Los Angeles Times:  The late James Brown once warned the world: “Papa don't take no mess.”

So one might assume that Brown — the Steve Jobs-slash-Albert-Einstein-slash-Benjamin-Franklin of funk (that's right Isaacson, we're paging you!) — would be pleased with news from the Associated Press that a professional money manager has been able to take the atrophied remnants of Brown's charitable trust and effect a remarkable turnaround, wiping more than $20 million in debt off the books and putting it in a position to fund thousands of college scholarships to poor students.  The credit goes to a series of canny licensing deals.

But that arrangement may now be in peril due to a challenge from two ousted trustees, Adele Pope and Robert Buchanan, who have filed a brief with the South Carolina Supreme Court that might be best summed up in the lyrics to Brown's 1973 hit “The Payback, Pt. 1”:

“I can dig rappin'… I can dig scrappin'. But I can't dig that backstabbin'!“