“I started the rap music”: Did James Brown invent hip-hop?
James Brown and his funk-fuelled musical revolution can be traced as the root of countless different scenes, subgenres, and performers across the musical landscape, from hip-hop to rock and roll. If you were ever in doubt about that fact, you only need to listen to various old interviews of the performer, as he had a habit of telling everyone about his seismic impact on music.
To be fair to Brown, not many people can claim the same all-encompassing power or musical influence that he had back in his heyday. From his landmark 1974 performance in Zaire to the life-changing sounds of his Live At The Apollo record, much closer to home, the musical mastery of the funk hero was impossible to deny, so why would he bother trying?
Aside from anything else, playing to such adoring crowds and living off a cocktail of PCP and mountains of cocaine for much of his existence rendered the performer with a pretty unavoidable ego.
As a result of that chemically-inflated ego, Brown was known to make some rather wild claims during his time here on Earth. However, his 1987 declaration that hip-hop was entirely indebted to his own output is a lot harder to dispute than, say, the idea that when somebody dies their soul departs the body through a “puff of smoke, right out of your rectum.”
You only need to look at the countless number of hip-hop classics that have sampled James Brown to get some idea of his impact on the genre. Whether it’s Public Enemy, Kendrick Lamar, NWA, Jay-Z, or any number of hip-hop icons, those sample credits – of which there are well over 15,000 – cemented Brown as a key cultural touchstone within the hip-hop realm. The man himself was never in any doubt about that fact, either.
Even during the relatively early days of the hip-hop scene, back in the 1980s, Brown quickly recognised his impact on the scene. Asked about groups like Run-DMC and Beastie Boys in a 1987 interview, an uncharacteristically calm and collected Brown declared, “Those are poor copies – I’m not gonna say poor copies – they’re copies of what they thought I was doing in the ‘60s, like ‘Let the Brother Rapp’.”
“I started the rap music.”
James Brown
Sonically, that 1970 single, ‘Brother Rapp’, shared little in common with the art of rapping; it was, as expected, much closer to Brown’s usual funk-centric approach. Nevertheless, it’s easy to see the connection between the track, with its distinctive attitude and funky backbeat, and the hip-hop that followed years later.
“What they’re doing is things I did years ago,” Brown went on. “Rap music is a kind of variation, it’s like the end of a James Brown song, what we would do at the very end.” By that, Brown likely meant that the ad-libbed, improvisational moments at the end of his recordings and live performances were awash with the same energy and spontaneity as the hip-hop sampling and MCing that was coming to dominate the airwaves of the late 1980s.
Again, it is a tricky claim to dispute, if only for Brown’s hip-hop credentials through samples and, aside from anything else, the fact that his performance style inspired everybody from Mick Jagger to Chuck D.
On the other side of the argument, hip-hop still wouldn’t have risen to its dizzying heights without the pioneering influence of groups like Run-DMC, so it wasn’t all entirely down to James Brown. Nevertheless, the hip-hop landscape would certainly be far less fertile without his influence.
