What the Pope Told James Brown
Charles Paul Freund | July 29, 2005, 5:43pm
"I took a trip to Rome during one of my down periods a few years ago, and had the good fortune to be greeted by the pope," says James Brown in his latest memoir (according to this Martha Bayles review). "The pontiff shook my hand three times, and I told him I had been thinking about leaving the music business, and to my surprise, he advised against it. I asked him why.
"He said, 'Because, sir, you can get things done.'"
So what do you suppose John Paul II meant by that? Did he have a list of worthy things that he hoped that James Brown would accomplish? Or was the pope trying but failing to get down, intending to say, "Because, James Brown, you can really take care of business!" Or is that "get things done" stuff what passes for papal small talk? Maybe you once chatted with the pope; did he tell you the same thing?
Maybe JP2 hoped that James Brown would reveal the truth about crunk. Brown speculates in his memoir that rap lyrics heavy with sex are some sort of FCC conspiracy to make Black people look bad, and that some songs may even have their origin in "some faction of the FCC."
Born Again Iconoclast | July 30, 2005, 7:48am | #
I seriously doubt the that Soul for Father God ever met and talked with the Godfather of Soul, anymore than Johnny Carson wrote material for Al Gore. We live in an age in which bald-faced lying to sell books comes so easily to public figures that have a camera or reporter's microphone shoved in their face.
The real sadness is that at one time, before he started beating his wives, wearing anti-FCC tinfoil hats, and doing Funkadelic-type fashion modeling for police line-ups, James Brown, in addition to being an entertainer, was a good role model for entrepreneurship in the black community. His business moves in the lates 1960s/early 1970s actually inspired a lot of today's rap and R&B moguls of my generation, as well as black pop artists like Prince and Michael Jackson.
Furthermore, his songs in that era like "I Don't Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door I'll Get It Myself)" helped shape my young mind in thinking outside the constrictions of welfare state victimhood.
Brown's statements are just another take on the "You're Making Us All Look Bad" speeches that Bill Cosby has been delivering to other blacks he sees as behaviorially degenerate (and in this regard, I agree with him, Wynton Marsalis, and Stanley Crouch). In Cosby's case, blunt as his words often have been, he is telling young blacks in an Hoffer-esque manner that they have the power to examine themselves and change their own behavior, which, taken simply, is at least a transcendent viewpoint. Unfortunately, Brown's comments are just a more bizarre and shallow version of the "we're all just non-white tabula rasas in the big racist conspiracy" victim mentality and that you are what others make of you, not what you make of yourself.
That being said, conspiracy theories are hardly the domain of only the disenfranchised (whether they actually are or just believe that they are) minority entertainers. My first brush with the concept of "wild government agency conspiracy theories" was back in the 1980s listening to Jello Biafra lyrics ...
