Sex Machine

The song that is not really about what you think

Say the title out loud in a pub in Manchester or a bar in Brooklyn and you will get a knowing grin. The phrase has become shorthand for swagger, for innuendo, for the kind of strutting bravado that later rock stars would turn into a whole costume. But if you actually sit with the record, something stranger happens. There is almost no story in it. There is no seduction narrative, no lover being addressed, no plot. What there is, minute after minute, is a conversation between two men and a band that refuses to stop moving.

That is the surprising truth at the heart of "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine", to give it its full, gloriously clumsy official title. It is a song about momentum. The "machine" in question is not a body so much as a groove, a perpetual-motion engine of guitar, bass and drums that Brown steers with shouted commands. The sexual boast is the hook that gets you onto the dance floor; the real subject is what happens once you are there.

And the backstory is better than any lyric. This record exists because, only weeks before it was cut, James Brown's band quit on him.

A walkout, a phone call, and a band of kids from Cincinnati

By early 1970, James Brown was already one of the most famous performers on Earth. He had been "Mr. Dynamite" and "the Hardest Working Man in Show Business" for more than a decade. "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" (1965) and "Cold Sweat" (1967) had pushed rhythm-and-blues toward something new, a music where every instrument, even the horns, behaved like a drum. "Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud" (1968) had made him a political voice during the most turbulent years of the civil rights era.

He was also, by nearly every account, an exhausting boss. Musicians were fined for missed cues, scuffed shoes or a wrong note. Pay disputes simmered. In March 1970, the story goes, the core of his band, including saxophonist Maceo Parker, confronted Brown over money and working conditions before a show and essentially went on strike. Brown, who reportedly did not take ultimatums from anybody, called their bluff.

His answer was a group of young players from Cincinnati, Ohio, who had been doing session work around King Records, the label that had been Brown's home since the 1950s. They were known as the Pacemakers, and at their centre were two brothers: guitarist Phelps "Catfish" Collins and his younger brother William, a skinny bassist still in his teens who would become world-famous as Bootsy Collins. According to the oft-told legend, Brown's longtime collaborator Bobby Byrd rounded them up and Brown had them flown in by private plane to make the gig that very night. Whether the details are exactly right or polished by years of retelling, the result is not in dispute: the new band was renamed the J.B.'s, and within weeks they were in the studio.

"Sex Machine" was reportedly recorded in April 1970, at a studio session most sources place in Nashville, and released that summer on King. Alongside the Collins brothers were drummer John "Jabo" Starks and, on some later versions, Clyde Stubblefield, two of the most sampled drummers in history. Bobby Byrd sat at the organ and took the second vocal part, and that detail turns out to matter enormously.

There is a little British footnote worth knowing, too. Brown's records were treasured in the UK long before they became chart staples there, passed around by mods in the 1960s and later dug out by the rare groove DJs of 1980s London, who built entire club nights around the J.B.'s and their offshoots. "Sex Machine" itself reportedly made the UK singles chart on its first release in 1970 and returned when it was reissued in the mid-1980s, as a new generation of British dancers discovered that the funk they loved in hip-hop and acid jazz had a single, very loud source.

Decoding the groove: what the song is actually saying

If you try to read the words of "Sex Machine" like a poem, you will be baffled. Most of it is call-and-response between Brown and Byrd. Brown announces that he feels like getting up, that he wants to do his thing, that he is ready to go. Byrd answers him, again and again, with a short, steady affirmation, like a deacon backing up a preacher. Brown asks the band and audience whether he should take it to the bridge, and then, in one of pop music's most famous meta-moments, literally does: he calls the change aloud and the band obeys.

That is the key to understanding the song. The lyrics are not describing an experience; they are conducting one. Brown is the bandleader narrating his own performance in real time. When he talks about staying on the scene and shaking his moneymaker, he is not really telling a story about romance; he is describing the state of being locked inside a rhythm so completely that the body takes over. The "sex machine" is a person who has become a piece of the groove, as mechanical and tireless as the beat itself.

Musically, this is where Bootsy Collins changes everything. Instead of walking a bass line around the chords in the jazz or R&B tradition, he plays a short, elastic, syncopated figure that leans hard on the first beat of the bar, what Brown famously called "the One", and then leaves holes for the guitar and drums to fill. Catfish Collins answers with a tight, scratching rhythm guitar that sounds almost like a percussion instrument. Nothing ever resolves. The song barely changes chord at all. It simply circles, building heat through repetition rather than development.

Byrd's role is the emotional anchor. His steady replies give the record a gospel shape, the shape of a church service where a congregation answers its minister. Brown grew up in poverty in Augusta, Georgia, and spent his youth around Black churches; that call-and-response structure was in his bones. So beneath the bawdy title, the song quietly borrows the architecture of worship. It is a sermon about the beat, delivered to a congregation of dancers.

There is also a playful sense of self-mythology. Brown talks about himself in the song with the confidence of a man who knows exactly who he is: the star, the one who calls the shots, the one who decides when the bridge arrives. After a spring in which his band had challenged his authority, there is something pointed about a record in which every musician follows his spoken orders to the letter.

