Chuck Brown – We’re About the Business
David Cantwell
Posted On November 1, 2007
Chuck Brown didn’t exactly invent the club-crazy offshoot of funk and soul known as go-go. But he did more than anyone else to nurture its birth and codify a sound. It was Brown and his Soul Survivors who, in Washington, D.C., in the 1970s, began to combine the call-and-response style of funk and soul with the bass/conga/high-hat-heavy rhythms he’d first encountered in the mid-’60s as a member of Los Latinos. The resulting sound crowded D.C. dance floors with the working-class black folk who, in other cities, were already boogie-oogie-oogieing to disco.
Brown scored a major hit in 1978, at the height of disco, with the dance-floor-swelling “Bustin’ Loose”. But despite occasional flirtations through the 1980s with mass acceptance — E.U.’s “Da Butt”, for instance, or the Go-Go Posse’s murder capital of the world-era “D.C. Don’t Stand For Dodge City” — neither Brown nor his sound ever spread much further than the immediate mid-Atlantic region, where both are still going strong.
Chuck Brown is to go-go, then, something like what Bill Monroe was to bluegrass or Clifton Chenier was to zydeco. He is the father (or, as he prefers, the Godfather) of a region-specific roots subgenre that mostly favors live performances to recorded ones, is beloved more by grown-ups than by kids, and has been influential far beyond what sales would predict. Millions and millions more people have heard go-go beats played or sampled on hip-hop records — Nelly’s “Hot In Here”, say, or Salt ‘n’ Pepa’s collaboration with E.U. on the 1980s hit “Shake Your Thing” — than have ever encountered go-go proper.
It would be nice if We’re About The Business, Brown’s first non-holiday-themed studio album in nine years, could at last spread the go-go gospel far and wide. That’s unlikely, of course — not too many 73-year-olds on MTV these days — though the best track here, “Chuck Baby”, is of a sonic piece with latest from Rihanna or Kanye. On that cut, Brown is trying, unsuccessfully, to pick up some girl, his funky-dapper baritone always playing call-and-response with the tart rhymes of his daughter KK, who’s having just as little luck with some new boy.
Oh well. You don’t need a partner to cut loose to the irresistible likes of “Block Party”, “We Come To Party”, “The Party Roll”, and “Funky Get Down” — the titles making plain why Brown is, finally, much more a go-go Chenier than a Monroe. He’s about the business, all right, and the business is moving the crowd.
