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James Brown beamed. He looked like a pickled version of himself, promenading around the stage with a big bobble head. "I love Shanghai!" he revealed, with the air of throwing a benevolent bone to the sizeable crowd arrayed before him. Silence.

Now every performer since the dawn of townships knows that you need to mention your location at least once per show: make the concert feel special, make the crowd cheer in regionalist frenzy. Suck some audience cock for a free roar. Even the shittiest places in the world will get a nod: "Cambridge is... er... Cambridge has... a very nice Coffee Time! The best fucking Coffee Time in Southeastern Ontario!"

James has played this dog-eared card enough times to know what the deal is. Unfortunately for James, telling a bunch of Koreans and ex-pats in Seoul that he loves China just won't do the job. See, Koreans have been fighting to stay independent from China for hundreds of years, so basically they were all like "fuck you, James Brown you negro. Does this look like Shanghai?" The foreigners mostly roared with laughter and catcalled, taking the whole thing as a sign of James' forthcoming decline into senility (the man is almost 80!). And the band played on.

We arrived at the show about forty minutes late, rushing off the Jamsil subway and down past Olympic Stadium, which is still neatly lit up in a fond mausoleum of great days long past. We had only gotten our tickets a few days before, on a whim. They for were the shittiest seats at 55 bucks a pop, but still... I was sure there would be an opening act - I mean, this was James Brown, right? - but nope: James was going full tilt when we got into the venue, all dressed up in a pink suit. The crowd was mostly foreigners, which I could understand. When James Brown was at his peak years ago, Korea was still trying to dig itself out of the ashes of a Japanese occupation and probably didn't have any time for Soul and/or Funk. I could see that lots of Westerners had brought their Korean girlfriends, ostensibly to show them what they'd missed in the glorious heyday of music.

And the music was excellent, for the most part. James had a full-piece band with him, some talented musicians on the horns with some funk in their hearts. He had backup singers with whom he flirted and smiled at disarmingly, and a hot pair of dancers who ran offstage between songs for outfit changes that got skimpier and skimpier as the night slipped by. The Man Himself was subject to a lot of annoying lip service from his ensemble - "Do you want to see James do his thing? *roar* Do you want to see James do his thing?? *roar* Do you want to see. James. Do. His. Thing?? *slightly disgruntled roar*. We know the man is a legend, okay? Let's get to the stuff that made him a legend already.

And, despite his age and misguided sense of current geographical location, James stood up well. He danced, as James Brown is wont to do, and the people loved his shuffle, his running man. He sang and played his keyboard, clearly enjoying every second. He let the spotlight wander away from him for featured solos from his band, cooling his ancient heels. He picked his moments with the careful methodism of a man who knows he doesn't have a whole lot of moments left to pick, and I could appreciate the fact that this particular James Brown simply didn't have the physical ability to dance all night like he once did. But he still had the love, and the memories.

"GET ON UP!" became his spectators' rallying cry, and the timeless refrain from James' biggest hit grew into a climatic conclusion. Korean rave-kids danced wildly in the stands, liquid, fists pumping. A stadium clapped in unison. Energy built and built and built and nobody was sitting and it could go higher, it could... it could... and then it was finished.

It's finished, we were told. At 10:00 PM. There would be no encores, which nobody could believe until the dreaded house-lights came up. The house-lights can be a blessing or a curse at a show depending on good times or bad, circumstance subjective. But one thing is sure about house-lights: they carry the infallable last word in endings, the assurance that no matter how hard you beg for more music, more songs, nobody is listening anymore. So you might as well just go home.

And so we did. Sam was bitter: "Well, he's eighty fucking years old, isn't he? He probably just wants to go back to his hotel room and have a hot chocolate. That's his afterparty now: a hot chocolate. Fuck him." So perhaps we learned something from James and his old bag of tricks that night: no matter how beloved a legend you might be, and regardless of how decrepit, you should always play an encore or Australians will slander you mercilessly.

And Shanghai is not Seoul, okay? Seoul has Soul. Shanghai has slave labour.

Posted by Chris at 08:33 AM >> Commentations (1)