Creativity Quote by Don Van Vliet

Calling James Brown a master of "decorat[ing] the clock correctly" is Don Van Vliet’s way of praising precision while refusing the usual vocabulary of praise. It’s admiration delivered through a sideways grin: Brown isn’t elevated as a romantic genius, but as a technician of time who can dress a beat so it looks inevitable. In funk, the clock is sacred. Brown’s band doesn’t merely keep time; it styles it, accents it, breaks it into glittering parts, then snaps it back into place. Van Vliet, an artist who built his own anti-slick rhythms and jagged forms, recognizes a kindred obsession with structure - but he frames it in deliberately odd, almost childlike terms to puncture music-critic solemnity.

"Lower mathematics" is the clincher. It sounds like an insult until you sit with it: not calculus, not grand theory, but the hard arithmetic of groove - subdivision, repetition, the ruthless counting that makes bodies move. Van Vliet’s subtext is that greatness can be infrastructural. Brown matters because he solved a practical problem at an elite level: how to organize time so tightly it feels loose.

The "Don’t get me wrong - he’s good" tag reads like a defensive afterthought, as if sincere enthusiasm risks looking naive. That’s part of the intent: to praise Brown while maintaining the speaker’s own aura of outsider cool. Van Vliet turns homage into an art object - slightly absurd, richly specific, and, in its crooked way, dead accurate about why James Brown changed popular music.