Not sure why Elvis has been brought into this :blink: but sad to hear of the death of James Brown based on his contribution to music.

i think theres alot of urban mythology surrounding stars over what they did or didnt do, regarding the beatles i wouldnt believe everything you read as the facts are that non of the beatles have ever been prosecuted for such actions whilst james brown has. so random lists are actually worthless, i mean, by what criteria was this list compiled?

If it's James Brown, OJ Simpson or Michael Jackson everyone automaically assumes them to be guilty but if it's Pete Townshend or Paul McCartney people assume innocence and cry for 'hard evidence'. Pretty obvious the main difference between the accused :(

If it's James Brown, OJ Simpson or Michael Jackson everyone automaically assumes them to be guilty but if it's Pete Townshend or Paul McCartney people assume innocence and cry for 'hard evidence'. Pretty obvious the main difference between the accused :(

 

Colour has nothing to do with it if that is what you are implying, McCartney has never been arrested or suspected of any domestic violence bar what stumpy said, Brown has 3 convictions for it, big difference

Colour has nothing to do with it if that is what you are implying, McCartney has never been arrested or suspected of any domestic violence bar what stumpy said, Brown has 3 convictions for it, big difference

McCartney's spent time in prison in Japan. "Stumpy"'s been married to the guy and had first hand experience. It's much easier for a black dude to be convicted in the USA than a rich white guy. Look at the stats. The media is owned and controlled by rich white guys with an agenda. If a black guy is called 'King" (Rodney, Michael "king of pop" Jackson) he's going to be dragged down screaming.

McCartney's spent time in prison in Japan. "Stumpy"'s been married to the guy and had first hand experience. It's much easier for a black dude to be convicted in the USA than a rich white guy. Look at the stats. The media is owned and controlled by rich white guys with an agenda. If a black guy is called 'King" (Rodney, Michael "king of pop" Jackson) he's going to be dragged down screaming.

 

 

no comparison at all... macca in a jap jail was for canabis, there has never been any hint of anything going off between him n linda. oj was as guilty as sin and everyone knows it, jacko was guilty of innapropriate behaviour and both got off with it. brown is a convicted wife beater.

Rock'n'roll by definition attracts an outlaw element. If a rocker dies you can't go out on the street and pick a replacement. It's like elite sport. It's a skill coupled with an attitude. When Elvis and the original rockers appeared they were like untamed animals from a part of America Washington and New York pretended didn't exist. They broke the rules of music and entertainment because they didn't live by the rules of polite society. To judge innovators and groundbreakers by a set of moral and legal values set up by land barons and media mogals to keep ordinary people in their place is to completely disregard the art and innovation of these people.

 

James Brown was a supreme entertainer whos dance moves influenced every one from Michael Jackson to Iggy Pop. Papa's Got A Brand New Bag completely changed the way songs were stuctured, throwing the old verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle8, chorus out the window. He had a direct influence on the New York No Wave movement of the late 70s and had a tribute album recorded by art rockers The Residents. At least 5 of his songs were covered by The Who. To reduce the mans achievement to a prison stay is the most stupid thing ever posted on the internet. And that's really saying something.

 

The best rock music has always , and will always be dangerous and therefore attracts dangerous people. Yeah, it's good to hear a little Moby or Bono every now and then but, man, it's like driving a Volvo you'd be safe but you wouldn't want to do it every day of your life :D

Edited December 29, 200618 yr by findingout

 

 

The best rock music has always , and will always be dangerous and therefore attracts dangerous people.

 

 

thats a very good quote! :) spot on!!!

Rock'n'roll by definition attracts an outlaw element. If a rocker dies you can't go out on the street and pick a replacement. It's like elite sport. It's a skill coupled with an attitude. When Elvis and the original rockers appeared they were like untamed animals from a part of America Washington and New York pretended didn't exist. They broke the rules of music and entertainment because they didn't live by the rules of polite society. To judge innovators and groundbreakers by a set of moral and legal values set up by land barons and media mogals to keep ordinary people in their place is to completely disregard the art and innovation of these people.

