown sample

becomes cliché when it is used because it is James Brown, rather than the liberation

of a beat that happens to have originated with Brown.

Capital M Memory

Whilst the heyday of unrestrained Brown sampling might have waned since the late

1980s and early 1990s, this does not mean that it has stopped. With his catalogue of

800+ songs, the DJs are just a little more cunning about the way they use his refrains,

often subjecting them to time stretching and various effects to disguise them, although

this is another way to allow them to keep on becoming.825 However, given the

currency of Brown’s music the many samples that have appeared time and again,

whether Funky Drummer, Think (About It), Funky President to name a few of the

most persistent, one wonders just how much more currency is to be gained by their

usage, and perhaps the best that might be achieved is like Deleuze says of the

creativity of the cinematic auteurs, that they might “parody the cliché”826 although

this is in itself not enough to “disturb the sensory-motor connections”. 827

The maintenance of copyright law will also effect the proliferation of cliché, even if it

inadvertently adds to the canonical status of the sample in the same gesture. By the

824 (Deleuze 1989: 20)825 In addition to those previously mentioned, recent use of James Brown samples has tended to bemore discreet, can be heard in tracks such as, Pete Rock and CL Smooth’s, “Da Two” on Pete Rock’sSoul Survivor (1998) (Pete Rock & CL Smooth 1998). The Unseen on Quasimoto’s The Unseen(Quasimoto 2000). “Natural Suction” on Wagon Christ’s Musipal (Wagon Christ 2001) (In the WagonChrist track, for example the break from the 1972 track, Think (About It) is sped up to resemble a drumand bass track. Also Brown continues to be called up for guest spots, appearing for example on therecent Black Eyed Peas track, They Don’t Want Music (Black Eyed Peas with James Brown 2005).Then again a high profile artist with the money and the taste for old-school flavour, will pay the pricefor the sample, as did Hip-Hop performer, Nas on the track “Get Down” the opening track of the albumGod’s Son (2002).826 (Deleuze 1986: 211) and (Deleuze 1989: 22)827 (Deleuze 1989: 22)

275

time the law begins clamping down on a particular practice, such as sampling,

chances are that any artistic revolution has already taken place long before. This is

still a lamentable state of affairs, however, and the worst effect of this State co-option,

is not so much to be found in the exploitation of the economic gains made through the

minor, but rather how such practices more generally serve to reiterate majoritarian

power. It is not only a question of those institutions which enforce the law, but of a

power they have over – and through – “official” representation. On this point Deleuze

and Guattari will distinguish between “memory” and “Memory” in regard to the

minor: “Of course, the child, the woman, the black have memories; but the Memory

that collects those memories is still a virile majoritarian agency treating them as

"childhood memories," as conjugal, or colonial memories”.828 We can see a

demonstration of this in the acts of record companies attempting to recoup the

memories of the minor via hegemonic representation, whether this is through

authorship, publishing as copyrights and so on.

Hence, one of my ongoing concerns with this increasingly litigious society and its

continued restriction of practices such as sampling is that this is indicative of deeper

cultural engagements that are quashed with a broad sweeping gesture by the law. This

concern is reflected in a recent interview with Jeff Tweedy of Wilco who has said that

a recent US court decision to ban all music sampling without a licence829 was

“racism”.830 Given the ongoing colonisation of memory this is not really as farfetched

as it might seem as the decision would appear to deliberately target a genre whose

entire oevre is based upon such activity.

Throughout this chapter I have, in answer to this, suggested the importance of the idea

put forward by Deleuze and Guattari, that freeing the simulacrum from its

subordination to notions of intrinsic models, and or predetermined hierarchies, is

perhaps the only way forward for an ethological view of the world. In fact there is

much to be learned from a wilful “bastardisation” as long as the said bastard is set free

828 (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 293)829 The court decision in question is discussed in the article “Court to Hip-Hop Nation: No FreeSamples” (2004) as reported by Billboard.com. “A federal appeals court ruled…that rap artists shouldpay for every musical sample included in their work - even minor, unrecognizable snippets ofmusic”(Associated Press 2004). For more on this story see (Associated Press 2004) and (OUT-LAWNews 2004)830 (Lessig 2005: 069)

276

from a connection to its parent, particularly if it did not even know that parent to

begin with. We should instead turn our attention toward the new connections the

bastard has forged in its name, rather than simply postulate its attachment to a history

that neither it nor its audience will ever really know. This latter denial of the bastard

simulacrum its right, as a singular image, forces it to maintain a concept of originary

identity would most certainly be considered unethical if applied to a human subject.

Yet the bastard must also be ready to accept the challenge of difference as well.

