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Rick James, b. 1948

Funk Master

Dwell long enough in pop culture's mind's-eye and you'll be forgiven or forgotten; the watershed glam-funk craftsman Rick James didn't live long enough to pull off either. It was the television comedian Dave Chappelle's riotous sendup of James's addictions, abuses and all-around sleaziness that managed to resurrect and thoroughly reinscribe the musician's self-inflicted image as a clownish, amoral grotesque. Not quite pop music's Fatty Arbuckle -- James's indiscretions left no corpses, and after serving time in prison for sexually assaulting to women, he drifted rather easily back into his recording career -- neither did he parlay his romance with cocaine into an image of poignant repentance, à la Richard Pryor. And no matter how often he alluded to tastes for white women or under-age girls, he was never as threatening a figure as, say, Jack Johnson, or even Chuck Berry. Not with that panda-bear posture, not with that childish leer. Instead, dogged by how perfectly the term "Super Freak" fit to the cartoon-pimp image he manufactured and then inhabited far too sincerely, James seemed merely icky, and silly.

What's lost behind the admittedly entertaining caricature is, well, only everything I'd like to suggest ought to be recalled about Rick James:

1. Despite an aura of heavy-lidded indolence that attached to his long, drug-addled waning from the pop charts, Rick James worked harder than most, toiled at his trade, paid lavish dues: some 16 years' worth by the time of the overnight success of "Super Freak" in 1981. James might be called the Pete Rose of funk; deprived of Sly Stone's or Prince's native genius, he scrapped his way to the top. Born in 1948 as James Johnson Jr. in Buffalo, he was the third of eight children raised on the wrong side of that hard-bitten town's tracks by a single mother, a Harlem nightclub dancer turned numbers runner. At 15, James joined the Naval Reserve, then went AWOL on being designated for Vietnam. In exile in Toronto, he formed the Mynah Birds, an integrated rock band that included a young Neil Young, as well as a future member of Steppenwolf. On behalf of the band, James played his one card: papa may have been a rolling stone, but his uncle was a Temptation -- specifically Melvin Franklin, the bass-voiced anchor of the legendary singing group. The Mynah Birds were signed to Motown, but Motown executives, on learning of James's dereliction of duty, insisted he "face the music" (literally) before beginning his career. He duly spent time in the brig, and Motown shelved the demo tapes, which remain unreleased. Then came another decade's apprenticeship; writing songs for Motown, more demos, more forgotten bands in Detroit and London and at last, in 1978, more than a decade after his first band, a breakthrough with the single "You and I," from his debut album. Nor did the effort diminish with success: along with his own steady output, James was a tireless impresario who created hits for the Mary Jane Girls, Teena Marie and Eddie Murphy. In collaborations on his own records, James gave a leg up both to his elders, the Temptations and Smokey Robinson, and to some of the rappers who had yet to conquer the world. As much as for his showmanship and his lunacy, James ought to be remembered for his ambition, his fluency, his professionalism. Among his colleagues and collaborators, he is.

2. While never an innovator at the level of James Brown, George Clinton or Sly Stone, James concocted a sound that was sturdy, glossy and irresistible. Reliant on magpie appropriations, particularly of the sounds of Clinton's band Funkadelic, James was a consolidator and synthesist, one who punched the funk's essence into a commercial sphere unknown to his rivals, who never forgave him for it. (George Clinton, for one, mocked him as "Slick James.") By the time of his commercial and artistic triumph -- the album "Street Songs," which held both "Super Freak" and "Give It to Me Baby," his two mightiest singles -- the mercurial and opportunistic James was calling his music "punk-funk," which wasn't so far from the truth. "Super Freak," above all, was a compendium of vocal mannerisms and twitchy synthesizer hooks that suggested he'd been listening to Elvis Costello, Devo and the Cars as closely as to his fellow funksters. The sound he fashioned, full of clean guitars, swirly keyboards and pop hooks, blew open the door that Prince would walk through only a year or two later. It also points to the producer Rick Rubin's guitar-and-rap epiphanies with Run DMC and the Beastie Boys, and to OutKast. Not a bad legacy for the Pete Rose of funk.

3. "Super Freak" itself probably shouldn't be glossed over too lightly. Consider the lives that hook has lived! Has anyone who ever heard it not succumbed? Please be honest. And if you have, can't you bring it to mind in an instant, now? Boing-boingy-bump -- querburp; querburp! As musical memes go, it's one of the immortals, one that transcended its first incarnation, in "Super Freak," to become the core of "U Can't Touch This," the hit single on what remains (sorry, purists) the best-selling rap album of the era: M. C. Hammer's "Please Hammer, Don't Hurt 'Em." When Rick James first heard how whopping a chunk of "Super Freak" the rapper had sampled -- without James's knowledge, let alone his permission -- he wasn't at all happy, though oceans of royalties soon soothed his pain. Hammer's hit would win James his only Grammy, perhaps an appropriate twist of fate for a musician dependent on borrowed riffs himself.

4. "Super Freak" notwithstanding, if I could free your mind of preconceptions, I'd steer you elsewhere to contemplate Rick James's muddled legacy. Motown belatedly issued, as a bonus to a "deluxe edition" of "Street Songs," a live disc of Rick James and his Stone City Band playing in Long Beach, Calif., at their very height, in 1981. Try, if you will, "Ghetto Life," which in this rendition is stripped of studio sheen and instead is nearly drowned in his fans' collective roar. Here's where the promise of punk-funk is kept: these ragged, furious guitars -- blended with James's ragged, furious voice and ragged, furious lyrics -- suggest a reconciliation of Bill Withers, perhaps, or Stevie Wonder, with the sonic insult of Gang of Four or the Clash. James sings:

When I was a young boy/Tenements on the corner, man/Playing tag with winos/Only way to have some fun/One thing 'bout the ghetto/You don't have to hurry/It'll be there tomorrow/Sister don't you worry.

Here, genuine pride and defiance are impossible to mistake. If Rick James had to turn from that place to a glamorous and then a loathsome self-destruction, we can at least recollect that he reached it once.

Rick James, b. 1948 Jonathan Lethem is the author, most recently, of "Men and Cartoons," a collection of short stories.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section 6, Page 38 of the National edition with the headline: Rick James [ b. 1948 ]; Funk Master. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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