I tend to make the connection between music in sports in terms of class or perceived class through the eras of change. What I mean by that is unlike in most other things, even in terms of entertainment, specifically music and sports are the only areas where you’ll hear a great deal of people who buy into the concept of ‘older being better’. Simply because someone made a basket on the court or a touchdown on the field thirty years ago, it may be perceived to a great deal of people as being better than the current athlete doing it now. The same thing could very well be said to be presumed in music as well where older fans and, very curiously, some younger fans who I feel seek to make themselves at least appear to be smarter, also come in with the same notion. Now, I don’t find that this happens in most other forms of entertainment, not even in terms of Hollywood. Sure, you’ll hear someone speak of the ‘Golden Era’ of films but you’ll also hear of the grand scale leaps forward made in movie production and even in terms of acting itself as today’s big named actors are masters of acting with each other and even without anyone, with the exception of some CGI created monster chasing them through some CGI created world. You’ll also never hear this concept in terms of literature, although people are reading less and less these days, people who do read a great deal accept that there has been no significant decline in what they read. The exception to that, of course, would be poetry, which is the basis of music anyway, right?
Myself, I’ve never bought into that concept as evident by what I write. I do often receive requests to write a bit more on the artists of yesteryear, but at the same time, I usually decline on the basis of there are already so many people around writing about ‘classic’/’golden era’ Reggae music. I wanted to be one of just a few who could take the modern era and show all the wonders of it, even in spite of its rather glaring faults simultaneously. Now, of course, that is hard. Even I, one of this current era’s most enthusiastic of supporters would have to admit that you cold go back twenty or thirty years or so and find many things better in the Reggae world than there are now, speaking specifically musically. Sure there were more accomplished musicians in the constant rotations in the studios and these men and women, under the auspices of more accomplished producers, for the most part, produced what have to be considered some of the greatest creations ever made in all of music, not just Reggae. There were also probably more consistent fans as well, as Reggae has since become somewhat of an unusual fad worldwide playing to people who seemingly would not have previously been drawn to it and many of whom don’t know much about it besides the things which Reggae tends to ‘promote’. One could argue that a few decades back, despite being less in number overall, Reggae fans were more educated and followed the music even closer, if for no other reason, than simply because they just had to.
However, one line in the sand which I have to draw in comparing this current era with any preceding it is when the discussion turns to that of the word. The spoken and written word: The Reggae lyricists and songwriters. Many argue, unsurprisingly and successfully that Bob Marley is easily the greatest Reggae writer of song and lyrics to have ever walked the planet. While it is definitely difficult to argue with any credential thrown at the feet of the King, and I’m not going to, I do have to wave a flag and hold a cheer for artists of this current era who I think can compare not only in general to Bob’s era of Reggae, but as well as, perhaps, even with Nesta himself. You also have to take this conversation in another direction with something that developed, predominately, after Marley had already made his transition in 1981, which is the development of the Dancehall. Dancehall is still, much like it’s ‘cousin’ Hip-Hop, a fairly young genre of music and one which is definitely still growing and adapting and evolving to really find it’s niche. I find it so odd now that both Dancehall and Hip-Hop are so involved in somewhat wide spread controversies due to developing trends within them; in Dancehall there is the already well tired issue of daggering and all of the downright potentially heinous sexual imagery which it may evoke on the youth and, of course, for the last few years Hip-Hop has had to sustain itself amidst rumours of its either imminent or already occurring death. I think and I actually know, that this will, at least in terms of Dancehall, draw critics and fans alike in another totally useless direction and away from appreciating these very talented artists for their abilities and not throwing blame at their feet for corrupting a system which they themselves grew up in for the most part, the system was clearly already set and the latest ‘daggering development’ is yet another in a long line of widely panned and dissed trends to emerge in the ‘follow fashion’ Dancehall world. Before it was the talk of the murder and violence tunes having gone too far and become too personal, again, which took away from the art form in my opinion, as it was clear to anyone who had been following the game and seen so many trends not develop so much in the Dancehall and knew that the gun, too, would do the same, as it subsequently did. All of this, in my opinion, takes the focus off of what it should really be about: what is being said. The message. Reggae music is message music.
