james brown was a great, churchy r&b ("night train") and soul ("a man's world") shouter. obviously, an amazing stage presence. but it's pretty easy to state his fundamental contribution to american music: he took up-tempo sixties soul and stripped it down to the rhythm, cutting out everything else - melody, lyric content - as extraneous. this not only made for these amazing modular works that could begin and end anywhere ("sex machine"), it opened music up in a profound way. now you could re-build from  the ground up in a radically open structure, using bricks instead of timber, a structure of repetition that was implicitly infinite. this made funk and hip hop conceptually possible. (the other elements of hip hop were provided by jamaica: recycling bass lines from recording to recording (as a cost-cutting measure) and recording dj's "toasting" over popular records.) since then black pop has been a series of deletions, re-buildings, and then new deletions: an open spiral or circular history always returning to the fundamental to build again on top of the basics. indeed, in a way sampling is inherent in the idea: it implies the collage, built on top of the big thump. you no longer think in terms of a song, but in terms of what we can make again from these elements.