Read part one here.

5.James Brown, the Godfather of Soul and Funk

James Brown, known as the “Godfather of Soul", made his professional debut in 1956 as a member of the singing group The Famous Flames and immediately broke through with the hit ballad “Please, Please, Please". The song, which is a blend of gospel music and R&B, took lyrics that could have been about seeking God’s grace and made them about a man begging his lover not to leave him.

However, Brown and his group had trouble producing a hit for sometime afterwards, and was in danger of getting lost in the sea of soul musicians being sent out into the world by labels like Motown. Brown braved the storm by performing live show after live show, honing his band’s skills while developing his own style as a singer and bandleader. To understand Brown’s music, it’s best to start with his live albums.

Brown’s soul era band is captured at its peak in the 1963 live album Live at the Apollo.

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Live at the Apollo
James Brown released this live album in 1963. Rolling Stone magazine ranked it 25th on its list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time”.

Brown’s ferociously energetic live performances became the stuff of legend, earning him nicknames like “Mr. Dynamite" and “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business". Especially famous was his trademark “cape routine" during performances of “Please, Please, Please". Partway through the song, Brown would fall to his knees, and the MC would come out onto the stage, drape a cape over Brown’s shoulders, and attempt to escort the performer off the stage—while his band continued to sing. At the edge of the stage, Brown would shake off the cape and lumber back toward the microphone to continue singing the song. This routine would be repeated numerous times, and each time the music would revive the exhausted Brown.

In the second half of the 60s, Brown’s sound would evolve and pioneer what would become known as funk. One of his seminal songs during this transitional period is the 1965 tune “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag". While most soul songs at the time were love songs about sad men pining for their lover to come back to them, Brown embodied a stylish, revitalized man brimming with confidence and showing off his dance moves. The “new bag" he refers to also hints and the new direction his music was taking. The song garnered Brown his first Grammy Award for Best R&B Song.

Another important song was “Funky Drummer", which was the result of a jam session in 1969. The song consists of simple rhythm guitar, sax, and organ licks over a distinctive groove, and Brown’s improvised vocals are mostly words of encouragement directed at the other band members. The highlight is the drum “solo"; just before the solo, Brown can be heard saying, "You don't have to do no soloing, brother, just keep what you got... Don't turn it loose, 'cause it's a mother." The eight-bar solo was sampled by many black hip-hop artists in the 80s, and then by many white pop artists in the 90s and onwards.

Brown’s was a demanding bandleader who required his band to wear tuxedoes and freshly shined shoes each time they took to the stage. (His band during the 70s was known as the J.B.’s.) Whenever a musician made a mistake, he would turn around and say “Gotcha!" or raise a number of fingers into the air to indicate how much the member would be fined for his mistake. For Brown, maintaining a perfect rhythm and groove and putting on a good show was more important than anything.

In March of 1970, most of the J.B.’s left over money disputes. Brown formed a new band based around funk musicians Bootsy Collins (bass) and his older brother Catfish Collins (rhythm guitar). This would push Brown’s sound in an even heavier, funkier direction. This is the lineup that would record the seminal track “Sex Machine". The call and response at the beginning of the song would inspire the kind of vocals seen in hip-hop and rap. (Think Naughty by Nature’s “Hip hop Hooray".)

This lineup of Brown’s band would be immortalized in the live album Love, Power, Peace: Live at the Olympia, Paris 1971. The album’s setlist includes everything from the performer’s early classics to songs like “Sex Machine”. Brown originally intended to release the performance as a three-disc album in 1971, but shortly after the concerts, Bootsy Collins and a number of the other members left, Brown switched labels, and the project was shelved until the label decided to release it in 1992. For a singular performer like Bootsy, wearing a tuxedo every night and being confined to a supporting player role could have only lasted so long.

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Love, Power, Peace: Live at the Olympia, Paris 1971
This is the only James Brown live album with the lineup that contains Bootsy Collins and Catfish Collins.

In the second half of the 70s, the rise of glittery disco music would cast a shadow over Brown’s funk. Ironically, disco DJs considered Brown’s early work essential, but his new work was increasingly being seen by music fans as out of step and behind the times. Brown himself was reluctant to embrace disco. Meanwhile, Bootsy Collins had joined George Clinton to launch Parliament and Funkadelic into the stratosphere.

6.George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, and The Rise of P-Funk

New Jersey-born George Clinton started a barbershop doo-wop group called The Parliaments in 1956, at the age of 15. (The group got its name from Parliament cigarettes.) In the 60s, Clinton began working as a songwriter/producer at Motown Records. When The Parliaments finally scored a hit in 1967, Clinton sought to conduct a tour to capitalize on the success, and formed a backup band to support the group. After some record label disputes, the vocal group The Parliaments would become the R&B-based funk band Parliament, while the supporting band became a rock-influenced funk band called Funkadelic. Clinton would sing in and produce both groups, and likewise there was a lot of overlap between the members. Collectively, they would come to call themselves P-Funk.

Funkadelic was heavily influenced by Jimi Hendrix and Sly and the Family Stone, and its early work fits squarely into the genre of psychedelic rock. 1971’s Maggot Brain, recorded and produced while the band was high as a kite on LSD, would be the group’s psychedelic masterpiece. Thematically, the album captures the dark side of America, tackling topics like the Vietnam War, the assassination of civil rights leaders, and the reality of inner city slums.
The title track is 10 minutes long, and begins with an otherworldly introduction by Clinton:





Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time
For y’all have knocked her up
I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe
I was not offended
For I knew I had to rise above it all
Or drown in my own shit

From that point, the track is for all intents and purposes a 10-minute guitar solo by Eddie Hazel. Legend has it that Clinton, under the influence of LSD, told Hazel to imagine he had been told his mother was dead. While he originally intended for the track to feature the entire band, when he heard the superhuman post-Hendrix sounds coming out of Hazel’s guitar, he faded out the rest of the band to the point that they are barely audible.