On the Roots side of Reggae in this modern era I typically point to a few examples of artists who I feel have the certain degree of skill which would allow them to be loved and appreciated and, at the very least, respected, in any era. Of course the first such example would be Sizzla Kalonji (pictured at top). While the question is always asked of just how Bob Marley would be going about his business these days at the still youthful age of just sixty-four this year and with whom he would be recording and just how far he might’ve taken the music, I tend to approach things from a more modern perspective: How would those more hardened and educated audiences of twenty or thirty years ago have responded if we just took Sizzlas music and transported it back to those times. Of course there would have been extreme issues in the more modest, at least musically speaking, 1970’s with some of Sizzla’s more ‘experimental’ vibes, like Pump Up, but how would they have responded if some radio man spun a record one day in 1974 Jamaica:
Di Prime Ministers know what a galang
A dem sell out di youths to di Queen of England
DI WHOLE A DEM HAFFI BOW WHEN DEM SI MI TURBAN
Mi drop every authority for Babywrong
Melchezidek order neva yet wrong
Come wi chant di Nyahbinghi fi di Black redemption
Unu careful of your words and di food weh you a nyam. . .
From the brilliant third full verse of one of the greatest songs ever created, One Away. That particular verse along with a few others is just an example of exactly how far we have gotten today. I have absolutely no direct relation with Bob Marley, I never met him, he transitioned just about three months before I was even born, but I have no doubt in my mind that were he around today, he would rate Sizzla Kalonji as an artist and in his full humility, he would probably rate him as an equal in terms of the pen. Especially when you consider the many stories you hear from Marley’s friends and associates concerning how he went about writing his tunes and carrying about his business. He was reportedly a virtual lyrics factory as he spent most of his down time either writing songs or thinking about writing songs. Compare that with the now infamous stories about Sizzla at home in his Judgment Yard compound in August Town walking through the place creating melody after melody, lyrics after lyrics. German Reggae artist Gentleman had a very interesting story to tell when recently coming down to voice a tune alongside the legend for a tune on his most recent album, Another Intensity, name Lack Of Love, in 2007 about just that:
Gentleman himself is a very fine lyricist and the very fact that he said “I could sense his genius, it was perceptible” is something extraordinary as an artist full accustomed to working with other top notch acts such as Capleton, Cocoa Tea, Daddy Rings and even Bounty Killer in Gentleman’s case, would say something like that about him is remarkable. One Away was actually just a one song on an album FULL of lyrical masterpiece’s Black Woman & Child which includes other brilliant works such as the title track, Mek Dem Secure, Give Them A Ride, Love Is Divine an perhaps my own personal favourite, No Time To Gaze, the final verse of which may just be the greatest written verse I have ever heard:
Di whole a di honour gi di youth di betterment
Educate dem right, gi dem upliftment
I no sekkle and they give I no sekklement
I run di palace, dis a bigga judgment
What’s di result of your conference?
No solution you confuse you and your friends
Babylon laws come to an end
Babylon di fake, going down again
Lightening message, slap England
Bun dem to ashes dem a pollute Jah land
Lightening message drop inna di Pentagon
Fight dem a fight fi King Selassie position
Lightening message fi every nation
To King Selassie I bows di generation!
And of course the tune carries more weight now, given four years later what happen in 9/11. That entire album was a carriage of brilliant lyrics. And, lest you take that an entirely too old example:
The power of the Trinity release the strain
This is the golden opportunity to go towards the main
I live in Ethiopia, from Zion I reign
Far I shall not past this way again
All that I have is pure love
Babylon only come yah so fi drink blood
Ethiopia could never ever be inna di mud
BABYLON A WASH DEM HANDS YET DEM SOUL CAAN SUD![Ghetto Yutes Dem A Suffer from Sizzla’s forthcoming album, Ghetto Youthology, Greensleeves 2009]
Kalonji, while the most visible, is not the only timeless lyricist in the modern age of Roots Reggae music. There are two others who I would also put in his class. The first is, of course, longtime favourite of mine Lutan Fyah. The Spanish Town chanter is the only artist who I can currently say in the past few years or so of consistently making music, to my ears, hasn’t dropped a substandard verse, much less an entire tune in the same time. His level of consistency is such a marvel that in terms of recording it almost shameful sometimes to hear others share a riddim alongside him, even Sizzla at times! Check this from the wicked tune Love Selassie a few years back:
I dun see Babylon kid robbin the poor man’s pocket
Dem sell us out down inna dem fetish market
Dem have di yutes ah work like crane and forklift
Wi nah ‘ave no food inna wi basket
Judgment a stand yuh nuh haffi ask it
Den how long shall di system keep doing us like this?
Wi find out she di leaders dem a some big terrorist
Turn dem back against Selassie, they’ve been so foolish!
