64. James Brown, "Don't Tell It" (1972)

(listen)

I wasn't about to let another hundred songs go by without including at least one from James Brown, who remains on the short list of my all-time favorites across a reasonably wide swath of music. Funny thing is, a good many of the songs that immediately spring to mind for him also find themselves with some version that was a top 40 hit. I mean, it's not hard to find great stuff by James Brown that never charted—but it's not as easy as you might think either. I'm going with this as much as anything because it somehow just leaped right out at me off the Make it Funky package (which is essential, along with Foundations of Funk and especially the Star Time box). I think it's one of his most convincing songs about sex and at the same time one of his most unusual in how explicitly it declares itself as illicit. More often, you may have noticed, James Brown is singing about working hard and dancing and generally trying to do the right thing—"Sex Machine" itself, for example, is only nominally about sex. In "Don't Tell It," the "main squeeze" with whom the singer is involved is somehow off-limits; whether that's because he or she (or both) are married is harder to tell. But it's definitely illicit, and as a prosecutor might say there is clearly knowledge of guilt here: "Don't tell it, don't tell it, don't tell it"—the repetition is the gist. Like that one guy and Mrs. Jones, they got a thing going on, they both know that it's wrong, but it's much too strong to let it go now. So don't tell it. Don't, don't tell it. Meanwhile, the groove is a stripped-down, slow-smoldering affair that threatens continually to bust wide open and burn the house down. That tension is exactly what makes this worth returning to again and again.