344: Sinsemilla, by Black Uhuru

Black Uhuru (Jamaica)
Sinsemilla (1980)
8 tracks, 36 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Sinsemilla is a classic album of roots reggae, from when the genre itself was achieving more and more mainstream attention around the world. That leaves this album, Black Uhuru’s international debut, with a really interesting edge to it. It’s undeniably roots: the music itself is dark and dubby, its lyrics a mix of hard-hitting politics, social issues, Rasta chants and good old cannabis songs (the ultra-catchy title track is a great example). It’s not extravagant, there’s no horn section, and the musical tone is for the most part rather serious. But on the other hand, there is something a bit pop about it too. Most obvious to my own ears is that most of the tracks are really rather fast. It’s not music for sitting back and letting the cavity-vibrating bass and infinitely recurring snare drum hits wash over you, this is get-up-and-dance music. There’s even some very of-its-time synth drums in there, which slot into the sound perfectly. It’s basically a great record to introduce the wider world to roots reggae: obviously on a different plane to the happy sunshine music of Bob Marley’s ‘Three Little Birds’ or ‘One Love’, but it can lead on from that very nicely.

Even without that context, it’s a hell of an album. Written and fronted by Michael Rose, with the legendary rhythm and production section of Sly and Robbie on drums and bass respectively, as well as Ansell Collins on piano and keys and all of it recorded at Channel One Studios, could it ever have really gone wrong? With so much reggae genius and history going into these eight tracks, it’s little wonder they’re permeated with vibe. There’s even some lovely blues harp here and there from Jimmy Becker, which helps to bring out roots reggaes inherent bluesiness (always a win in my book).

Black Uhuru helped to bring the intense, Jah-filled not-quite-dub of roots reggae to a world that had been primed by fun, soulful Caribbean lilts, and Sinsemilla was their way of opening the door. And even 40 years later, it is just an excellent listen.

321: Making History, by Linton Kwesi Johnson

Linton Kwesi Johnson (Jamaica/United Kingdom)
Making History (1983)
7 tracks, 33 minutes
YouTube

Linton Kwesi Johnson really is the quintessential dub poet. His poetry is hard-hitting, intelligent and cool. His work offers an unabashed and uncompromising view of life in Britain as a black man, and specifically as a Caribbean immigrant, told with the exact amount of smouldering anger it deserves yet with a crystal clear gaze and a healthy wit to it too.

The ‘dub’ of Johnson’s poetry comes from within rather than without. When he speaks his poetry, there is a music to it. The lilt of it, the rhythms and cadences inherent in the words he writes and the melody provided by his still-Jamaican accent make it dub, unmistakably, even when he performs alone. It also means that when he performs – as he often does – alongside dub music, the fit is completely natural and mutually enriching for both artforms.

When performing with music, Johnson’s partner and collaborator is, more often than not, legendary UK-Barbadian producer, guitarist and bassist Dennis Bovell, also known as Blackbeard, and it’s Bovell and his band that shore up Johnson’s spoken poetry on Making History. Bovell’s usual medium is, as you’d expect, dub, but on this album they do something a bit different. Dub definitely permeates the lot – with Linton Kwesi Johnson, it can’t not – but they also experiment in letting the poetry float among other styles. ‘Wat Abou Di Working Class’ is a slinky jazz-blues with some really hot solos, ‘Di Great Insohreckshan’ is a very 1983-sounding synth pop and ‘Raggae fi Radni’ is ever-so-slightly Latin. It’s interesting to hear the dubwise style of production, performance and poetry turn all of these types of music into the perfect backdrop for Johnson’s truth, his words moulding the music into the appropriate sound, rather than the other way around.

It’s also very pleasing that Bovell isn’t precious about the position of music within the sonic space. At times, when it’s appropriate, the music drops out entirely, allowing Johnson to speak directly to the audience on his own, without backing. These bits actually make the music more effective, as its presence on the album never feels like clutter – the whole thing is neat and tidy, the backing playing its role when it benefits the poetry, and letting the words stand on their own when they need to.

