i wake up in the morning and i just can't keep from blogging
Fire House Rock
The Wailing Souls
The Biggest Dancehall Anthems, 1979-82 (Greensleeves, 2002)
Prison Oval Rock
Prison Oval Dub
Barrington Levy
Prison Oval Rock (RAS, 1991)
I picked up this Greensleeves comp a year ago and it's been in constant rotation on my stereo ever since. There are forty tracks of rub-a-dub goodness, including this Wailing Souls classic that I almost tossed up online for my earlier post. There's not a bum track on the comp, but among the standouts are Barrington Levy's "Mary Long Tongue" and Johnny Osbourne's "Fally Ranking" and a sizable helping of classic deejay platters like Eek-a-Mouse's classic "Wa-Do-Dem" and Michigan & Smiley's "Diseases." Greensleeves is a great label - they started sometime in the late 70s (I think), as roots was starting to fade, and they made their name with the new dancehall stuff that was coming out around then. This was back when English and American record labels were still focussed on roots singers, so I got much respect for folks at Greensleeves. If you're new to Mr. Bassie's favorite five year period of Jamaican music, there is no better introduction than this. (Listening to it all at once is a bit exhausting, but these are forty classic tracks you need to have in your collection.)
While I'm at it, I figure why not post this Barrington Levy track. Who doesn't know Barrington Levy? He's probably the most famous Jamaican singer to emerge from the 80s dancehall. I get a little tired of his tenor voice and his excessive use of those backwards yodels, but he dropped some fine records back in the day. On this joint, "Prison Oval Rock," one of my favorites by Levy, he expertly rides the "Fire House Rock" riddim, strutting all over it with his inimitable dancehall swagger. It comes off RAS records' compilation album Prison Oval Rock, which is a collection of some of Barrington's singles from the early eighties. (Don't confuse the RAS comp with Levy's 1985 album of the same name, though. That one's good, but you'll only find it on vinyl.) Levy's pretty much a singles artist, and his greatness doesn't translate to album as well as Marley or a group like The Wailing Souls, so stick to his various Best Of sets and you'll be fine.
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Buy Prison Oval Rock from amazon.com.
Buy Prison Oval Rock from the iTunes Music Store.
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Laters.
this is it
Oh What A Feeling
A Fool Will Fall
The Wailing Souls
Fire House Rock (Shanachie, 1980)
This is it. As far as Mr. Bassie is concerned, the greatest period in Jamaica's musical history is the post-roots dancehall of the early eighties. Shit got stripped down and minimal like the Bauhaus architecture movement. Meandering chord sequences became two chord vamps. The guitar stopped playing the bouncy insistent upbeat that carried Jamaica from ska to rocksteady to roots reggae. (It was replaced by the subtler rhythmic emphasis of the hi-hat.) All the excess instrumentation was dropped and the bass and drums got LOUD. There were still horns back there somewhere, but the horn parts became much less complex – often the whole horn section (i.e., a sax, a trumpet, and a trombone) simply played lines in unison. And the tempo slowed way the fuck down.
Now, if you’re English (or is it British? what do I call you guys? I'll cop to my ignorance), you probably know this shit. (Y’all got lots of Jamaicans over there.) But if you’re American, and not from New York, Boston, or Miami or some such place, this is probably about when Jamaican music drops off your radar. Back in the 1970s, the record companies knew exactly how to market roots reggae, but then it all seemed to change overnight and we Americans stopped listening as much as we used to and the record labels stopped trying so hard. (Though, at some point in the early 80s, A&M tried to package reggae legend Dennis Brown – Bob Marley’s favorite singer, y’all – as some sort of Jamaican R&B crooner and pseudo-funkster. That shit is ugly.)
Not that roots disappeared completely, though. The Wailing Souls, one of the greatest of the roots harmony groups, stuck around. They had been around since way back in the day – they cut an album for Dodd on Studio One in the sixties, and in the seventies they cobbled together a bunch of their killer 45s (including “Bredda Gravalicious” and “Very Well”) to put out the roots classic Wild Suspense. (An album that is sadly out of print here in the States, though I might be willing to trade someone my copy of it via mp3 to the first person who’s got something good I want to listen to. Email me.)
The Wailing Souls were heavy roots, but they were musical chameleons who managed to stay true to their Rastafarian faith while hooking up with rub-a-dub producer extraordinaire Junjo Lawes and the Roots Radics, and then dropping one of the classic albums of the era (during the first half of the eighties, before Jamaican dancehall went electronic). That album, Fire House Rock, is one of my Top Ten of All Time albums. It’s that fucking good. Usually, where Jamaican music is concerned, I would go for a singles compilation before I’d go for an artist’s album – the place has always been all about the 45s. Shit, I think it was only in the late 1990s that CDs starting selling there in sizable numbers (please correct me if I’m wrong). That emphasis on singles makes it hard to find an album that achieves the “coherence” that many white Americans like me, brought up in the world of Pitchforkian rock-critical geekdom, are looking for in an album.
Well, this album has got “coherence.” I don’t how many songs from it were released as singles or what, but all I know is that it’s glorious. The two songs I’ve chose for this post happen to be my favorites, but the album is so good I’m not even sure these two tracks are the best here. (I had to pass up on posting both the classic title track and the phenomenal “Kingdom Rise Kingdom Fall” because I didn’t want to put up two roots track on this post.) No matter, cause the whole album measures up.
Dig the roots badassness of "A Fool Will Fall," then swoon to the loveliness of "Oh What A Feeling," then buy it, cause it's good.
