54. James Brown, "Star Time"

 

Four CDs!! Nearly five hours of music!! This collection, released by Polydor in 1991, has basically every song you could possible think of when you think "James Brown."  It's not just a greatest hits collection, it's an every hits collection, and this is a man who put something like 120 singles on the R&B charts.  It goes from his first hit, "Please, Please, Please," a doo-wop-adjacent number released as "James Brown & the Famous Flames" in 1956 to his 1984 collab with Afrika Bambaataa, "Unity, Pt. 1."

In between are some of the best-known songs in R&B, soul, funk, and just whatever it is James Brown does.  It's arranged in chronological order, so the first disc ("Mr. Dynamite") covers roughly '56 to '65, then the second ("The Hardest Working Man in Show Business") runs from '65 to early '69.  Disc one has "Night Train," which I didn't realize I already knew, and the often-misunderstood "It's a Man's Man's Man's World," which Brown wrote with Betty Newsome.  On its face, the song is grossly misogynistic and chauvinistic ("Man made the train/To carry the heavy load/Man made the electric light/To take us out of the dark"), but the real message is that a man is nothing without a woman.  Still not great!  But maybe not as dark as it first seems.

The all-time classic "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" ends disc 1 and begins disc 2; the original recording first and the slightly sped-up single version second.  Disc 3 also has "I Got You (I Feel Good)," and "Cold Sweat," as solid a song as you will hear, and sometimes cited as the first funk song of all time.  Like most of the songs in this collection, Brown either wrote or co-wrote it, which is even more impressive considering that a lot of artists in his era relied on other writers for their material.  Not James Brown.

Disc 3, covering summer '69 to early '72, shows Brown mastering funk and working with the Bootsy Collins band, including stuff like "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine," which is such a great fucking song, and "Funky Drummer," which launched a million and a half rap songs; if it's not the most sampled song in history, I'm not sure what is.  (Oh, I see it's fourth; "Amen, Brother," which has the famous "Amen break," is first.)  Speaking of sampling, it went both ways; disc 4's "Hot (I Need to Be Loved, Loved, Loved)" lifted the guitar riff from Bowie's "Fame;" by all accounts, Bowie was flattered by the lift, and who wouldn't be flattered to be sampled by James Brown?

And finally there's disc 4, "The Godfather of Soul," with Brown's later work like "Get on the Good Foot" and 1974's "Funky President" (People It's Bad)," a song about the need for pervasive social change dressed up in an absolute funk jam.

Did I listen to this entire collection all the way through?  No, of course I didn't.  But now I wish I had.  We've been over and over whether collections really deserve to be on the list; I've slowly migrated from "no way, original albums only" to "sure, who gives a fuck," and so if collections are OK then this one should be, if anything, higher on the list.  Brown had a complicated life and was an abuser who served time in prison for assault and other offenses.  He died on Christmas Day, 2006, leaving behind a legacy that will be tough for anyone to top.  (He was also one of the first 10 artists inducted into the Rock Hall of Fame, which make sense.)

Is this album in my personal Top 100? Sadly, no, although everything I heard on here was a treat.