There are no words

A friend of mine recently wrote me an email chastising me for not having written about James Brown's death on No Mas. Strangely, I found out that James was dead because of No Mas, indirectly at least. I woke up that morning and made some coffee, turned on the computer, checked my email. The first message I read was from a different friend, which began - "Sad that in the midst of all this Ali Rap bullshit, the man who actually did invent rap died today."

James was a boxer as a young man, evidently a pretty good one, which is not hard to believe when you've dug the goodfoot once or twice. As far as sports go, his music is most directly connected to the sweet science, through his friendship with Ali and his performance at the Rumble in the Jungle festival in Zaire, through his unforgettable "Living in America" barnburner before the Drago/Creed bout in Rocky IV, and through Sonny Liston, who trained so compulsively to JB's "Night Train" that it became his personal theme song, and would later be the name of a Liston biography.

I've listened to JB countless times myself while hitting the bag or getting my shadowbox on, working up that good sweat, feeling my own feeble funk while I bobbed and weaved and jabbed on the one. Shit is so good, so nice, it's hard to believe James didn't have the boxing gym in mind when he put half that shit together.

Then again, there are few things to do that I have not done to the music of James Brown at least sometime. Drinking smoking dancing fucking cokesnorting eating driving grieving thinking every damn thing worth doing in my life has at some point been enhanced by James Brown doing his thing in the background. One album in particular, "In the Jungle Groove," I've listened to so many times in so many different phases that it's hard to imagine how many actual hours I've spent with that record on. It's been more of a constant for me than just about anything other than sports - friends, thoughts, styles, attitudes. I've turned my back on about a thousand different ideas of what my life should be over the years, and kept coming back to that album through every single one of them.

One moment I'll never forget - it was in my room in college, with four friends. We'd all dropped acid, it was the morning, winter-time, and my room was cold like it always was. The shit was just coming on us all pretty hard, that terrible strychnine-laced paper shit that fucked you up so wrong. Everything was starting to turn into a freakshow in there, and I went to my CD player to put on something mellow to chill everything out a little. Traffic, I think, was what I was trying to cue up.

But I played "In the Jungle Groove" by mistake, and from the very first sound on the record - "Fellas, things done got too far gone!" - a mighty spirit put the room in a stranglehold and the voodoo was high. We were about six songs into the thing before I even knew what hit me. It was like "Get Up Get Into It Get Involved" and I was thinking my goddamn head is about to blow right off of my body up in here and I looked up and saw my friends in the same feverish trance that I was, jaws clenched, faces red, bobbing their heads like they might hurt themselves. The music was vicious and dangerous, but in a way that we seriously, SERIOUSLY dug. For myself, it seemed like a glimpse of true manhood, of power and virility and righteousness and of just how heavy shit can get out there in the big bad world. To paraphrase Dylan, I was frightened by the awful truth of how sweet life could be.

Lester Bangs concluded his epic eulogy for Elvis by pointing out that the truly special thing about the King was that he had moved people across all lines of race and class and ethnicity, that he was something we'd all agreed to agree upon, and thus the tragedy of his death was that we weren't just losing an icon, but that we were losing something that had kept us all together, which in this day and age is the kind of thing that we can ill afford to lose. Right now, that feels more true to me of the Godfather of Soul than it ever was of Elvis, and so I'll steal a line from old Lester and finish up by not only bidding farewell to James Brown, but by bidding farewell, my dear readers, to you.