Sample School: James Brown

The amazing thing about so much of modern music, from hip-hop and out beyond, is that you’re never really listening to just one album or just one track, you’re skimming the surface of musical history. Most hip-hop artists are as much archivists as they are musicians and if you look a little deeper you’ll find a mind-boggling back-catalog of genius staring back at you. Spend more than a few minutes on WhoSampled.com and you’ll quickly become entranced, digging out track after track to find out which 70s funk hooks, film score overtures and Malcolm X quotes built the flesh around the skeleton of the beat. The purpose of this feature is to give you an insight into a particular band or artist who helped to shape that world, an artist you’ve likely been listening to for years without even realising it.

Earlier this year I went to see D’Angelo live in Birmingham. I’m reasonably confident that it’s the best gig I’ve ever been to. Beyond the showmanship, the quality of the material and the sheer elation of being stood less than 50 feet from one of the greatest RnB/neo-soul legends there is, it came down to just how tight and talented his band were. The arrangements were so beautifully crafted and the way the individual members played off each other as one track blended seamlessly into the next (which would often be distinctly different to the studio version or any other prior rendition) was incredible to behold. The reason I’m bringing this up is because it’s probably the closest I’ll ever come to seeing James Brown live in his heyday.

Now I’m not saying that there are particularly massive musical parallels between D’Angelo and James Brown (although there are a few), but simply that you’d be hard pressed to find many people around today as dedicated and adept as bringing amazing musicians together as James Brown was. The story was the same in the studio and although there’s been plenty of talk about his empiracal, almost tyrannical work ethic, the man got the job done on pretty much every record ever put out under his name. That’s the reason that, since the mid 1980s, he hasn’t gone a single year without being sampled. ‘Say it Loud (I’m Black I’m Proud)’ was considered a milestone in African American rights activism through music and when it turned up in Public Enemy’s ‘Fight the Power’, it was a logical progression (even though 19 other tracks are also sampled in it).

Everybody knows his hits, either by himself or with the JBs, his sound is unmistakable, but you’ll be hard pressed to find more than a handful of samples from ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’ anywhere in hip-hop. Brown’s body of work is so vast and so diverse that he’s been a mainstay in sampling from pretty much the beginning. There’s very little record of exactly what was being laid down at those Bronx block parties in the 70s that first brought brought the musical side of hip-hop to life, but I think it’s safe to say that a lot of James Brown would have been flying around. So, without further preamble, let’s examine 3 of JB’s most significant tracks in sample culture. You might not have heard them knowingly, but trust me, you’ve heard them.

The Payback – The Payback – 1973
Appears in Protection by Massive Attack

One of the times when James Brown’s sampling influence actually did fall in line with his widespread fame, the 1973 double LP The Payback is lauded as a funk classic and the title track is quintessential Brown. It’s not an especially complex track, but the weighty, fizzling beat and the intoxicating guitar keep it from descending into mediocrity for the entire 7 and a half minute run. The album was originally submitted to act as a soundtrack for the Larry Cohen blaxploitation film Hell Up in Harlem, but it was rejected for apparently being too unimaginative. What a beautiful piece of poetic justice that it’s such a classic now. Just about every part of the track has been used as a sample by someone or another from Big Daddy Kane and EMPD in the late 80s right up to this year, when Kendrick Lamar used it for ‘King Kunta’, even going so far as to quote a few of the lyrics. Massive Attack remain the ones to have used it the most inventively to this day though, if you ask me.

 

The Boss – Black Caesar – 1973
Appears in Get Down by NaS

Emanating from another soundtrack album (one that actually got used for the film), a lot of James Brown’s work from this period tends to be regarded as emblematic of a bit of a downfall. At the time of release, the Black Caesar soundtrack was critically panned and while history has been somewhat kinder, it’s far from an underrated gem. Luckily though there is a little glint of the James Brown genius nestled in there and numerous producers have honoured it over the years. In the film it was written for, ‘The Boss’ plays as one of the main characters gets shot. It isn’t necessarily an ominous track, but there’s a strange otherness about the way it’s toned and the content of the lyrics. The running thematic undercurrent of violence is a lot more direct in the NaS version of the track, which is one of those hip-hop tracks so similar to its sample source it’s almost a cover. It features less obviously in Pete Rock’s instrumental track, which shares the same title, rippling in and out of focus behind a more prominent Dorothy Ashby sample. The Boss is one of those tracks which seems to have become a sampling talisman almost by accident, it could easily have been lost to the ages, but that brass hook deserved preservation and it got it.

 

 

Funky Drummer – King – 1970
Appears in Fight the Power by Public Enemy

Remember what I said about Fight the Power sampling 19 tracks other than Say It Loud (I’m Black I’m Proud)? Well it’s also true that there’s another James Brown track in that list. Also remember a few weeks back when Sample School covered the Amen Break? Well James Brown has one of his own, the Funky Drummer Break. Not content with just being possibly the most frequently sampled artist in musical history, Brown can also lay claim to one of the four tracks listed on WhoSampled which has more than 1000 different samples, next to Amen, Brother, Think (About It) by Lyn Collins and Change the Beat by Beside. The Funky Drummer Break is a brief reprieve between Brown’s organ noodling and Maceo Parker’s tenor sax work which sees the awesomely named drummer Clyde Stubblefield launching into a brief, but ratchet-tight solo. As it turned out, the tempo of the track and the general tone of the solo became catnip to early hip-hop producers and by grace of its appearance of some iconic early era tracks, the loop became one of the genre’s greatest mainstays.

It’s appeared in numerous tracks outside of hip-hop too, though, with artists like Korn and Sinead O’Connor getting in on the act. Oh, remember how the Amen Break also crops up in the Futurama theme music? Well this time around it’s James L. Venable’s theme for the fucking Powerpuff Girls. Public Enemy still emerge as the most significant group to utilise it though, aside from Fight the Power (which also name checks the track in the lyrics), they used it in six of their other tracks. Although the playing credit falls to Stubblefield (albeit none of the capital), Funky Drummer’s huge impact on musical development at large just shows what a progressive and powerful arranger James Brown really was, his mind was so overflowing with ideas that even the most incidental aspects of his work have become huge parts of the wider stratosphere.