THE FUNK MESSIAH

THIS IS HOW MR. BROWN CHANGED MUSIC FOREVER

Listen up, y'all! Let me tell you some TRUTH about the baddest man in music history, Mr. James Brown! The Godfather. Soul Brother Number One. Mr. Dynamite. This dude didn't just change the game. Hell no. One day he just woke up and said, ¨hey, all this music I hear is just plain boring. What we need is something FUNKY!¨ And that's that. A new style of music was born. So revolutionary that we're still feeling it shake the ground beneath our feet today.

FROM NOTHING TO SOMETHING

Let's get this straight, JB came from nothing. Born in a one-room shack, raised in his aunt's brothel, shining shoes and dancing for pennies. No silver spoons, no fancy music lessons, no theory classes. Just a kid with nothing but SOUL and HUNGER.

While other kids were learning to read music, little James was learning to read the streets. Got himself locked up as a teen for some petty crime, and what does he do? Forms a gospel group IN PRISON. You gotta do whatever to survive, baby!

BREAKING THE RULES HE NEVER LEARNED

Here's what's wild; James Brown never really knew the rules he was breaking! He couldn't read a note of music. Couldn't tell you about music theory. And THANK GOD for that!

Everyone else with their fancy degrees were stuck in their heads while James was living on another level. They're thinking scales and chord progressions, and he's thinking about that GROOVE, that FEELING, that thing that makes your body move before your brain even knows what's happening.

THE MOMENT THE FUNK DROPPED

By '65, JB was already making noise, but then, BOOM! "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" hits and music ain't never been the same. But the real REVOLUTION? That came with "Cold Sweat" in '67.

That track wasn't just different, it was from another PLANET. JB stripped everything back to the bone and built it all around THE ONE. First beat of the measure, hit it HARD, make everything else serve that groove.

While everyone else was serving up three-chord love songs, James was cooking up something raw and nasty that made your body move in ways your mama didn't approve of!

The music folks were SHOOK. "This ain't music," they said. Yeah, it was BETTER than music—it was FUNK!

THE HARDEST WORKING MAN FOR A REASON

Ha! I'm laughing! Y'all think your boss is tough? Try playing in James Brown's band! Show up late? That's a fine. Miss a note? That's a fine. Scuff on your shoes? FINE! JB ran that band like a drill sergeant with a hangover.

Rehearsals weren't just practice, they were endurance tests. Same groove for hours until it was perfect. Not good, not great, PERFECT.

"Hit me!" wasn't just some catchphrase, it was a COMMAND. Hit that note, hit that beat, give me everything you got and then hit it some more!

Man, that band was tight! So precise. It knew and it could feel those notes and beats all around them. And the drums! My brother, those drums were innovative, so ahead of their time that those beats began another revolution - RAP. But that's another story for another blog. I will touch upon it a bit later.

CHANGING THE WHOLE DAMN WORLD

What JB created wasn't just some new style, it was a whole new language for being alive. Funk wasn't just heard, it was felt. In your chest, in your hips, in places you don't talk about at church!

Look around at EVERYTHING that came after:

• Hip-hop? Built on James Brown samples. Just ask Public Enemy, who made "Fight the Power" by chopping up JB breaks.

• Disco? Just funk with platform shoes and glitter.

• EDM? Funk through a computer, baby!

• Modern R&B? Still chasing that JB groove decades later.

• Afrobeat? Fela Kuti straight up admitted he took James Brown's blueprint and ran with it!

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Before James, folks listened to music with their ears. After James? We felt it with our WHOLE BODIES. Music wasn't just some pretty sounds anymore, it was a physical experience.

AGAINST ALL THE ODDS

And let's be real about what he was up against:

Radio didn't want that funk; too raw, too Black, too ghetto! Record execs were scratching their heads like, "Where's the chorus?" Critics called it "primitive" because they couldn't understand GENIUS when it hit them in the face. Oh, and did I mention he was doing all this as a Black man in AMERICA - yes, the most racist place at that time - during the 60s? When just drinking from the wrong fountain could get you arrested or worse?

But JB didn't care about any of that. Man had a vision so clear, so powerful that nothing was gonna stand in his way.

THE LESSON IS FIRE

So what's the moral of this story? The most earth-shaking ideas don't come from textbooks or classrooms, they come from the street, from the struggle, from people who don't know enough about the "rules" to be limited by them.

James didn't ask, "How can I make better music?" He asked, "Why does music have to be like THIS at all?" And then he blew the whole thing up and rebuilt it from scratch.

Every time you nod your head to that beat, every time your hips start moving without you even thinking about it, you're feeling the aftershocks of James Brown's REVOLUTION.

The man gave us the funk, and funk is freedom in musical form. It's sweaty, it's nasty, it's real, and it moves you.

In the immortal words of the Godfather himself: "The one thing that can solve most of our problems is dancing." And nobody, let me say it again, NOBODY, made us dance like James Brown.

So, GET UP! GET ON UP! The revolution wasn't televised, it was FUNKIFIED!

Thanks for MotherF-ing Reading, my brothers and sisters! Abrazos.

Diego Rojas