The 1970s File Feature
Get Up (I Feel Like Being Like A) Sex Machine (Part 1)
Get Up (I Feel Like Being Like A) Sex Machine (Part 1) — James Brown's Defining StatementThe Summer of 1970There's a moment in the summer of 1970 when a reco…
01 The Story
Get Up (I Feel Like Being Like A) Sex Machine (Part 1) — James Brown's Defining Statement
The Summer of 1970
There's a moment in the summer of 1970 when a record comes on the radio and you can feel everything shift. That moment, for a significant portion of the American listening public, was Get Up (I Feel Like Being Like A) Sex Machine (Part 1). The country was in a state of considerable social tension; the counterculture was fragmenting, the draft was still running, and popular music was being pulled in half a dozen directions at once. James Brown, characteristically, went his own way entirely.
The Band Conversation That Became a Record
By 1970, Brown had reorganized his band, bringing in a younger group of musicians who would drive the next phase of his sound. The new ensemble was tighter, more rhythmically sophisticated, and capable of sustaining grooves with a precision that earlier iterations of the band had only approached. Sex Machine emerged from this chemistry. The record opens not with music but with Brown talking to his bandmates, setting up the groove before it begins, making the listener a witness to the creation itself. It was an unprecedented move for a pop single. The conversational intro dropped the fourth wall between performer and audience entirely.
A Nine-Week Run to Number 15
The commercial trajectory confirmed the record's power. Debuting on the Billboard Hot 100 on July 18, 1970 at position 72, it climbed rapidly over the following weeks. By August 8, 1970, it had reached its peak position of number 15, and it held that position for two consecutive weeks before beginning its descent. Nine weeks total on the Hot 100 for a record that pushed against every convention of what a pop single was supposed to do.
The Architecture of the Groove
What made the record revolutionary was what it prioritized. Melody is almost incidental; harmony barely registers. The entire weight of the music is carried by rhythm, and within that rhythm, by the interplay between the bass line and the drums. The guitar functions percussively more than melodically. Brown's vocal is another rhythmic element as much as a melodic or lyrical one. He had invented a new relationship between the human voice and the rhythm section, and on this record that relationship was stated with perfect clarity. The track is a masterclass in how much can be accomplished with the minimum necessary elements.
The Record That Named a Genre
Debates about the precise origin of funk will continue as long as people care about the question, but most serious accounts locate Sex Machine near the center of the story. The stripped-down rhythmic approach, the call-and-response between Brown and his musicians, the emphasis on feel over structure: these qualities would become definitional for an entire genre of music. Hip-hop would later find the record essential sampling material. Its influence is not merely historical; it is structural, woven into the DNA of popular music in ways that continue to surface in new recordings half a century later.
Press play on this one and understand where the bottom dropped out and rebuilt itself.
"Get Up (I Feel Like Being Like A) Sex Machine (Part 1)" — James Brown's singular moment on the 1970s charts.
02 Song Meaning
The Energy Inside Get Up (I Feel Like Being Like A) Sex Machine (Part 1)
The Command and the Invitation
The title is half command, half confession. "Get up" is an instruction with a long history in African American music, reaching back through gospel and blues. To be told to get up is to be told that your current position is insufficient, that something better awaits if you can only bring yourself to move. But the second half of the title turns the command into something more personal: a declaration of what the narrator is feeling, an explanation for why they are issuing the instruction in the first place.
The Body as Political Territory
In 1970, a record celebrating physical freedom and bodily assertion carried cultural weight that the lyrics alone cannot convey. The civil rights movement had made the Black body a site of political contestation in the most literal and sometimes violent sense. A record insisting on physical joy and liberation was, in this context, a form of resistance. Brown understood this dimension of his music without needing to spell it out. The exuberance of Sex Machine is, among other things, a refusal to be diminished.
The Machine as Metaphor
The specific metaphor of the "sex machine" is worth examining without over-literalizing it. In the vernacular of the period, "machine" connoted precision, power, and unstoppable momentum. To call oneself a machine was to claim a kind of superhuman efficiency and energy. Combined with the physical vitality implicit in the rest of the lyric, the image creates a persona of absolute potency. This is swagger elevated to the level of artistic declaration. Brown was not simply boasting; he was constructing a myth, and the music made the myth credible.
Why It Still Moves People
The reason Sex Machine retains its energy across more than fifty years of listening is that it operates at a pre-cognitive level. Before you have processed what the record is about, your body has already responded to what it sounds like. The groove is the argument, and the argument is made in the first four bars. Everything that follows is elaboration. This directness is rare in popular music, where layers of production often mediate between the source energy and the listener. Here the energy is unmediated, immediate, and essentially inexhaustible.
The Invitation to Presence
At its core, Sex Machine is an invitation to be fully present in your own body at this exact moment. That is an instruction that never becomes obsolete. Whatever year you are listening, whatever the circumstances, the groove is offering the same deal: stop whatever you're doing somewhere else in your head, and get up. The good news is that the offer is always open. The music has been waiting this whole time.
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