Soul, sermonising and wrestling Satan: James Brown's 20 best albums – ranked!

The Guardian

30-01-2025

If you want a roll call of James Brown's formative influences, just check the covers on this album: Hank Ballard, Roy 'Good Rockin' Tonight' Brown, dirty blues supremo Bull Moose Jackson and Billy Ward's impressively morbid The Bells, which – never knowingly understated – Brown used to perform on stage with a doll representing his lover's corpse.
A classic 60s JB album, in that it carelessly throws together singles, tracks from random sessions and live tracks (the version of Tell Me That You Love Me is ludicrously intense). The difference here is the quality of the ragbag material: Bring It Up, Money Won't Change You, Let Yourself Go, the effervescent sermonising of Don't Be a Dropout.
Brown's second Blaxploitation soundtrack isn't a match for Black Caesar (below), often relying on transplanted or rewritten old material. You can see why the film's producers were annoyed, but if you ignore its origins and simply take it as 40 minutes of music, it works just fine – and the opener, Slaughter Theme, is superb.
Brown's disco years have been much maligned, not least by Brown himself. The standard line is that he ended up sounding like everyone else, which just isn't true: the rhythms might have changed, but there's a sweat-soaked rawness to Mutha's Nature that resembles nothing else disco produced.
They say that if you're going to buy a Brown album, you're best served by a compilation, and that is particularly true of his early years. But not entirely. Aside from the hits, Think! has a lot to commend it, not least I Wonder When You're Coming Home and You've Got the Power, both haunted by the ghost of doo-wop.
An album that lies somewhere between funk and disco, with a title track that temporarily reversed Brown's commercial decline in the US. Quite rightly so: it's fantastic, particularly in the full-length version here. Moreover, This Feeling, I Refuse to Lose and, especially, the frantic Can't Take It With You run it close.
The world could probably have lived without It's a New Day's thoughts on feminism – 'a man can't do nothin' no more!' – although its groove is magnificently hypnotic. Elsewhere, there's the peerless Give It Up or Turnit a Loose, a great remake of It's a Man's Man's Man's World and the fabulous, mid-tempo World.
Usually a pioneer, Brown was a latecomer to Blaxploitation soundtracks, but had clearly noted the success of Isaac Hayes' Shaft and Curtis Mayfield's Super Fly. As with those albums, the music on Black Caesar outstripped the film it accompanied: check out Down and Out in New York City and Make It Good to Yourself.
One thing the album format allowed Brown and his musicians to do was stretch out, something they were capable of without a hint of self-indulgence. Hot Pants offers just four tracks: the curiously titled Blues & Pants is a serious deep cut; while Escape-ism's squealing horns later turned up on Public Enemy's Don't Believe the Hype.
Brown's 60s studio albums were so wilfully patchy, it's no wonder the occasional gem gets ignored, but I Can't Stand It When You Touch Me is a relentless delight. The lesser-known tracks (the instrumental The Soul of JB, the bizarrely produced stomper Time After Time) are as delightful as the big-hitting title track.
Live at the Apollo's sequel captures Brown in a period of transition – what would come to be called funk is starting to stir. His band, the Famous Flames, sound as punchy as ever, but there is more space in the songs. Get the unedited deluxe edition, on which It's A Man's Man's Man's World lasts nearly 20 minutes.
Proof that the Godfather's albums were more than just addendums to his hits. Soul on Top is, if not a concept album, then certainly a conceptual one: an unexpected set of jazzy R&B recorded with Louie Bellson's big band. Amazingly, it works – even the swing take on For Once in My Life, also recorded by Stevie Wonder a few years prior.
When Brown began slowing down the rate at which he released albums, it led to an increase in their quality – here, even the evidently improvised slow-motion closer Never Can Say Goodbye is compellingly haunting. Point docked for including two spoken-word warnings about drugs – the sombre King Heroin and Public Enemy Number One, the two parts of which go on for what feels like months.
The tracklist suggests a hurried dance-craze cash-in; five songs have 'popcorn' in the title. It might well have been recorded in a rush, but that works in It's a Mother's favour. A couple of ballads aside, the album feels like one ferocious extended jam, improvised on the spot, Brown barking orders to the musicians as much as singing.
Tom Waits described seeing Brown live as 'like putting your finger in a light socket', which fits the music here: the handbrake turns of the 'fast medley' (three songs in 80 seconds!); the ferocious succession of tracks on side 4. And hats off for his rant against dieting: 'The more you got, the more I want.'
As the 60s ended, Brown seemed to finally grasp that an album was more than a random collection of tracks. The title number is the draw here, but there's a real flow to the rest. The ballads and instrumentals are too good to count as padding, and the slinky groove of Licking Stick – Licking Stick is obviously irresistible.
At this point, Brown had started billing himself as the Minister of Super New New Heavy Funk. The Hell album's My Thang reveals he wasn't exaggerating. An abysmal, inexplicable cover of When the Saints Go Marching In aside, it's all fantastic – plus the cartoon sleeve features Brown wrestling Satan and winning.
Sex Machine saw Brown's band, the JBs, at the height of their powers, supposedly captured live. Over half of the album patently isn't live, but given how awesome the extended takes of the title track and Mother Popcorn are – not to mention the thrillingly improbable transition from a version of If I Ruled the World into a warp-speed There Was a Time – is anyone really bothered?
Brown's label was dismissive of his idea for a live album, so the singer had to fund its recording himself. The result was an atmospheric, electrifying document of classic Chitlin' Circuit soul, both raw and incredibly tight: a relentless, no-pauses barrage of songs, strafed with the audience's screams and cries.
Brown's career was about to take a commercial dive, but you'd never guess from The Payback; nor would you guess that it was a rejected film soundtrack repurposed as a standalone double album that's completely cohesive and immensely powerful. At least part of that power and cohesion comes from a shift in tone. In the midst of Watergate and a deepening recession, Brown's messages of empowerment now seem underpinned by a noticeable impatience and anger. The softer songs have a bleak, despairing tone, suggesting that, whatever Forever Suffering and Doing the Best I Can present themselves as, they're not necessarily just about affairs of the heart.