Songfacts®:

• "Living In America" is James Brown's showcase song in the 1985 movie Rocky 4, where he performs it in a boxing ring before a big fight scene. Sly Stallone, the movie's star and writer, arranged for Brown to appear in the film and record the song.
  
  Brown was well established as "The Godfather Of Soul," but in 1985 the younger audience (especially the white audience) was generally unfamiliar with his work. Jim Peterik, who wrote "Eye Of The Tiger" for Rocky 3 and "Burning Heart" for Rocky 4, told Songfacts that Stallone was exceptional when it came to reinventing himself for a new audience, and had a great sense for how to use music in his films. Stallone could also be very convincing, and was able to put Brown in a position he wasn't familiar with - singing a song he didn't write in a mainstream movie. The move paid off for Brown, who hadn't charted on the Hot 100 since 1976. "Living In America" became one of his biggest hits and introduced him to a new generation.
• The movie Rocky IV is over-the-top in its jingoism, as the boxer Rocky fights the evil Russian, Drago. In 1985, the cold war was at a peak, and the underdog Rocky played very well with an American audience. James Brown was used effectively in this context, as this song was used early in the film before the American boxer Apollo Creed is killed by Drago in the ring.
• The song won the 1986 Grammy Award for Best Rhythm & Blues Vocal Performance. It was just Brown's second Grammy win, following his 1966 win for Best Rhythm & Blues Recording with "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag." Grammy voters usually snubbed Brown in favor of artists like Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder.
• In the years after this song was released, Brown's music became the basis for hundreds of hip-hop tracks that sampled him without his consent. It was the fresh new sound, but Brown felt ripped off. His 1988 album I'm Real both blasted hip-hop and incorporated it, especially the title track. It was his last his last studio album to chart in America (#96), but once the legal issues were worked out, he got paid for all those samples and claimed his place as a forebear of the genre.
• In 1986, Weird Al Yankovic recorded a parody of this entitled "Living with a Hernia." The original line "got to have a celebration" is replaced with "got to have an operation."
• The horns were supplied by The Uptown Horns, a New York section that backed the J. Geils Band on their Freeze Frame album and played on "Love Shack" by The B-52s.
• "Living In America" is a rare James Brown hit that he didn't write. The song was written by Dan Hartman ("I Can Dream About You") and Charles Midnight. The pair also wrote Brown's next single, "Gravity," his last Hot 100 chart hit (it went to #93).
• The song ends with James Brown barking out his famous catch phrase, "I feel good!" He introduced that line back in 1964 with his song "I Got You (I Feel Good)."
• "Living In America" was a comeback song for James Brown, but that comeback was short-lived. In 1988, three years after the song was released, he was arrested on drug charges, and a cascade of incidents followed, including a high-speed police chase. For the next several years he was in the news much more for his legal problems than his music. He started getting his luster back in the late '90s when the legal issues abated and he earned accolades like a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. When he died on Christmas Day 2006 at age 73, he was remembered mainly for his profound musical accomplishments.