great, as in, "go buy the magazine or you can have my copy or I'll buy you a copy" great, article in rolling stone this week. i don't think it's on newsstands yet, but you can read it for free on their website.I suggest printing it out and taking it away from the computer. the author is Jonathan Lethem, and he writes for the page and not for the computer screen. give yourself a chance to sit down with it. or check out motherless brooklyn, one of my favorite books.
the article is very long, but it is worth it if you care about dance music, funk, rock & roll, pop music in general, live music, rap (yes, rap), brilliant storytelling, and rich reporting.
it's that good. an example:
For to see James Brown dance and sing, to see him lead his mighty band with the merest glances and tiny flickers of signal from his hands; to see him offer himself to his audience to be adored and enraptured and ravished; to watch him tremble and suffer as he tears his screams and moans of lust, glory and regret from his sweat-drenched body -- and is, thereupon, in an act of seeming mercy, draped in the cape of his infirmity; to then see him recover and thrive -- shrugging free of the cape -- as he basks in the healing regard of an audience now melded into a single passionate body by the stroking and thrumming of his ceaseless cavalcade of impossibly danceable smash Number One hits, is not to see: It is to behold.
i have seen all these things on TV; indeed, I remember my friend G-$ [pronounced: gee-money] telling me, the first time I saw it on Soul Train, "watch this with the cape, he comes out, then he goes back, he's not done! he's back for more!" ahh, i laughed so hard but it was powerful!
you don't believe me? put on Sex Machine next time you're at a dance party. put on any of Brown's #1 smash hits.
watch. what. happens.
as the french would say, "for-mid-AHHH-bluh!"
love you.
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