I Can't Do The Split No Mo'
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The truly great may grandly exit on great days, as James Brown (1933 - 2006) did on Christmas Day.
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"I can't do the split no mo'" - this, from the mouth of the Godfather of Soul, is my own choice of the famous last words of James Brown. He said it in a documentary (probably Soul Survivor), shown on British television (Channel 4) in 2004, I think. Though shown a bit late in the night, the documentary was billed as something of a small television event, and was followed immediately by a specially recorded live concert given by Brown in Novemer 2003 - to mark his 70th year on earth and many decades as 'the hardest working man in showbusiness'.
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There is a sense in which great men and women can in their twilight years almost become a subtle parody of themselves; a sense in which they serve to aid and validate the aspirations of lesser artists seeking to rub shoulders with greatness in the hope something might rub off (and so it was that the over-promoted and probably overrated Joss Stone got to earn her stripes by performing live on stage with the man who sang 'Sex Machine'); a sense in which we feed on them still, to tell ourselves that by witnessing the spectacle, we have lived in great times.
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For these and many other reasons, the great are not allowed to simply be; they have to prove again and again though they are no longer in their prime, that they can still roar, that we were correct in our sense of awe the first time round. One got a sense of this as, clad in a shiny blue suit, James Brown carried on gamely onstage, surrounded by young, flapping dancers he needn't have had to share the stage with. There was that tiny sense that it should have been... one is not quite sure what.
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Still it was mostly grand. James Brown in his seventh decade, still did moves that made the jaw drop. He loved the drama of falling on his knees singing Please Please Please, while a bandmember put his velvet cape back on his shoulders and coaxed him to get back up again - the audience never tired of seeing it so he never tired of giving it to them. He still sang with raw funkiness. How, at 70? you wondered.
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The documentary helped give perspective to those who were too young to have experienced James Brown's heyday of the 60s and the 70s. Grainy black and white footage showed where Michael Jackson must have first seen the footwork that gave birth to the moonwalk. Would we have had Jackson the dancer without James Brown? Or Prince the all round performer? Those moves in black and white are still amazing. And how the music punctuated the times, the sexual revolution, the 'I'm Black and Proud' track that shouted out a slogan of civil rights and Black Power... the music whose influence is everywhere.
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The documentary showed in archive footage ample evidence of a dance move that was conspicuously absent from the 2003 London shows. Brown must have been asked in the documentary because he admitted: "I can't do the Split no mo'". He looked down as he acknowledged the effect of age and decline on his abilities; no incidental music, no histrionics, no explanations, no regrets, nothing. A stoic James Brown said with dignity and gravity: I Can't Do The Split No Mo'.
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This was for me the most poignant moment in the documentary and the show that followed, and it struck me then, that this could be James Brown's last stand in the UK. I was not going to get a chance to catch him in concert in a year or two, and I suddenly regretted not having managed to catch the 2003 shows.
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I Can't Do The Split No More - this has come to mind every time I've thought of James Brown since that television event. It came to mind again when in the early evening of Christmas Day a friend called my mobile from Nigeria to say: E ma Ku u ti James Brown o. It could only mean one thing. I was away and hadn't heard the news.
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And earlier today, a friend's elderly mother sang for me an old Yoruba track referencing James Brown, as performed by Ebenezer Obey (Omo eniyan sa ni James Brown, to n fi moto se ese rin o...aiye o, aiye o, a o lo'gba yi pe o). It was a hit when my friend's mum was a young woman. She sang and I smiled as she did so, because the song helped her appreciate the importance of the man we now said had died.
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This is a man's world, Brown famously sang. I always loved that song. Not because it goes on to say the world would mean nothing without a woman - but because he sang the unavoidable truth (about this being a man's world) as a lament, such that I, a woman, could sing it without any sense of conflict.
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I Feel Good; Please Please Please; Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine; Papa's Got a Brand New Bag; Get Up Offa That Thing; It's a Man's World; Say It Loud - I'm Black and Proud; Living in America... and more
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With all that funky music, he needn't have had to do the split no more.
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Amy Winehouse, troubled singer of the great 'Back to Black' album and the now eerily prescient hit single Rehab, found dead in her London flat today at 4pm local time.
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