Lutan Fyah’s strength comes from his ability to simplify things which many of his peers go the other way and complicate. His style is one which, technically speaking, is so simple to mimic, however, if and when someone attempts to do such a thing, they will almost certainly have to have his skill level to do so, which is very unlikely, to say the least. Along with Sizzla and Lutan Fyah, I would also be wrong were I not to mention one of the most ridiculous lyricists in the game and one whose style is timeless, indeed, the well respect Vaughn Benjamin of Midnite Band from out of St. Croix. While it is certain that someone at some point there will come artists who will be referred to as the ‘next Sizzla’ or the ‘next Lutan Fyah’, Vaughn Benjamin, in all of his oddity, is truly one of his kind. The artist has been without a doubt one of the, if not THE, most active artist in Reggae altogether over the past two or three years, dropping probably over twenty albums in that same time bearing his name. Benjamin writes tunes which only he, himself, can pull off. I’m sure many can relate to his words, and millions around the world, including your’s truly, do just that year in and year out, but you’d literally have to pull a few artists together to be able to actually mimic what he does! The greatest example of that would almost definitely be a tune he voiced for the 2005 album Let Live for I Grade, named The Gad, and if you know that tune then you know that me trying to listen to it and transcribe it s foolish, but today I play the role of a fool:
Longtime man been living in Babylon waiting for political judgment come down
Waiting for the day when dawn til sun down
Moving how the way when ice cream run down. . .
Make no mention of the fact that he delivers that first half of the first verse in less than seven full seconds and you can, of course, fill in what the wording of the tune may or may not mean to you, but the fact that he would write something like that, and an entire 4:22 long tune like that, says something about the man and the confidence of the man within the man. Still there’s another tune, which I feel conveys Benjamin’s ultimate ‘strength’ as a writer, which went well underneath the proverbial radar, the tune, Before I Lose My Strength, appeared on the 2006 album Jah Grid, also from I Grade:
Blessed are they who thirst
The words of judgment from the mighty rushing stream of power
Coming from the wordsmith JAH
Shaping all sociological instant to betterment tomorrow
[Vaughn Benjamin]
“Coming from the wordsmith Jah” is VERY deep. You’ll often hear artists, and rightfully so, decline taking credit for their material, instead choosing to give credit to The Almighty. In this tune, that is exactly what I feel Benjamin does while, simultaneously acknowledging himself as a ‘powerful’ lyricist, equivalent t a mighty rushing stream and anyone who has heard any of his tunes will find themselves in a ‘mighty’ difficult position should they try to present evidence to the contrary.
Then, there is, of course, the Dancehall. Now, while I won’t spin as much time defending the honour of the current state of Dancehall, or what little of it is left, I will say that I feel that Dancehall and its artists of the modern era quite often get overlooked for the classic artists, especially in terms of lyrics. Over the past few years, just like the few years prior to it and the few years prior to it, the Dancehall has been criticized for becoming a more and more violent place and I’d be an idiot to argue against and I’m not going to be both an idiot and a fool in the same day, at least not today, maybe tomorrow. Instead I will tell you to actually look within that ‘ground zero’ type of approach had by many of our Dancehall artists of today and notice the extreme level of genius going on in the mist. Of course, the most significant pure Dancehall lyricist to emerge over the past decade or so would be Vybz Kartel and I wonder, in the early eighties how Jamaica may have responded were a harmless tune like So Mi A Say to play on the radio one day:
How you love talk dirty so?
Like yuh wild and flirty so?
If you sit on mi dick 29 minutes afta 8,
Guaranteed you run off 8:30 so
Yeah a so
A nuh maybe so
Weh yuh mean she mi love call yuh baby so
Wicked slam like Tracy McGrady so
Mi and Jam2 deal wid ladies so
Don how yuh wicked so?
You get props from DJ Wayne, Collin Hines and Liquid so
How di gun pon you hip big so?
It make bwoy haffi jump and prance like calypso!
I would suggest that while a certain, rather large, portion of the populace would be attempting to make sure that such a tune never played again on the radio, another portion would be downright hypnotized by the rather unusual Portmore native’s delivery. Besides such inconsequential tunes, Kartel has also been at the forefront of some of the bloodiest spills in the Dancehall and has been involved in that controversy and criticisms as well. So maybe its just me, but I tend to find even some of the most wrong of rants be entertaining in much the same fashion as a violent action film from out of Hollywood. Such was the case in his most recent battle against singer Mavado, which included, from Kartel’s side one of the most violent, yet oddly poetic tunes you’ll ever hear, Kill Dem All from TJ’s Beast riddim:
Kill dem all off and done
Face drop off pon ground
Gunshot chop off one lung
Bwoy life a done
Body left pon di fuckin ground
Again, maybe it’s just me, but also I found something wildly genius about Mavado’s subsequent reply, Gangsta Nuh Play, although he is not as lyrical as his more adroit rival consistently. Mavado’s history is full of tunes which show themselves to be incredibly violent and bleak, which is something his music does which most doesn’t, at its best. Mavado paints pictures of hellaciously violent scenarios with absolutely no end in sight. Such tunes appear on his debut album, Gangsta For Life: The Symphony Of David Brooks, such as Last Night and especially Dying and Mama Don’t Cry.