 

James Brown was a supreme entertainer whos dance moves influenced every one from Michael Jackson to Iggy Pop. Papa's Got A Brand New Bag completely changed the way songs were stuctured, throwing the old verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle8, chorus out the window. He had a direct influence on the New York No Wave movement of the late 70s and had a tribute album recorded by art rockers The Residents. At least 5 of his songs were covered by The Who. To reduce the mans achievement to a prison stay is the most stupid thing ever posted on the internet. And that's really saying something.

 

The best rock music has always , and will always be dangerous and therefore attracts dangerous people. Yeah, it's good to hear a little Moby or Bono every now and then but, man, it's like driving a Volvo you'd be safe but you wouldn't want to do it every day of your life :D

 

Being a pop star or rock star is not a licence to beat women to a pulp though, nor should a woman who marries a pop or rock star expect to be given a pounding every day, that is no excuse for domestic violence infact there IS no excuse for it be the man a hellraising rock star or a shelf stacker in Sainsbury's, no one who beats the $h!t out of a woman deserves any form of respect no matter how many records they sell. Brown dished out some severe beatings including one where the woman nearly died after he kept smashing her head against a wall, what excuse is there for that ? how can a man deserve respect when he does something like that "oh but he makes good records" is NOT a valid excuse

 

James Brown: A Flawed Soul Man By Chris Johnson

 

http://www.theage.com.au/news/in-depth/a-f...6895479345.html

 

WHEN a great entertainer dies the default position in the media is to conjure up some sort of universal grief, especially in the holiday season. "The world mourns," is the catchcry. Yet the reaction to the death on Christmas Day of James Brown, the "Godfather of Soul", was neither widespread nor particularly impassioned. In some televised cases — "I don't know anything about him," said a woman in New York, "but I'm sad" — it was even manufactured.

 

In South Carolina, where Brown was born to a Depression-era, dysfunctional family in a one-room forest shack, he would certainly have been mourned. In the former slave state of Georgia, where he died in hospital from pneumonia-related heart failure after uttering the words, "I'm going away tonight," he was mourned. And in the Bronx and Harlem, where the black power message he pushed for nearly 60 years fuelled a civil rights revolution, he was certainly mourned.

 

These were Brown's people — urban African-Americans. He gave them hope at a time when they needed it most. During the race watershed of the 1960s, he was as important a figure as Martin Luther King. When King was assassinated in Memphis in 1968 it was Brown who went on national television to call for calm, the only one considered able to do so.

 

This week the Reverend Al Sharpton, a New York minister and longtime civil rights activist, said Brown, who died at the age of 73, was "a person of epic proportions" who single-handedly introduced the word "black" instead of "Negro" or "coloured". He made soul music a world music, Sharpton said. "We have lost a way of life."

 

But Brown was no Steve Irwin. He was too prickly, too antagonistic, too mad for universal mourning. True heroes are clean; he was dirty and unlawful. He used hard drugs. He was too far removed from what most people would consider virtuous and his achievements, although monumental, would only make real sense to a minority.

 

Remember that 2004 mug shot? That crazed photograph taken by the police is probably the best-known image of Brown. This after 50 No. 1 hits in America, beginning in 1956 with Please Please Please. This after spearheading the monumental rise of black music, paving the way for Marvin Gaye, Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, Prince and Michael Jackson (the new James Brown, in a sense), all of whom owed him a massive stylistic debt.

 

The mug shot was taken after he was arrested on a domestic violence charge. He was wearing a bathrobe. His trademark coiffed hair was a shambles. Grey stubble grew out of his face. He looked like a bad man, and in many ways he was.

 

He first went to jail as a teenager for stealing cars. At one point in the 1970s he owed $US4.5 million in unpaid taxes. In 1988 he was jailed for 15 months on weapons (a shotgun), drugs (PCP, or angel dust) and driving charges.

