The Buffalo Funk

He was born James Ambrose Johnson Jr. in Buffalo, New York, on February 1, 1948, deserted the U.S. Navy at nineteen, fled to Toronto, played in the Mynah Birds with a kid named Neil Young, signed to Motown for Come Get It! in 1978, and proceeded to put Mary Jane (1978), Bustin' Out (1979), and Street Songs (1981) on the R&B chart for the better part of three years. Super Freak alone has been sampled across two generations of hip-hop. The 1981 Street Songs tour took $40 million on the road and put a punk-funk hat on the entire decade.

Tariah Robinson's biography opens earlier and follows the arc with the documentary rigour the subject demands. The book traces the early Buffalo years, the AWOL escape to Canada, the Mynah Birds and the Greenwich Village years, the Motown signing, the long second act of Teena Marie collaborations and the Mary Jane Girls and Eddie Murphy's Party All the Time, the 1991 Linda Blair conviction and the 1996 release, the 2004 Chappelle's Show I'm Rick James sketch, and the death at fifty-six on August 6, 2004 of a cardiac event at his Burbank hilltop home.

What emerges is a portrait of a punk-funk pioneer whose drug habits the rest of his peers caught up with in the 1980s and whose sound the two decades that followed have been mining ever since.