Topic: MUSIK - on July 2, 2007 at 5:13:00 PM CEST
Where Have All the Rock Stars Gone?
James Brown's death last December was a much more pointed, and poignant, marker of the changing role of popular music in American culture than the current exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Art celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love.
While the San Francisco counterculture did exemplify the importance of music to the 1960s youth movement, Brown stands out as one who became more than just a musician. He was not only the inventor of funk and the Godfather of Soul; he was also Soul Brother No. 1, a leader about whom Look magazine could ask on its cover, "Is this the most important black man in America?" Today there is no popular musician, black or white, about whom something similar might be said. Brown's televised concert in Boston the day after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated helped prevent riots in that city, while Los Angeles and Detroit burned. His "Say It Loud — I'm Black and I'm Proud," released later that year (1968), became the anthem of the black-power movement. Through it all, Brown never made stylistic concessions to attract a crossover audience, yet, as he himself observed, he lived the American dream, going literally from rags to riches.
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