All of Linton Kwesi Johnson’s work is essential in the way he tells the stories of the black British experience with beauty, clarity and thought. Making History is a high-point in his musical output, however, for the almost telepathic connection between poet and producer in crafting the perfect settings for the verse, whether that is a dense musical arrangement or stark silence. Those settings give us the optimal opportunity to learn from Johnson’s thoughts and teachings – which are sadly often as relevant today as they were more than 35 years ago.

252: Hot Shot, by Shaggy

Shaggy (Jamaica)
Hot Shot (2000)
14 tracks, 53 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

With Bob Dylan, making a point to listen to his lyrics as their own art-form for which the music was complementary but not strictly necessary was a revelation and greatly aided my appreciation of his work as a whole. For Shaggy…well, not as much.

Hot Shot was on my list because when it came out, little 8- or 9-year-old me really dug it. It had a couple of big hits on it – ‘It Wasn’t Me’ and ‘Angel’ were both number ones in the weekly charts, and reached number one and eight in the year-end charts for 2000 too – that were fun and sounded good, and that carries on for the rest of the album too. There are some solid tracks on here; even lesser-known ones such as ‘Why Me Lord’, the coolly romantic ‘Leave It to Me’ and the Bollywood-sampling ‘Hey Love’ would be nice additions to appropriate playlists. It’s basically a nice collection of pop-dancehall with heaps of soul and R’n’B, which make it a little more palatable for the charts. It’s very Year 2000 but still good for a cheesy laugh and good vibes.

But, oh, the lyrics. Today was the first time I’ve properly given them my attention, and I sort of wish I hadn’t. Actually, that’s not strictly true: I once did a karaoke duet with a friend singing ‘Angel’. What a lovely song that is, I thought, all romantic like…except half-way through singing it comes the sinking feeling accompanied by a gradual realisation that the premise of the song is that Shaggy’s character has been abusing his ‘angel,’ went to prison for it and now she’s taken him back and he’s very appreciative. Grim. The awkward part is that the whole album is full of that crap too: tales of cheating, carrying guns, casual misogyny and the like…even when the lyrics aren’t offensive in their content, they’re not exactly enlightening or even particularly inventive either.

How depressing. Hot Shot is an easy listen and remains pleasant and enjoyable as long as you don’t pay too much attention. It’s not aged well in the 19 years since its release: for the music, that lends it a certain charm and adds to its nostalgia quality; for the words, though, it just ends up making the previously fun, happy-go-lucky character of Shaggy just seem like a creep. Sad. Does one outweigh the other? That’s your call.

180: Satta Massagana, by The Abyssinians

The Abyssinians (Jamaica)
Satta Massagana (1976)
14 tracks, 47 minutes (1993 reissue)
Spotify (sort of – it’s a different version, but a lot of the tracks are the same) ∙ iTunes

I've written in the past about the 'traditional' sacred music of the Rastafari, the drums and chant of the nyabinghi, but there's another religious music of the Rastas that is much more famous: it is, of course, reggae.

Roots reggae to be exact. Reggae has its origins in many forms, from the Jamaican styles of ska, mento and nyabinghi and American imports of soul, rhythm and blues and rock. As such, reggae itself comes in many forms, from the crooning pop of lover's rock to the funkier side of things made famous by Bob Marley. Roots reggae, for me, is on another plane entirely. It's deeper in so many ways: the lyrics are invariably about Rastafari and themes of black liberation; the groove is slow and weighty, as if nothing can stop it once it's got a momentum; the melody is bluesy and it's often – like so much religious music – based around short repeating phrases.

The Abyssinians are one of the most famous roots reggae bands, and Satta Massagana, their debut from 1976, is one of the genre's most crucial albums. It's actually a little bit more on the poppy side of roots, but it doesn't suffer from that at all, and everything that makes roots special is all there and accounted for. There are so many classics on this album, including the opener 'Declaration of Rights', but the stand out has to be the title track. The band's name shows their deep affinity with the Rasta motherland of Ethiopia, and 'Satta Massagana' shows that this is more than lip service – with lyrics in Amharic, Ethiopia's most widely-spoken language, the group show their passion for the country and the people of Ethiopia in line with Marcus Garvey's teachings.

Religion is the inspiration for so many of the world's most passionate music, from qawwali and gnawa to Gregorian chant and gospel, but if you're looking for the deepest grooves alongside the equally deep religious themes, roots reggae is surely your port of call…and you could do a lot worse than Satta Massagana by the Abyssinians to fill you up with that coolest of religious fervours.