Another artist over the same time span who has done a similar act has definitely been Kartel protégé, the, at times, seemingly demented word smith that is Aidonia. This artist can be downright comically talented at times as he will almost inevitably hit a torrent of words which simply do not make any sense to anyone besides himself and are almost inaudible, but should you break some of them down, what you’ll find are really detailed lyrical paintings. Such a tune would be Badman A Step, also from the Beast riddim:
Wi nuh bring machete
Yuh faggot
Mi rise gun from St. Elizabeth
Badman full head of shot
And crack it
Hole inna head big like egg
Weh nuh hatch yet
Walk down pon him and slap it up
And mi a knock it
Waste out di clip
And all di spare inna mi pocket
Just a really ridiculous stream of words which don’t come off as lasting very long. Again, you can sit there and take the words as being wrong and degrading to human life and glorifying the violence and the gun and I’m simply not going to argue with that. But you almost have to appreciate the level of wordplay initiated by the artist that is Aidonia, played by the man that is Aitana Lawrence.
Two other quick examples I would use would be Busy Signal, who most consistently takes tunes, almost as gimmicks or just a show of his lyrical ability, more so than any other artist in the Dancehall than I know of. Such was the case on his 2008 accapella tune The Letter P:
Pickup Priscella
Precisely place her pon propeller
Put power performance pon pum pum proper
And, perhaps even more impressive ultimately, the tune Double Rhyme where he brilliantly used the same word or phrase twice and in such a very entertaining fashion as:
Mi squeeze ten, walk in ten dead
That was intended!
All of them, Vybz Kartel, Mavado, Aidonia and Busy have been very much so on point, but I would also mention a legend in Beenie Man, quickly who perked the attentions of quite a few Hip-Hop heads I know when he dropped the tune Reverse Di Ting back in 2007 when he literally turned his own tune backwards in the middle of it:
Mi dat Dancehall di have King Beenie
Marley son sing a album name Halfway Tree
Halfway Tree name album sing a song a Marley
Free and AJ run left BET
BET let run weh AJ and Free!
Beenie Man’s history of doing such things and just generally providing big tunes is very interesting here because the longevity of his career has given him the chance to develop more than just one time. He developed, initially as an artist, but has since reformed himself, inwardly, not very much outwardly in a sense, so it doesn’t appear as if he has made a major shift in himself and instead it appears as if he has simply followed the changing times, unlike so many others of his initial era who are either not around anymore or simply out of the business altogether. Others in the Dancehall today such as famed song writer Tyrical, young Bramma and especially Assassin are artists whom I feel could have done just as well in any stretch of Dancehall’s rather limited constructed history.
In closing, I’d like to mention that there is an excellent book written by Ghanaian born Jamaican writer Kwame Dawes by the name of Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius in which he says when speaking about Marley’s seminal Exodus album
In interviews Marley was too busy trying to anticipate how the things he would say might be interpreted or reported. He would often guide his responses around the vibe he was getting from an interviewer. Many of his comments were filled with irony, and many were strained attempts to make clear things that he knew he could explain best in songs. This was because Marley worked long and hard on his songs -- testing phrases, testing lines, altering things.
I feel that Bob Marley is indeed a lyrical genius if ever such a person were to exist. But I also feel that he wasn’t the only one. This small piece speaking specifically about dealing with being interviewed about his forthcoming masterpiece at the time, to me can also apply somewhat figuratively to discerning how the mind of such an individual works, not just in his case, but in artists we still see performing today. As I said, I think too often we look over what we have today to give attention to what we once had. There is a saying to give a man his honour when he is alive to appreciate it and not when he is long gone, well I can apply that here as well, give a man his honour while he can still improve. The great Reggae songwriter did not pass on with Bob Marley and were he here today, I’m sure above all, including myself, the King would realize that.
Truly amazing post. Bless.
ReplyDelete"I’m not going to be both an idiot and a fool in the same day, at least not today" hahaha!