I thought the James Brown movie did a good job describing the creation of funk, but was a missed opportunity when it came to hip hop. At films end words pop on screen that mention how many times JB was sampled. Where was the cross generational drama that sampling generated? Brown, easily the most sampled act of the 80s and 90s, saw this as stealing. Law suits ensued. Later Brown came to work with Afrika Bambaataa and Full Force. Browns relationship with hip hop is a apt metaphor for the ways in which the civil rights generation and the hip hop generation did and did not blend. I think there would have been some great scenes that dealt with JB and the new jacks that would have both shown how hip hop expanded his legacy (one reason this film must have seemed commercially viable) and integrated hip hop figures into the narrative. This film is tracking very old, which may give it legs over the summer. Still I feel the film makes JB more of an museum piece than a figure whos music crosses decades.
Posted on: Mon, 04 Aug 2014 18:11:14 +0000