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PAPA'S GOT A BRAND NEW BAG, James Brown |
| Written and produced by James Brown |
| King 45-5999 - 1965 |
| Billboard: #8 |
The only way "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" could be more bone-rattling would be if James Brown himself leaped from your speakers, grabbed you tight by the shoulders and danced you around the room, all the while screaming straight into your face. This record doesn't have an introduction; it's just suddenly, immediately there in a burst of brass and Brown's shriek.
Skirting the edges of intelligibility, his voice quavering and shaking like a man with cosmic palsy, Brown declared a new order of rhythm and himself its avatar. Or at least, that's the only way in which his expostulations about digging the new breed thing and his recital of every dance craze of the previous five years fit together with the percussive frenzy of drums, bass, razor-edge guitar, and blaring horns. The result is a beat chopped up into an infinity of bright, hard shards.
Each pierces the formula that was beginning to dominate soul music as it was pulled, like any other pop genre, toward more blandness than was good for it. Brown had helped perfect that formula, but with "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag," he declared his refusal to live within its restrictions.
With the possible exception of Little Richard, no one has ever made a rock or rhythm and blues record this extreme. At a time when Motown had made comparatively ornate records seem the wave of the future, Brown posited the most radical alternative: a record so totally immersed in rhythm that you barely noticed ornamentation at all. No record before "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" sounded anything like it. No record since -- certainly no dance record -- has been unmarked by it. James Brown is entitled to every bit of his vanity, because in 1965, he invented the rhythmic future in which we live today.
James Brown - Papa's got a brand new bag - the lyrics
Come here sister, papa's in the swing
He ain't too hip to that new breed thing
He ain't no drag, papa's got a brand new bag
Go get mama and dig this crazy scene
He ain't bad dancing, but his mind is pretty clean
He ain't no drag, papa's got a brand new bag
He's doing the jerk, he's doing the lfy
Don't play him cheap, you know he ain't shy
He's doing the monkey, the mashed potatoes
Jump back jack, see you later alligator
Come here sister, papa's in the swing
He ain't too hip now, but he can dig the new breed thing
He ain't no drag, he's got a brand new bag
Papa he's doing the jerk, papa's he's doing the jerk
You're doing the twist, just like this
He's doing the fly, every day and every night
The thing, like a boom-a-rang
Come on, hey hey, come on, hey hey
I say you're uptight, you're out of sight, come on, see what you know
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