Turn It Up Give It Shrooms
On the "Reimagining" of James Brown's classics
Since when did the music of James Brown need any “reimagining?”
That sounds like an old-person question. (Guilty as charged.) But it’s also a musical one. So’s this: What’s the most creative way to do it?
Homage-style remix projects like the just issued Black & Loud: James Brown Reimagined by Stro Elliott have been part of the music landscape for decades. The label executives who underwrite these endeavors can argue for them as win-win: The estate of an icon benefits when “refreshed” old music returns to circulation, and at the same time, the public (particularly younger listeners) gain the chance to encounter works they might not discover otherwise. The right producer can drive traffic back to the catalog. Or so the thinking goes.
This act of reworking – which the producer Bill Laswell aptly called “Mix Translation” when he created the 1998 Panthalassa, a fantasia based on Miles Davis’ electric-era works – demands a degree of sensitivity, and at least some awareness of the original artist’s aesthetic. Turn a speed metal person loose on “Turn It Loose” and you might end up with music that’s devoid of the signature James Brown looseness.
Stro Elliot, the multi-instrumentalist, DJ and producer who’s part of the Roots crew, understands the architecture of Brown’s classic hits; he clearly reveres the often-imitated never-duplicated magnetism of the James Brown rhythm section.
Still some of Elliot’s choices are eyebrow-raising. He slows down many tunes – his “Sorta Bad” sacrifices the crisp, rousing, slightly uptempo sticks-on-rim crackle of “Superbad” for a diffuse, indifferent, easy-listening medium tempo. It’s pleasant enough, and from a DJ perspective, totally appropriate.
But it de-fangs an eterally relevant, enduringly perfect groove. It’s a red flag drawing attention to a missed opportunity: Brown was fierce about timing and tiny gradient shifts in emphasis. He regarded tempo as sacrosanct, put things exactly where they felt best to him. You could do a semester-length class on this, comparing the classic studio recordings to various live versions and then the (mostly weak-sauce) covers to determine precisely what metronome marking led to the most riveting music. Wild guess: The studio versions get this right more often than not.
Elliot achieves his boldest reimagining on “Coal Sweat.” It’s slower too, but the new tempo, defined by a rattling, heavily processed kick drum, has its own kind of hypnotism. And when he reaches the bridge, Elliot goes for a fully psychedelic mood change, juxtaposing carefully chopped drum fills against harmonically rich swirls of overlapping synths. The last two minutes are flat-out tremendous.
It's a shame there aren’t more radical moments like “Coal Sweat” here. Also dismaying: The emphasis on the well-known never-to-be-improved-upon hits. The Brown Reimagined project many musicheads long to hear would involve further inquiry into the many instrumental tracks by Brown, the J.B.s and others in the orbit, which are beyond ripe for dubifying and weirdifying.
Hearing this sent me back to Laswell’s Davis project, as well as mix translations he did on works by hitmakers (Bob Marley) and lesser-known talents (Iranian vocalist Sussan Deyhim, featured last week here). My recall of Panthalassa was as an intermittently engaging ambient rendering of music from In A Silent Way and later records. It was astonishing to hear it now, after absorbing so much of the textural invention associated with dub and electronic music that owes some debt to those Miles records. Laswell respects the stark atmospheric beauty of the source material, and somehow manages, with light strokes, to expand and deepen the moods.
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