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December 27, 2006
"James Brown is Hip Because He Has to Be"
Via Crooked Timber, an excellent essay on the nature of James Brown's funk. To entice you, a nice long excerpt:
As I've explained elsewhere, I think about hipness a fair bit, and one of the things I think about is how very, very few things remain hip all the time. Hipness is Heisenbergian: the act of observation changes the thing observed. If I say that Madlib (say) is hip, the mere fact that I, a paunchy middle-aged music professor, say he's hip will mean that he's actually a little less hip, because it means that I've heard about him, and now that you've read this, so have you. (Ideally you know of Madlib's hipness because he got you high in his bomb shelter or something. You gotta live it or it won't come out of your horn, as Charlie Parker said.) So hipness is unstable, and you can't ever really define hipness in terms of individuals. Even so, there are a few musicians who are basically hip all the time: Miles Davis, John Lennon, and, it now must be said, James Brown. James Brown is hip because hipness, as a concept, as an eschatology, is unthinkable without him.
Posted by todd at December 27, 2006 8:06 PM
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