after the holidays we recalibrate and discover: 24 days til “one hundred”…

we just threw down a set at boondocks for the annual james brown tribute (dj melodic, soulone, and i)…it was a load of fun once again…it happens every dec 25th- it’s brett koshkin’s party, but this year i was the caretaker as he had some family matters to tend to…

my first exposure to james brown was through radio in suriname- the track “hustle” was a big hit there when i started my critical listening, so to speak…there were another two more obscure cuts that made impressions “hot (i need to be loved)” which had “superbad superslick”…

listening to “hustle” today and matching it up to the entire catalog: it has a very distinctly different feel- the guitar work sounds different…i’m assuming he’s referring to the disco dance craze among one of which was the hustle (sent all over the globe, courtesy of van mccoy), but this track is still more funk than disco…

“hot” was a curious track at the time and without the advantage of the web (where you can wikipedia the actual song) and other future accounts of how the song came about, we wrongly assumed that david bowie had ripped off james brown…it happened the other way around…

jb played an important role in my early listening experiences before hip hop came about…and then: a pleasant resurgence during the late 80s/early 90s when hip hop sampled a ton of james brown, jbs, and jb-produced material…that tribute we do every year- that’s what its mostly about for me: james brown’s contribution to the development of hip hop…