Provided that it maintains difference over identity, at some stage it will assuredly not

recognise itself any more. That is precisely what happened when Brown himself came

face to face with his own becoming:

At dinner with old friend Cliff White after accepting a special award atBritain’s March 1988 DMC (Disco Mix Club) Championships, Brownbetrayed confusion about a reception so rapturous White himself hadbeen stunned. “It was quite amazing standing with him behind thatcurtain in the Royal Albert Hall, and seeing the place just packed withstreet kids! It was such a charged atmosphere. Then, when theyannounced “James Brown” - which had been a well-kept secret - andpulled back the drapes, it was just like the Beatles. Pandemonium!…But back at the hotel,” says White, “every once in a while, Jameswould go back to the evening and say, “But why didn’t they ask me tosing? What was I really there for? Why wasn’t I asked to sing a song?He really didn’t seem to know what it meant”. 831

831 (Cynthia Rose 1990: 151)

277

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Thompson, D. (2001), Funk, San Francisco, Calif.: Backbeat Books.

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White, C. (1985), The Life and Times of Little Richard, New York: Pocket Books.

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Wolk, D. (2004), 33 1/3 Volume 13: James Brown's Live at the Apollo, New York andLondon: Continuum Books.

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DISCOGRAPHY

A Tribe Called Quest (1996), Beats, Rhymes and Life, Jive.

Afrika Bambaataa and Soul Sonic Force (1982), ‘Planet Rock’, Tommy Boy.

Afrika Bambaataa and James Brown (1984), ‘Unity (Parts 1 - 6)’, Tommy Boy.

Black Eyed Peas with James Brown (2005), 'They Don't Want Music' on MonkeyBusiness: A&M.

Ballard, H. (1968), 'How You Gonna Get Respect (When You Haven't Cut YourProcess Yet)?', King.

Brown, J. and the Famous Flames (1956), 'Please, Please, Please', King.

Brown, J. (1962), 'I've Got Money', King.

Brown, J. (1962), 'Night Train', King.

Brown, J. (1963), 'Prisoner of Love', King.

Brown, J. (1964a), 'I'm Tired But I'm Clean' on Pure Dynamite: Live at the Royal,King.

Brown, J. (1964b), 'Oh Baby Don't You Weep (Parts 1&2)', King.

291

Brown, J. (1967), 'Hip Bag '67' on Live at the Garden, King.

Brown, J. (1967b), 'There Was a Time', King.

Brown, J. (1968), 'Say It Loud-I'm Black and I'm Proud', King.

Brown, J. (1969a), 'Ain't It Funky Now (Pts 1 &2)', King.

Brown, J. (1969b), 'Give It up or Turnit-a-Loose', King.

Brown, J. (1969c), ‘The Popcorn’, King

Brown, J. (1969d), ‘Mother Popcorn’, King

Brown, J. (1969e), ‘Let a Man Come in and Do the Popcorn’, King

Brown, J. (1970a), 'Funky Drummer', King.

Brown, J. (1970b), 'Get up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine (Pts 1&2)', King.

Brown, J. (1970c), 'I Don't Want Nobody to Give Nothing (Open up the Door, I'll GetIt Myself) (Parts 1&2)' on Sex Machine, King/Polygram.

Brown, J. (1971a), 'Escape-Ism Pt.1 and Pt.2', Polydor.

Brown, J. (1971b), 'Make It Funky (Pts 1 & 2)', Polydor.

Brown, J. (1971c), 'My Part/Make It Funky (Parts 3 and 4)', Polydor.

Brown, J. (1971d), Revolution of the Mind - Live At the Apollo Vol. 3, Polydor.

Brown, J. (1971/1991), Hot Pants (re-issue). New York: Universal.

Brown, J. (1972a), 'Get on the Good Foot', Polydor.

Brown, J. (1972b), 'Public Enemy #1, Pt.1' on Star Time, Polygram.

Brown, J. (1973a), Black Caesar, Universal.

Brown, J. (1973b), Slaughter's Big Rip Off, Universal.

Brown, J. (1973c), ‘Think', Polydor.

Brown, J. (1975), 'Funky President' on Reality, Polydor.

Brown, J. (1986), 'Funky Drummer' on In the Jungle Groove: Polydor/Universal.

Brown, J. (1988), I'm Real, Scotti Bros.

292

Brown, J. (1989), Roots of a Revolution, Polygram.

Brown. J. (1990), Live At the Apollo (CD re-issue of 1963 album), Polygram.

Brown, J. (1991a), 'Get It Together' on Star Time: Polygram.

Brown, J. (1991b), 'Let Yourself Go' on Star Time. New York: Polygram.

Brown, J. (1991c), Star Time, Polygram Records Inc.

Brown, J. (1995), Say It Live and Loud - Live in Dallas 08.26.68, Polygram.

Brown, J. (1996), Foundations of Funk - a Brand New Bag 1964-1969, Polygram.

Brown, J. (2001), Live At the Apollo Vol. 2 (Deluxe Edition), Universal.

Brown, J. (2005a), Funky People's Greatest Breakbeats, Universal.

Brown, J. (2005b), Greatest Breakbeats,Universal.Brown, J. and the Louie Nelson Orchestra (1969/2004 (reissue)), Soul on Top (James

Brown with the Louie Bellson Orchestra and Oliver Nelson Conducting,Verve.

