The thing, it shakes itself.

MT asks an important philosophical question: Does James Brown shake my thing? And suggests the following answer: "No. James Brown does not shake my thing. I shake my thing."

Murky begins by giving the appropriate credit to The Hardest Working Man in Show Business: "Indeed, while short of stature and weird of hair, Mr. Brown may be the funkiest person ever to have walked the Earth."

But then, while reflecting on some shower dancing that he had performed, MT realizes how absent Soul Brother Number 1 was from the scene: "Mr. Brown was far away, ...he and his band hadn't created or even ever performed that music with me in mind. In an important and overlooked sense, I alone was shaking my thing."

I understand MT's desire to assert his thing shaking autonomy. No matter how funky The Godfather of Soul is, no thing would be shaken if the audience, MT, were not funky as well.

Nevertheless, I must assert that neither MT nor Mr. Dynamite shake his thing. The thing shakes itself. It is simply hubris for any person to take credit the thing shaking. How can you own the thing shaking, when you do not even own yourself? The thing shakes, and for pragmatic reasons we attribute it sometimes to someone in the shower, and sometimes to the man Look Magazine in 1969 named “The Most Important Black Man in America”. We have good reasons to make these attibutions, but the deepest reality is simply that the thing shakes itself.