It’s a stunningly unorthodox book, indifferent to the conventions of biographical nonfiction. It honors its subject by its brave peculiarity, rising (for the most part, but sometimes falling flat) on its own terms. The book is a hybrid of forms, largely a telling of Brown’s life story and partly a telling of McBride’s search for that story, with digressions about the author’s own life, essayistic ruminations on Brown and his music, and free, looping riffs that have the energy of improvisation...With Kill ‘Em and Leave, McBride provides something lacking in most of the books about James Brown: an intimate feeling for the musician, a veracious if inchoate sense of what it was like to be touched by him. He accomplishes this by fairly unconventional means: He introduces the reader to a select group of Brown’s intimates, one at a time, and lingers with each of them before breaking away at unexpected points to veer off on fanciful tangents.
Kill ’Em and Leave turns out to be more revelatory about its author than its subject, although the Alan Lomaxesque 'seeking the subject' aspect is engaging. And the author’s honesty gives the book an authority that is never snobbish. McBride writes well, and the fact that he is also a musician allows him to open up dimensions of Brown’s creativity that a non-musician critic could not ... But the informants here are not particularly forthcoming; indeed, most avoid saying anything especially critical about Brown.
McBride has written a collection of diverse meditations and interpretations in search of James Brown, more than he has written the story of the man. Readers embarking on Kill ’Em and Leave would be wise to bear this in mind. That said, when McBride digs in, especially when describing the music — that massive, unstoppable, titanic, world-shaking accomplishment — by virtue of his own training as a saxophonist, he does so with great warmth, insight and frequent wit.
This is an important book about an important figure in American musical history and about American culture. Yes, there is sadness. But you won’t leave this hypnotic book without feeling that James Brown is still out there, howling. McBride himself believes Brown remains 'hollering from the back of the bus of history.'”
The book McBride has written is no nostalgic homage, nor does it aspire to be part of the very large dossier of investigative raking over of the excesses and bizarre turns of a crowded and unimaginably propulsive life. McBride has subtitled it Searching for James Brown and the American Soul, even if it becomes clear early on that the search may end in an acknowledgment of the unfathomable ... McBride is a musician as well as a writer, and his prose has the improvisatory flow and rhythmic freedom of a live voice urgently conversing, by turns impassioned, funny, rueful, angry, exasperated ... At a personal cost that McBride’s book helps to gauge, James Brown invented James Brown.
James McBride has outdone himself. His new book is part memoir, part biography, part history, part journalistic investigation, and part musical exegesis. But mostly it’s a scorchingly honest examination of the racial divide that explains why America continues to be a bloody and schizophrenic place ... I already knew that McBride was a gifted writer and musician, but this book proves that he’s also a tireless shoe-leather reporter. He does the legwork, finds the right people, gets them to open up to him. These writing and reporting skills dovetail to produce some startling insights.
While McBride’s considerable skill as a writer is evident in significant stretches, Kill ’em and Leave is undermined by redundancies, and some readers may tire of his penchant for bold, unsupported claims. In the latter pages, McBride seems to run out of energy. Ultimately, we learn that writing about James Brown is like writing about the ocean; the subject is vast and full of mysteries. It’s difficult to fathom a tidy rendering of such a complex man, but McBride deserves credit for this earnest attempt.
Kill ’Em and Leave is not the kind of account that reeks of the archives, with interminable pages of endnotes and sourcing. Nor is it a chronological account of the life of his subject. Instead, McBride develops an idea of Brown mostly through journalistic profiles of the people who knew him, including Sharpton, his accountant, his manager, members of his band, and other close friends ... McBride scores points for the eerie mood he creates, but unfortunately the profiles, in the aggregate, don’t yield as much as the reader might like. It’s too elliptical an approach, and as he jumps from character to character, the story becomes disjointed. At times he seems more committed to perpetuating Brown’s mystery than uncovering it ... For what Brown accomplished musically, we need a discriminating interpreter, and this is where McBride is on much stronger footing. His description of the emergence of funk, of the difference between jazz and funk solos (comparing the former to basketball and the latter to baseball), and of funk’s emphasis on intuition rather than rote, is masterly ... the book’s total break from conventional biography accounts for its charm but also its weaknesses.
...it comes as something of a disappointment that Brown’s music isn’t discussed at more length. The section of the book in which Mr. McBride compares the differences between jazz and funk soloing, emphasizing the deceptive difficulty of playing funk, is so well done that one wishes for more, especially since the book is often marred by clichéd phrasing and puzzling similes ... Even so, Mr. McBride provides a sympathetic and deeply knowledgeable portrait of one the 20th century’s most important musicians.
Kill ’Em features some of [McBride's] best and most beautiful passages. Still, it is also marked by a tone of frustration that fluctuates in how righteous it feels ... It’s easy to read this as crankiness more than insight, and McBride doesn’t exactly dissuade detractors by admitting he took on the book because he needed money after a divorce. But the tone is a deliberate choice, used for a serious purpose.
There’s no way to 'figure out' James Brown, McBride acknowledges at the outset. Nevertheless, he gives it an admirable go; he’s flinty and funny, seeing in the singer the frustrated promises of the land that spawned him ... Brown’s innate urge to move was also a big part of his downfall, and McBride handles that part of the story with uncommon sensitivity. Finally relegated to an oldies act by the 1990s, Brown’s last years were a study in dissolution.
Kill ’Em and Leave makes a wary, focused, and altogether inventive broken-field run at the Godfather of Soul’s legacy ... The musician in McBride is savvy when it comes to assessing Brown’s work ... He is also a tender and solicitous listener, preserving the tone and pattern of testimonies from Brown’s inner circle as if he were protecting yellowed news clippings of family wedding announcements.
[This] impassioned investigation of Brown’s essence and legacy represents a tour de force of cultural reportage ... Of all the incredible scenes McBride re-creates, none is more touching or ominous than his description of [Michael] Jackson arriving in Augusta to view Brown’s body at a funeral home in the middle of the night, standing for hours by his idol’s gold-plated casket.
The author brings special strengths to the recounting of Brown's life ... yields an illuminating portrait of Brown and the culture that rewarded and rejected him.
McBride does not lecture but he does preach. As a result his writing rings out with righteous passion. It also disintegrates at times, especially early on, into thickets of personal digression wrapped in conflicted mixed metaphors that underline his own initial ambivalence about taking money to write James Brown’s story in the first place. He does rediscover his resolve, though, and his writing revives ... Readers will be grateful for everything he has exposed here — the good and the bad, much of it hitherto unknown. Somewhere, even James Brown is probably saying thanks.
The author of the best-selling memoir The Color of Water and the award-winning novel The Good Lord Bird turns out to be the biographer of James Brown we’ve been waiting for. There’s some new dirt on the soul legend’s early life in this digressive amalgam of journalism and memoir, and more about Brown's decadelong afterlife — a pileup of lawsuits over a $100 million estate that should have gone to poor Southern schoolchildren years ago. But McBride’s real quarry is race and poverty in a country that wants to change the subject.
This is a work of excavation but also of identification, one artist wrestling with the tumultuous life and uncanny talents of another. More stirringly, it represents the efforts of one black man to speak authentically of another black man’s tribulations, successes and faults.
