In 1985, inside the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, James Brown walked onto a stage rigged with enough sequins and pyrotechnics to light the Nevada desert. He wore an electric blue cape. He danced as though gravity were a suggestion. And he sang a man to his death.

The man was Apollo Creed, the fictional former heavyweight champion of Rocky IV, who entered the ring draped in an American flag, utterly certain of his superiority. Brown sang the anthemic “Living in America” while Creed showboated before Ivan Drago, the Soviet machine who would, within minutes, beat him to death in front of a horrified crowd. The song reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100. It won Brown a Grammy. Today the video has sixty five million views on YouTube. Hardly anyone remembers that the character it introduced was dead before the second act.

The irony is worth pausing on. Brown’s song was a celebration of American confidence, released at the high water mark of Reaganite optimism. Its lyrics rattle through American cities and landmarks like a Greyhound route map. Somewhere in the song, Brown sings about stumbling across the promised land without ever setting out to look for it.

For a boy born in a one room shack outside Barnwell, South Carolina, abandoned by his mother at four, sent home from school in Augusta because he lacked sufficient clothes, and jailed at fifteen for petty theft, the promised land was not a metaphor. Brown danced for soldiers’ pennies outside Fort Gordon, picked cotton, shined shoes, and clawed his way to a........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)