107: Churchical Chants of the Nyabingi, by the Church Triumphant of Jah Rastafari

Church Triumphant of Jah Rastafari (Jamaica)
Churchical Chants of the Nyabingi (1983)
10 tracks, 42 minutes
YouTube playlist

We know a lot of Rastafari religious music in the form of roots reggae, but it’s not that often that we hear much of the ritual music of the Rasta church, the nyabinghi. This album is a great place to start. It’s a recording of an actual ritual – one of the biggest ever nyabinghi gatherings, as it happens – and so it captures the true musical form of the worship. A particularly interesting element of this recording is its context: the reason it was such a big gathering was in response to a visit to Jamaica by Ronald Reagan in 1982, during his presidency. The event was a reaction against the honour with which the Jamaican government was receiving its guest. As such, the songs that are on this record are not only chants to Jah and to Ras Tafari, Haile Selassie I, but they’re also filled with righteous anger directed at Reagan, the Pope and religious and white supremacist imperialism in general. The whole gathering lasted for seven days. Heavy stuff.

The music itself is all percussion and voice. The percussion is made up of three types of drums and various rattles and shakers that bring strongly to mind West African drum ensembles. The voice, however, is really a mix of things: there is lots of overlapping call-and-response between the leader and the congregation, but the harmonies and melodies obviously owe lots to the Christian tradition of hymns. The whole effect make the nyabinghi bear a lot of musical resemblance to the spiritual music of other Afrodiasporic religions in the Americas, especially Vodou in Haiti but also to some degree Santería in Cuba and Candomblé in Brazil. Rastafari is a bit different from those religions though; whereas the others developed organically from West African religions (most notably of the Ewe, Yoruba and Fon) incorporating elements of Christian practice and imagery to ‘hide in plain sight’ when the Africans’ religious practices were banned, Rastafari was somewhat more explicit in its construction, with its religious practices and rituals built from pre-existing cultural elements of Christian, Ethiopian, West African and Afrodiasporic religions as well as secular political beliefs. It’s not impossible that nyabinghi was directly influenced by the music of Vodou and similar traditions.

Listening to nyabinghi also allows for a bit of a glimpse into the creation of reggae: you can hear how, with the addition of influences from soul, gospel and rock music, this style could move towards the direction of roots reggae. But then again, this recording was made in the 1980s, when reggae was already a huge phenomenon. However it came about, and whichever cultural factors were at play Churchical Chants of the Nyabingi is a great document of a particular and epic event, and also a great document of a deep religious practice that is widely known of, but not often known about, at least in any detail.

054: ¡Ay Caramba!, by Ska Cubano

Ska Cubano (UK/Cuba/Jamaica/everywhere else)
¡Ay Caramba! (2005)
17 tracks, 60 minutes
Bandcamp · Spotify · iTunes

Maybe it’s a bit of an overexaggeration to say that this album directly led to me becoming a music writer, but not by much. The very first time I ever read a copy of Songlines Magazine, I stuck the free CD in the machine, pressed play and *BAAA BAAA BAM!* da da da da *BAAA BAAA BAM!*

Wow.

The first track on that sample CD was ‘Oye Compay Juan’ from this album, ¡Ay Caramba! by Ska Cubano. The stereo was turned up way too loud – or maybe the exactly correct volume - and those opening horn blasts and timbale runs went through me like electric. I devoured that magazine and haven’t really stopped since. And now I’m a writer. So there’s a link there somewhere, possibly.

Ska Cubano have such a simple idea, spelled out in their name – ska, but if it were Cuban – but it just works so well. It’s kind of amazing that it hadn’t been tried before…or if it had, it didn’t get anywhere near the traction of Ska Cubano. Add in hints of calypso, klezmer, cumbia and little bits of other stuff and you get this wonderfully infectious album. It’s all made by utterly top-class musicians, from the squealing clarinets to the jangly trés and the cheeky vocals of Beny Billy (Cuban, in Spanish) and Natty Bo (British, in English).

When you listen to this album, sitting still is impossible – it will electrify you just as it did me 14 (wtf) years ago. Get up and dance around till your head drops off.