In the early 1970s certain journalists described James Brown’s music as boring. The reason they did so was because they were white and couldn’t see beyond their own stunted notions of what constitutes skill, intelligence, radicalism or social effect. They really believed that playing a 9th chord for 10 minutes was less intelligent than playing in odd time signatures for 40 minutes. The problem was that they didn’t understand their own buried partiality, nor could they see beyond the stuff they were born with.
– Maggoty Lamb interviews David Toop (The Guardian)