Friday, June 6, 2008
Heavy Reggae Reprise
Every once in a while, maybe twice a year, I get the jones for some reggae music. Real deal stuff--heavy dread Roots Irie stuff, music of the bass and drums and spirit.
Burning Spear is featured this month on your cable operator's Concert TV On Demand. It is a classic Spear performance with the original horns, but not the singers from Germany's Rockpalast. This stuff is amazingly dread heavy. It has to be Spear at the top of his game, so joyful and majestic.
Winston Rodney aka Burning Spear has had a long career spanning many record labels and backup musicians, but his message and love of Rastafari and Marcus Garvey's legacy over steady bass and drum riddim have remained constants. His reading of the Grateful Dead's Estimated Prophet 17 years ago probably expanded his fan base. I think it is also significant to note that Spear maintains a blog, I don't see this being done by any other artist of his age and generation. I can't help but believe that this will also be impressive to younger generations of fans who link to his site because someone turned them on to the Live! album or they stumbled across the impressive Rockpalast performance.
I also checked out a new DVD tribute to Joseph Hill of Culture, who died in 2006. When you see Hill or Spear perform, it becomes really clear how lame much reggae is, particularly of the slithery dancehall variety. And this was apparent to the two hour sort of cable access like packaging of concert sequences by his Hill's son, Kenyatta Hill, but also IJahman Levi, Taurus Riley, and a woman singer by the name of Etana, who I found basically unwatchable. The intensity of the half hour concert footage of Joseph Hill and Culture overwhelms anything else on the disc.
When Hill shouts out at the beginning of his songs that he is taking down Lucifer, it grabs one's attention. Rodney and Hill have and had the ability to create a stage persona larger than life. I saw Culture at a reggae festival in the velodrome in Dominguez Hills, CA back in the early nineties. I remember being in an entirely different space mentally and emotionally at the end of the show than I was when it started. How many performers can you really give that kind of credit to?
Heavy roots reggae will likely soon drop back out of my musical rotation, but I and I know it will resurface again and I once more will appreciate the spiritual and emotional devotion masters like Spear and Hill possessed and shared with the world with their riddim, passion, and spirituality.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:22 PM
Comments:
Post a Comment