From King Records to hip-hop's sample bank

The single was a smash on the American R&B chart, reportedly peaking at number two, and crossed into the pop Top 20. But its real influence is measured differently. The J.B.'s line-up that cut it lasted only about a year. Bootsy and Catfish soon left, reportedly tired of the fines and the discipline, and headed to George Clinton's Parliament-Funkadelic, where Bootsy's space-age bass and star-shaped sunglasses would help build the P-Funk universe. In a sense, "Sex Machine" was the laboratory where that whole future sound was first tested.

Brown re-recorded and performed the song constantly. A longer, faux-live version anchored the 1970 album also titled "Sex Machine", which mixed studio recordings with crowd noise to create the feel of a concert. Live recordings from Paris and elsewhere in the early 1970s show how elastic the tune was on stage, stretching and contracting according to Brown's hand signals. Generations of musicians have studied those performances to learn how a band can be both completely disciplined and completely loose at once.

Then came hip-hop. When DJs in the Bronx in the 1970s began isolating the breaks from funk records to keep dancers moving, Brown's catalogue became the raw material of a new art form. The drummers and players on records of this era, Jabo Starks and Clyde Stubblefield above all, are said to be among the most sampled musicians who ever lived. Brown's shouts and grunts, his commands and his rhythmic phrases, echo through countless rap records of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Even listeners who have never heard "Sex Machine" from start to finish have almost certainly heard pieces of its DNA.

The title phrase took on a pop-culture life of its own as well. It turns up in films, adverts, comedy sketches and karaoke nights, often detached from its source. In the UK, the song became a staple of wedding discos and indie club nights alike, beloved by people who would never call themselves funk fans. That is the paradox of the record: it is one of the most radical rhythm experiments of its era, and also one of the most cheerfully crowd-pleasing.

Why it still resonates today

Part of the answer is simple physics. The groove works. Put it on at a party in 2026 and people still move, because the record was engineered, quite deliberately, to make bodies respond. Brown understood that rhythm could be a form of communication more direct than words, and "Sex Machine" is perhaps his purest statement of that idea.

But there is a deeper reason too. The song captures a moment of reinvention under pressure. A famous man loses his band overnight, takes a chance on a group of unknown kids, and instead of falling apart, produces one of the defining records of his career. That story speaks to anyone who has had to rebuild something in a hurry. The confidence in the track is not complacent; it is the confidence of someone who has just proved he can survive.

It also resonates because of who was in the room. Bootsy Collins was barely out of school, and you can hear his excitement. Listening now, knowing what he would go on to do, is like hearing a young footballer score in his first senior match. The record preserves the sound of a future legend discovering his own voice.

Finally, there is Brown himself, a complicated figure whose personal life included serious controversies and legal trouble in later decades. His legacy is not simple, and honest listeners hold both parts in view. Yet the music he made with the J.B.'s remains foundational. When modern pop producers talk about "the pocket", about grooves that feel inevitable, they are speaking a language that this record helped write.

How to dive deeper

🎧 Immerse in the sound

• Sex Machine (1970 album) — The double album that framed the single as a live event, mixing studio takes with audience atmosphere. Listen to it as a set rather than as separate tracks, and you will feel how Brown paced energy like a boxer pacing rounds.
• Love Power Peace: Live at the Olympia, Paris 1971 — A concert recording reportedly made with the Bootsy-era J.B.'s just before that line-up broke apart. It is the closest thing to a time machine back to the band at its most combustible.
• Ahh... The Name Is Bootsy, Baby! by Bootsy's Rubber Band — Hear where the young bassist took the lessons he learned with Brown. The playful, cartoonish world of Bootsy's own records makes it clear how much of the J.B.'s swing was his.

📚 Follow the story

• The One: The Life and Music of James Brown by RJ Smith — A deeply researched biography that places Brown inside the history of Black America, from the Jim Crow South to the global stage. It is especially good on the tensions inside his bands and the meaning of "the One".
• Kill 'Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul by James McBride — The author of "The Good Lord Bird" goes looking for the man behind the myth, talking to people who knew him in Georgia and South Carolina. It reads like a detective story with a soul soundtrack.
• The Big Payback by Dan Charnas — Not a Brown biography, but a history of the hip-hop business that shows how funk breaks became the foundation of a global industry. It helps you understand why Brown's grooves never went away.

🌍 Visit the places

• Augusta, Georgia — Brown grew up here, and the city honours him with a statue on Broad Street and an arena bearing his name. Walking the streets he knew as a poor shoeshine boy gives the swagger of the song a poignant backstory.
• The Apollo Theater, Harlem, New York — The stage where Brown cut his legendary 1962 live album and where, after his death in 2006, crowds reportedly queued for hours to pay their respects. Catching a show there connects you to the call-and-response tradition at the heart of "Sex Machine".
• Cincinnati, Ohio — Home of King Records and the city that produced the Collins brothers. The old King Records site has been recognised with a historical marker, and the city's local music history tours celebrate its funk and R&B heritage.

🎸 Experience it yourself

• Learn the bass line on "the One" — Even a beginner can try playing a short figure that hits hard on the first beat and then leaves space. You will quickly discover that the silences are as important as the notes, which is the whole secret of funk.
• Try a call-and-response with friends — Put on the track at a party and assign someone to be Bobby Byrd, answering every call. It turns listening into participation, exactly the way Brown intended.
• Watch "Get On Up" (2014) — Chadwick Boseman's committed performance as Brown captures the energy, the discipline and the contradictions of the man. It is a fun way to see the band dynamics behind records like this one dramatised.

🎵 Listen to this song