A&E SERIES SPOTLIGHTS JAMES BROWN'S IMPACT

In the late 1960s, Look magazine once asked of cover subject James Brown, "Is He the Most Important Black Man in America?" A new four-part A&E docuseries, James Brown: Say It Loud, which premiered on 2/19, continues to wrestle with that question decades later, dissecting the cultural and musical relevance of the Godfather of Soul over the course of four hours.

Harlem's world-famous Apollo Theater recently hosted a screening of the second episode at its newly refurbished Victoria Theater, with a star-studded discussion panel including executive producers Questlove and Black Thought of The Roots, director Deborah Riley Draper, the Rev. Al Sharpton and Brown's daughters Dr. Yamma Brown and Dr. Deanna Brown Thomas.

Through commentary from rappers Chuck D and LL Cool J, producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, road manager Alan Leeds and others, the episode touches on Brown's calming of the Black community at a Boston Garden arena performance in the wake of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination; his controversial embrace of President Richard Nixon; and his Black Pride sloganeering through the 1968 release of "Say It Loud — I'm Black and I'm Proud." What sets Say It Loud apart from previous documentaries like 2014's Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown is the participation of his family and their personal anecdotes, as well as the inclusion of a previously unheard 1970s recording, "We Got to Change."

"Essentially, hip-hop—the culture, the music—could never have come to exist had it not been for how revolutionary and visionary Mr. Brown was," Black Thought remarked during the discussion. "James Brown defined the way we hear the beat. He was the first person to really lean into the downbeat to create music that was jammin' on the one. He heard music in a completely different way that no one had heard it before. What I do, what [Public Enemy] did, it would have been completely different had it not been for the way we hear where the one is."

Before and after the screening, guests strolled through a mini-exhibition in an adjacent atelier at the Victoria with wine and hors d'oeuvres in hand. On display: Brown's Shaft-esque leather trench coat; his Big Bird-style yellow jumpsuit with a SEX-embroidered waistband; his brown leather ensemble from the Black Caesar era—all arranged on mannequins behind plexiglass alongside concert posters, mayoral proclamations and vinyl albums. Even a quick perusal made Brown's influence clear on the Hollywood costume designers who dressed the casts of Blaxploitation classics like Dolemite and I'm Gonna Git You Sucka.

"You really want to look at James Brown as a Black man, and I think it was really important to me to center the blackness," Riley Draper said. "Not just to center the blackness of James Brown, but to center blackness—what happens in Black America, in that living experience, through James Brown's lens. The singular question from our treatment was: was James Brown the single most important Black man in America? It's a provocative, powerful question. [Editor] Mari Keiko Gonzalez was able to help me craft [the answer] in a way that I think not only centers James Brown but centers the story of the Black experience."