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Maggot Brain
Funkadelic’s third studio album was released in 1971. Rolling Stone magazine ranked it 486th on its list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time”.

According to Clinton, “Maggot Brain” referred to a “state of mind”, where your consciousness had been set free by the power of funk. Drugs facilitate the process. In the albums the followed, Funkadelic would celebrate funk as a kind of religion—music that had the power to save humanity from itself.

Parliament, on the other hand, was a funk band that borrowed more from R&B than it did from rock. Piano and keyboards were a major component of its sound, and its message was literally out-of-this-world, that is to say, space and sci-fi themed. Space, of course, represented freedom—both in the literal sense, and the spiritual sense. The outer space theme was a central part of P-Funk mythology, and the themes were developed throughout the band’s work. Clinton explained, "We had put black people in situations nobody ever thought they would be in, like the White House. I figured another place you wouldn't think black people would be was in outer space.”

The other key piece of the puzzle was the larger-than-life presence of bassist Bootsy Collins, who joined the P-Funk collective in 1972 after he left James Brown’s band. Bootsy was known for his distinct groove, trademark star-shaped sunglasses, wild stage costumes, and his “space bass”—a bass shaped like a star.

Parliament’s magnum opus is 1975’s Mothership Connection. The album cover features a black spaceman decked out in silver intergalactic disco attire sitting in a UFO. The sci-fi concept of the album is that aliens from a funk-depleted world have come to Earth in search of funk. Rolling Stone magazine called the album “a parody of modern funk”.

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Mothership Connection
Parliament’s fourth studio album was released in 1976. Rolling Stone magazine ranked it 276th on its list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time”.

The album’s climax is the P-Funk classic, “Give Up The Funk (Tear The Roof Off The Sucker)"). After the aliens fail to convince Earth to sell them its funk, they turn to their last resort: threatening to tear the roof off any place on Earth where people are getting down unless they give up the funk.

7.Epilogue

The other day the renowned Japanese comedian Shimura Ken died of pneumonia caused by COVID-19.

Shimura rose to stardom in the 1970s after he joined the popular comedic band/comedy group The Drifters, which had its own weekly TV show where it performed comedic skits and songs. After The Drifters dissolved, he became a household name for a number of shows bearing his name.

Shimura was also known for his extreme fondness for R&B and soul music, and for a time he even wrote music reviews of the latest releases by black artists for a Japanese music magazine.

Shimura’s musical tastes seeped in to his work with The Drifters. For their parody song “Dorifu no Hayakuchi Kotoba" (Tongue Twisters Sung by The Drifters), they heavily borrowed from Wilson Pickett’s song “Don’t Knock My Love", which has a distinct funk groove.

Then there was the “Hige Dansu" (Moustache Dance), where Shimura and his bandmate Kato Cha prance around and perform different street stunts to a track based on a snippet of soul singer Teddy Pendergrass’ funk song “Do Me".

Finally, there’s the band’s single “Dorifu no Bai no Bai no Bai", a Japanese-style funk tune complete with wah-wah guitar, brass instruments, and groovy rhythm section with percussion. It also contains the iconic refrain from the disco classic “Do the Hustle". While the main vocals are sung by the aforementioned Kato, Shimura plays the James Brown-inspired hype man who yells out “Wao!" “Get up!" and “Dynamite!"

This funk influence is evident not only in the music of The Drifters but also in the work of other Japanese comedy rock and roll bands. This is true of the jazz band and comedy group Crazy Cats, as well as the impressions and parody tunes of Busy Four. These groups combined the influence of black music with a comedy edge that was clearly influenced by the absurdity inherent to the funk aesthetic.

This funk influence can also be seen in the popular Japanese music of the time. The epicenter of the Japanese music scene is always in Tokyo, and in that sense the late 70s and 80s was the heyday of City Pop—characterized by a smooth, refined sound that combined jazz, R&B, AOR, and soft rock. Other bands trying to make it on the geographic periphery of Tokyo and beyond had to go in the opposite direction toward a rawer, earthier, thicker, funkier sound. That meant groovy rhythms, lyrics that incorporated regional speech and colloquialisms, alter egos, and a healthy dose of the comedic and the absurd. In a sense, those groups were the funk bands of Japan.

Those bands included Ulfuls, a rock band from Osaka with heavy funk influences and Unicorn, a rock band with an appreciation for the absurd, formed in Hiroshima by the singer-songwriter Okuda Tamio. Even the famous singer and “King of Rock" Imawano Kiyoshiro—born in the Western part of Tokyo, away from the city center—was heavily influenced by soul and funk music. Little comedic asides were a part of his live act, and even included his take on James Brown’s cape routine. The chip these bands had on their shoulder led them down the path of music that was the antithesis to the smooth, refined sounds of City Pop; in other words, funk.

Funk music in the U.S. was a way for black musicians to express themselves freely—and set people’s minds free in the process. In Japan, the funk aesthetic was adopted as a way for musicians on the periphery to achieve notoriety and compete with the Tokyo mainstream.

If I had to translate the word funk into Japanese, I’d borrow an expression from Osaka dialect, kotekote, which essentially means thick—like molasses.