When James Brown crowned his own 1970 effort “the greatest dance song ever”
If there was one thing that James Brown was never lacking in, it was the confidence that comes with being ‘Mr. Dynamite’. Whereas other artists might make some attempt to be self-effacing in interviews, the funk progenitor never passed up an opportunity to highlight the generational brilliance of his output – and quite rightly, too.
Brown had, after all, built his career from the ground up, escaping his impoverished childhood in South Carolina with dreams of musical stardom. It didn’t take him very long to achieve those aims, either. By the early 1960s, Brown’s trailblazing, sweat-soaked R&B energy had morphed into the newly emerging realm of funk, and the American airwaves would never be quite the same again. Countless imitators followed in his wake, but nobody could pull off that enigmatic energy quite like James Brown.
Along the way, of course, the performer amassed a colossal discography with more classics than some artists have hot dinners. Where Brown differed from a lot of his contemporaries at that time, too, was that he earned songwriting credits for the vast majority of his major hits, giving him a certain kind of music industry power that afforded him far more creative freedom than other up-and-coming R&B artists of the era.
Inevitably, Brown has his personal favourites within that extensive and illustrious career, and during a 1986 interview with MTV, he was asked precisely that question. Rather than delving into one specific song, though, the performer rattled through a plethora of his best-known efforts before declaring, “All my songs, they’re classics.” Arrogant, perhaps, but if anybody earned the right to be arrogant when it came to their work, it was James Brown.
Within that bullet-pointed list of Brown’s most beloved efforts, though, he did pluck out 1970’s ‘Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine’ as one of many notable highlights, dubbing the single “all-time probably the greatest dance song ever put out”. Again, bold claims rolled off Brown’s tongue at quite a consistent tempo during his interviews, but the idea that ‘Sex Machine’ is up there with the greatest dance songs ever recorded is difficult to fully dispute.
Ushering in a bold new era for the funk sound, ‘Sex Machine’ was among the first tracks that Brown recorded with his now-legendary backing group The JB’s, and as a result, it sounded unlike anything else on the scene during the early 1970s.
He wasn’t nailing himself to the retro-styled soul that dominated the charts in the 1960s, but he wasn’t falling in line with the politically-charged funk emerging over the airwaves of the counterculture era either; James Brown was, as usual, in a league of his own.
As for the claim that the 1970 track is dance music’s magnum opus, proving such a fact is a little trickier. It is worth noting, however, just how influential the song was in the later development of dance music and hip-hop. ‘Sex Machine’ has, after all, been sampled in over 200 tracks since its release, spanning the spectrum from Biz Markie and A Tribe Called Quest to Technotronic and Pop Will Eat Itself.
In terms of longevity, at the very least, Brown’s bold declaration that his song is the greatest dance track of all time does have some weight to it. Over half a century on from its release, ‘Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine’ still has the funk-fueled power to move a dancefloor, and there aren’t many songs you can say that about.
