In 2005, the San Franciscan comedian W Kamau Bell joked that Barack Obama's name was "too black" to see him elected president. Despite this apparent lack of foresight, Bell's gentle yet challenging exploration of race and racism already looks set to be one of the most insightful Fringe shows this year.

I don't know if it's common for people in fashion to talk this way but I do know they're not the only ones in our society to be confused over race

In a world of shifting values, it's comforting to encounter an oasis of stability – which, despite his flamboyant musicality, is what one gets with Bootsy's Tha Funk Capitol Of The World.

Magazine industry veteran James Brown's Sabotage Times is a hit online. But that doesn't mean he's going to follow The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast in selling out, he tells Ian Burrell

Did the contributors to YouTube claim a windfall when the site was bought by Google for $1.65bn?

Sharon Jones sings backing vocals and the Menahan Street Band provide the grooves, but something about this soul remains distinctly ordinaire.

As a boy, the Godfather of Soul didn't get toys for Christmas.

Nobody works the festive angles the way James Brown could: not many acts have managed to crank out three complete Christmas albums, as are compiled here along with a smattering of bonus singles – including the not entirely festive-spirited "Believers Shall Enjoy (Non Believers Shall Suffer)", on which the Number One Soul Brother doesn't seem to have quite grasped the notion of goodwill to all men.

'Slash might clash with James Brown as they are both flamboyant stage-hoggers'

The Godfather of Soul, the late James Brown, was a hard taskmaster, fining his musicians for every mistake they made on stage. In March 1970, when most of his band quit after failing to get a pay rise, he didn't panic. He simply asked his right-hand man Bobby Byrd to put the Pacemakers, a young group from Cincinnati he had jammed with at King Records, on the next plane to Columbus, Georgia, where they backed him the following night. Among the musicians who became "the nucleus of a very good band" – as Brown put it – were bassist William "Bootsy" Collins and his older brother, the guitarist Phelps "Catfish" Collins.

"Fool's Gold" lolloped out of the backend of the Eighties with a loose-limbed strut and an attitude to match. Merging northern English, pasty-faced guitar rock with urban American dance music, it was recorded a world away from the Stone Roses' native Manchester, at Cornwall's small Sawmills studio, a 17th-century stone building set in its own tidal creek.

James Chance was a crucial component of the No Wave/Ze Records strain of early-80s new-wave endeavour in New York.

A rowdy live album from 1967 which was not actually captured at New York's Madison Square Garden and therefore should not have been subsumed by booming audience mayhem – it was actually recorded in a nightclub in New Jersey.

Dating from 1967, Live at the Garden was one of James Brown's less auspicious releases, which is why it's taken so long to be reissued in this expanded format. In the first place, it wasn't actually recorded at Madison Square Garden, or even Kew, but at the Latin Casino, a New Jersey supper-club. To approximate the ambience of the larger venue, faked crowd noise was liberally ladled all over it, including a version of "Let Yourself Go" taken from an after-hours rehearsal. To squeeze the 150-minute show on to a 40-minute album, several of the best performances were either truncated or left off entirely, most notably a storming nine-minute version of "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", which captures the Godfather on the cusp of his new funk sound, with Clyde Stubblefield and Jabo Starks's double-drum alliance locking into an ingenious syncopated propulsion of the kind that would, just a few weeks later, produce the seminal "Cold Sweat"; and an extended "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" – though the microphone placement on the strings is so bad they're left buried in the back of the mix. Both are restored on a second disc that also dispenses with the fake crowd noise, leaving one better able to track the lock-tight changes of rhythm, and appreciate the interlocking rhythm guitars of Chank Nolen.