 

In 2004 Brown was charged with aggravated assault after pushing his wife over in the bedroom and threatening her with a chair. Tomi Rae Brown is 36, his fourth wife. His third wife filed for divorce after claiming he hit her with an iron bar and fired his gun at her car.

 

Brown met Tomi Rae in a casino in Las Vegas and she became one of his backing singers. This week, after her husband's sudden death, she was locked out of their mansion. She said the gates were padlocked at the request of his lawyer, who began claiming the marriage was never legal. The pictures of her kneeling and wailing at the mansion's gates, holding her head in her hands, were immeasurably sad. I think it's fair to say that most people would find them a lot sadder than the actual death of her errant husband.

 

Errant, but a genius. That's the complicating factor in all this. He was a genius: a band leader who didn't play an instrument or read music but was able to motivate probably the tightest band ever to grace a stage — his 1970s outfit, the JB's (including Maceo Parker, Bootsy Collins and Fred Wesley) — to be even tighter, to find an unprecedented melody-free groove around the drums, the bass and the horns — and stay on it until it seemed it had been stayed on too long. Then stay on it a few bars more.

 

Lyrically, he did little of consequence, bar It's A Man's, Man's, Man's World — covered later by a young Renee Geyer — and Say It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud), his greatest civil rights anthem and the song that transformed him from a curious rhythm and blues/gospel performer to a subversive black activist. "We'd rather die on our feet," he sung in it, "than live on our knees."

 

Instead of proper lyrics, he relied on a kind of primal, intuitive series of chants and incantations. "Give it to me," he would shout. "I'm ready to get up and do my thing." "Take it to the bridge!" "Hit it." "Excuse me while I do the boogaloo!"

 

In the great track Cold Sweat, from 1967, a brutally raw, metronomic, seven-minute song ostensibly about falling in love, all the instruments become percussive elements. It has only one chord change. The musical emphasis is on the first beat in every cycle — this pattern of being "on the one" became the basis of funk music. As did Brown's spontaneous command to his 11-piece band to "give the drummer some", meaning let the drummer do a solo. Clyde Stubblefield's subsequent effort, his drum "break" recorded naked and alone, has since become the most sampled piece of music ever, forming the basis of hundreds of hip-hop, R&B, disco and techno tracks.

 

James Brown became funk, he owned it. And funk became the soundtrack to the civil rights movements in America in the 1960s and 1970s. " 'Funky' is about the injustices, the things that go wrong, the hungry kids going to school trying to learn," he once said. " 'Funky' is about what it takes to make people move."

 

Funky, however, doesn't cut it in the whitebread suburbs of the world. Cultural critic Simon Frith has pointed out that Brown and his hardcore black funk followers such as George Clinton and Sly Stone make "unsettling" outsider music that has "haunted the bourgeoisie'. This is why in the perennial mainstream top 100 album lists in the likes of Q magazine, Brown rarely features, despite imitators such as Prince and Michael Jackson getting great billing.

 

What funk does represent is movement, rhythm, freedom and self-expression. These are Brown's legacies. He was important, but not in a blindingly obvious Paul McCartney kind of way. He changed music and went some way towards changing the world. Yet his deep flaws always threatened to overshadow his achievements.

 

According to the Washington Post in an obituary published this week, he joins Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan as the ones who laid the foundations of American popular music.

 

Dylan owns the canon of lyrics and storytelling and metaphor. Brown had more primitive, straightforward instincts. His was a guttural, physical, wordless imprint.

 

Early in his career he had a routine of feigning collapse on stage. A cape, in a piece of theatre taken from the world of wrestling, would be draped around him, as if in death. Then he would shrug it off, dislodge the microphone from its stand with his foot, catch it and rise to his feet only to drop to both knees again to resume the song that was interrupted in the first place.

 

When he died on Christmas Day, his heart and lungs were shot. The coroner would also find that he had badly damaged cartilages in both knees, the result of a lifetime of falling to them in the throes of his elaborate, difficult dance.

 

Chris Johnston is an Age senior writer