Was James Brown right about all the genres he claimed to have invented?
James Brown was many things, but modest was never one of them.
To be fair to the enigmatic, endlessly energetic performer, his sheer impact on the musical landscape of the world was such that any phoney modesty would have been rather superfluous. He was the man who gave the world funk, after all; who taught Mick Jagger to dance, recorded some of the most legendary songs of the 20th century, and whose work still props up virtually the entire world of hip-hop sampling. His self-assurance was earned, and fair enough.
Even still, Brown was known to make some rather outlandish claims during his day. Whether it was his declaration that he had written “5500 songs”, thus making him more prolific than the likes of Irvine Berlin or Mozart, his bizarre endorsement of Richard Nixon during his 1972 re-election campaign, or his advice to a young Eddie Murphy that he should quite literally put all of his money in a box and bury it in his backyard, James Brown wasn’t often known for his coherence outside the recording studio.
Admittedly, that aforementioned extreme confidence Brown always maintained, when coupled with the copious amounts of cocaine and PCP that were coursing through his body for years on end, didn’t add up to a man who was well-grounded in reality.
Hence, when he once said, “Disco is James Brown, hip-hop is James Brown, rap is James Brown; you know what I’m saying? You hear all the rappers, 90% of their music is me,” it is easy to write off his ramblings as another drug-induced bout of arrogance.
Then again, there is a certain degree of truth to those ramblings. As far as disco goes, for instance, that dance-centric sound was rooted in the funk and soul output of the 1960s, with many of the architects of disco graduating from a funk background into the more commercial-friendly realm of disco towards the late 1970s. Given his well-earned reputation as the ‘Godfather of Funk’, Brown does stake a claim to being a major influence on disco.
Moving onto rap and hip-hop, Brown’s claims tend to hold even more water. Particularly during the early days of the scene, in places like Harlem, old funk records provided the basis for sample culture and MCing, and James Brown’s records were abundant in that movement. What’s more, if you revisit songs like ‘Brother Rapp’ from Brown’s back catalogue, his delivery isn’t all that dissimilar from rapping.
You only need to look at the ubiquity of James Brown’s material in the hip-hop world to understand the vital impact he had on that scene. Having been sampled by everybody from Public Enemy to NWA, Snoop Dogg, Kanye West, Childish Gambino, Kendrick Lamar, and The Notorious BIG, among countless others, it is virtually impossible to argue against Brown’s continued presence within the hip-hop world.
Whichever way you spin it, Brown had a huge impact on the development of hip-hop and disco, but the idea that he was the sole person responsible for those scenes is much harder to support. No genre or musical movement is truly owed to only one man in isolation, and there is a distinct possibility that the disco sound, and even hip-hop sampling would have still existed without James Brown. Then again, neither of those worlds would be quite the same without him.