Cooke, S. (1986), ‘A Change is Gonna Come’ on The Man and His Music, RCA.

Davis, M. (1969), Bitches Brew, Columbia.

Davis, M. (1972), On the Corner, Columbia.

DJ Shadow (1996), Endtroducing, Mo' Wax.

Edan (2004), 'Sound of the Funky Drummer' (uncredited “mixtape”).

Ghostface Killah (2001), Bulletproof Wallets, Epic.

Jin (2004), 'Learn Chinese', EMI.

LeBlanc, K. and Malcolm X (1983), 'No Sell Out', Tommy Boy.

Kool Moe Dee (1987), 'How Ya Like Me Now', Jive.

LA Style (1991), 'James Brown Is Dead', Bounce Records.

Malcolm X (1992), Words from the Frontlines: Excerpts from the Great Speeches ofMalcolm X, BMG.

Nas, (2002), ‘Get Down’, God’s Son, Sony.

Pete Rock, & CL Smooth (1998), 'Da Two' on Soul Survivor: Loud Records.

293

Public Enemy (1988), It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back, Island/Def Jam.

Quasimoto (2000), 'The Unseen' on The Unseen: Stones Throw.

Raekwon (1999), Immobilarity, Loud Records/Wu-Tang.

Reich, S. (1987), Early Works: Come out/PianoPhase/Clapping Music/It's GonnaRain,New York: Elektra/Nonesuch.

Sir Frontalot (2005), 'Good Old Clyde' available online at, frontalot.com.

Slum Village (2000), 'I Don't Know' on Fantastic Vol. 2: Goodvibe.

Stetsasonic (1988), 'Talkin' All That Jazz', Tommy Boy.

Stubblefield, C. (1993), DNA Beat Blocks Groove Construction Kit: ClydeStubblefield, EastWest.

Stubblefield, C. (2003), 'Interview Footage' on Clyde Stubblefield: The Original.Minnetonka: Liquid 8 Records.

Various Artists (1997), American Primitive, Vol. 1: Raw Pre-War Gospel (1926-36),Revenant Records/Koch Distribution.

Various Artists (1999), 300% Dynamite: Ska Soul Rocksteady Funk & Dub inJamaica, Soul Jazz.

Wagon Christ (2001), 'Natural Suction' on Musipal, Ninja Tune.

Wu-Tang Clan (1994), 'Method Man' on Enter the 36 Chambers, Loud Records.

FILM AND BROADCASTS

Ain't It Funky Now (2005), from the series Soul Deep, dir. A. Lawrence, BBC.

Ali (2001).M. Mann (Director), Columbia Pictures.

Baadassss (2003), dir .M. Van Peebles, Imagine Entertainment.

Be My Baby (1996), from the series Dancing In The Street: A Rock and Roll History,dir. S. Barrett and H. Thomson, BBC Video.

Better Living through Circuitry-a Digital Odyssey into the Electronic DanceUnderground (2001), dir. J. Reiss, Siren Entertainment.

Classified X (1997), dir. M. Daniels, Les Sept Artes/Yeah, Inc.

Electric Miles: A Different Kind of Blue (2004), dir. M. Lerner, Eagle Eye Media

294

F for Fake (1974), dir. O. Welles, Janus Film/Les Films de l'Astrophore/SACI.

James Brown the Godfather of Soul: A Portrait (1995), dir. M. Peterzell (Director):Goodmarc Productions/ A&E Television Networks.

James Brown: Man to Man (1968), dir. A. Fisher, Metromedia.

James Brown: Soul Survivor (2003), from the series American Masters, dir. J. Marre,Universal Music.

Jazz - Episode 4: "The True Welcome" 1929 – 1934 (2001), from the series Jazz, dir.K. Burns, PBS Home Video.

John Cage: I Have Nothing to Say and I Am Saying It (1990), from the seriesAmerican Masters, dir. A. Miller, Kultur Films Inc.

Lenny Henry Hunts the Funk (1992), from the series The South Bank Show, prod. M.Bragg, London Weekend Television.

Make It Funky (1996), from the series Dancing In The Street: A Rock andRollHistory, dir. S. Barrett and H. Thomson, BBC Video.

Modulations-Cinema for the Ear (1997), dir. I. Lee, Caipirinha ProductionsPiano Blues (2004), from the series Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues, dir. C.

Eastwood, PBS/Vulcan Productions.

Red, White and Blues (2003), from the series Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues, dir.M. Figgis, PBS/Vulcan Productions.

Soul Brother No. 1 (1978), dir. A. Maben, Swallowdale Productions/RMProductions/MHF.

Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song (1971), dir. .M. Van Peebles, XenonEntertainment Group.

That Was Rock (Re-Released Title of T.A.M.I. Show) (1965), dir. S. Binder, RBCEntertainment.

The Soul of Stax (1994), dir. P. Priestley, Les Films Grain de Sable.