on Brown's lyrics in Amistad 2: "... The artistry of James Brown is epitomized by the guttural grunt (uh, uh) or the equally familiar cry of 'oo-wee' that punctuates practically every song he has recorded. In those simple, primal utterances Brown comes nearer his poetic goal than in any of his more elaborate lyrics. For there, he is not singing
about black life he
is black life."
So "Hot Pants" (subtitled "She Got to Use What She Got to Get What She Wants") begins not only with the image of hot pants (there they are filling up the album's back cover: red knit stretched taut over a plump, round ass) but with JB's double-punch delivery of the words. The gritty relish of his opening shout, repeated with the same sweaty excitement every time hot pants are mentioned, sets the tone and the "sense" of the song. The 8:42 of the extended cut are filled with repetitions both musical and lyrical. There is no lyric line or story, only free-association: "Stand up baby let me see where you're comin' from ... The girl over there with the hot pants on She can do the funky broadway all night long." A lot of the lines are garbled (to me) or completely elude any literal "meaning" or sense. It just don't matter. Hot pants! Smokin' Sizzlin'. This is undoubtedly why James Brown is popular in Africa and many non-English-speaking parts of the world you don't have to understand the words to know what he's saying. It's all right there on the most immediate level.
James Brown, more than anyone else, is about dancing, movement, the body. The other two long cuts on the Hot Pants album make this clear. The "lyrics" on "Blues & Pants" are as arbitrary as the title merely a string of ideas with little or no interrelation except the ejaculation "hot pants!" at the end of every verse. After the first maybe seven minutes, it turns into a series of horn solos and group riffs with Brown's high-pitched exhortations to his musicians knocking them along as steadily as the drumbeat. (At one point he screams repeatedly, "Can we get some bread?" but it seems he only wants some group horn work.)
"Escape-Ism," parts 1 & 2, doesn't even pretend to lyrics much less any relevance to the title. It begins, "I was talking to a cat the other night. He said what everybody's looking for today they're lookin' for escape-ism" (pronounced "ex-cape-ism") and that takes care of the title. JB raps and r
