“One was the music of Ray Charles and Bo Diddley and Little Richard,” all black musical pioneers whose hard-driving style and cross-genre interests were obvious precursors to James’ own hits. In Buffalo where James grew up, Ritz explains, he “absorbed” two different styles. As a child, James was musically omnivorous.ĭavid Ritz, music’s go-to biographer, appears frequently throughout Bitchin. “But he didn’t know how to turn it off.” Here are 10 takeaways from the film.ġ.

“He wanted the fame, he knew how to get it,” she says. Maybe the most telling analysis comes from one of James’ former video directors. T he film also includes strange animated sections to replace scenes for which there are no photographs or footage - the inclusion of a PG animated orgy scene is a head-scratcher. This might lead to a fruitful discussion of distinctions within R&B, but he refuses to elaborate any further, leaving listeners wondering about potential differences, especially since acts like the Gap Band made ferocious funk records (“Early in the Morning,” “Burn Rubber On Me (Why You Wanna Hurt Me)”) as hard-bitten as anything James did. The analysis can be frustrating do we need the quote “Rick James’ grooves were groovier than most?” The rapper Big Daddy Kane shows up to claim that “James’ style of funk wasn’t like” other great groups that got their start in the 1970s, including the Gap Band, Con Funk Shun, and the Ohio Players. (James went to prison in the Nineties after he was found guilty of assaulting a woman.)īitchin is surprisingly heavy on explanation and talking heads - long on tell, short on show - and sometimes pedantic in a way that seems at odds with James’ party-starting music. The film has a tough task: celebrating James’ work even as it reminds viewers that the singer was both a victim of abuse and an abuser himself. It incorporates interview and performance footage along with quotes and analysis from James’ family members, bandmates, ex-wives, a slew of other artists (from Ice Cube to Conway the Machine, Bootsy Collins to Nile Rodgers), and a host of critics. The man behind “Mary Jane” and other urgent funk hits like “Give It To Me” is the subject of Bitchin: The Sound and Fury of Rick James, a new documentary that just premiered on Showtime. After years of trying to funk his way to stardom, Rick James finally broke through in 1978 on the back of a pair of dynamite singles: “You and I,” an eight-minute dance-floor workout that includes a lovely, soaring falsetto kiss-off (“they all can go to hell”), and “Mary Jane,” the most hummable ode to weed this side of D’Angelo’s “Brown Sugar.”

A Million Ways to Die by Rick James