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Here’s what Rick Anderson over at the all music guide has got to say about Fire House Rock:
Talk about a triple threat: first you have the (by this point well-established and effortlessly professional) Wailing Souls, one of the greatest of the cultural harmony groups; then you have the Roots Radics, the studio band that almost singlehandedly defined the new dancehall reggae sound in the early '80s; and to make everything perfect, you have the unassailable team of producer Henry "Junjo" Lawes (who can claim equal status with the Roots Radics as a dancehall pioneer) and engineer Hopeton "Scientist" Brown. The result is one of the finest reggae albums of all time, one which combines the Wailing Souls' top-notch songwriting and harmony singing with the absolute best in studio accompaniment-there may never be another reggae band with a sound as rock-ribbed as that of the Roots Radics. Each track is a highlight in its own way, but pay particular attention to the title track, the gently rolling "Who Lives It" and the smoky, apocalyptic "Kingdom Rise Kingdom Fall."
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Laters.
lazy monday post
10
M.I.A.
Arular
Though I've heard nearly every track of the M.I.A. at some place or another in the blogosphere, I finally decided last weekend to show some love and buy the album. Over the last five or six months, I'd downloaded all of the Piracy Funds Terrorism mixtape, seven of the album's twelve tracks, and several bitchin' mash-ups and remixes (big up to boom selection - thanks, mate!). I was all over that shit, but somewhere along the M.I.A. way I missed this track. Which is a damn shame, cause it's fucking banging! If I had heard this shit earlier, I would've gone out and bought the fucking album on day one.
Yeah, so you've probably heard this shit before. Yeah, you probably bought the fucking album already. Big up to yourself, playa, cause you're a pimp! Mr. Bassie is fucking lazy today and this his fucking lazy post. Shit, you fish have been crammed to the gills with so much M.I.A. propaganda nonsense that I don't even have to say anything. Shit, I don't even have to link to anything. Fucking awesome how easy it is! Just click, download (if you ain't got), and show some love if you haven't already. (I'm keeping this mp3 up for a week, so I'm interested to see if I get some fancy suits breathing down my neck - that shit ain't happened to Mr. Bassie yet.)
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Big up to Portland Trail Blazers' GM John Nash. Now that the finals are done and gone, dude has got the entire league hanging on his every word, waiting for him to make his move. Just don't fuck it up tomorrow, John. I want my Blazers back!
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Serious blogging will resume tomorrow, y'all. I got a nice platter to serve up: two fat rub-a-dub joints by Bassie favorite The Wailing Souls. Laters.
a great big cadillac
Be Thankful
Bunny Clarke
Shocks of Mighty: Lee Perry and Friends
Dubbing in the Backseat
The Upsetters
Shocks of Mighty: Lee Perry and Friends
Howdy y'all. Let's keep this brief, because some of us need to get drunk tonight. I forgot about this Bunny Clarke track until the mo rizza posted another reggae cover of this William DeVaughan classic on his blog yesterday. I wasn't totally digging that one, but y'all need to check out the reworked chromeo joint he posted cause that shit goes balls deep into the giant vagina of electro-soul music heaven.
Well, like the mo rizza was saying, I've never heard anyone touch the pimped-out swagger of DeVaughan's version. I've always loved the song. Some killer shit. I mean, listen to the song: dude's obviously sitting on some cash, driving around like a fucking gangsta, but he drops the verses like he singing one of those ghetto-conscious numbers that were so kinda popular back in the early 70s. "Though you may not drive a great big cadillac," dude sings, "you can still stand tall - just be thankful for what you've got." Fucking what? Dude's a fucking gangsta hypocrite. He's probably that mysterious Rinehart from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Probably gets his dough running numbers. Well, it's this, uhh, confusion that makes me totally dig the DeVaughan joint and is why I'm more likely to return to it instead of some other socially-conscious number by The Impressions or somebody (no diss for Curtis, cause his solo shit is scalding hot).
I don't know much about this Lee Perry-produced joint since I got this disc burned from a friend, but I'm pretty sure the comp it comes from is out-of-print. The dub version of the song also appears on Trojan's Flashing Echo set, where it hopefully was remastered to sound better than this shit job. Bunny Clarke was also the singer for the pop-reggae group Third World. Clarke's cut doesn't have the swagger of the DeVaughan version, but maybe that's a good thing. Instead, Clarke sounds desperate. DeVaughan sings it like he's got bank, but Clarke sings it like he's got nothing. I think it's the creepy synth line in the background that nails it for me.
It's fucking raining right now in Portland, Oregon, and what a fucking surprise that is. You know, it was like this last year, too. It was winter weather until the tenth of fucking July - rain, rain, rain, rain. Fucking hell. Where is summer? I just got out of a long relationship, I'm back home, and I'm alone, and what I want is hot chicks in short skirts on northwest twenty-third. God hates me.
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Get Bunny Clarke's "Be Thankful" on 7" here.
bassie's back
I Admire You
Oh Girl [extended mix]
Larry Marshall
I Admire You
Nanny Goat
Nanny Goat Dub
Larry Marshall
The Sound Of Channel One: King Tubby Connection
I left the game for awhile, but I'm back now. I'm meaning to stick around this time, but we'll see how it goes. I had to stop blogging back in February cause I was getting way too whiny and bitchy in my posts. I was dealing with some terrible shit at the time, but this blog was never supposed to be about letting off steam, so it had to go. I'm back now.
Larry Marshall. I don't know too much about this guy. There's just not a lot of good info out there on the internet about Jamaican music. But I don't have any money to drop on some books 'cos I spend most of my money on crack and compact discs. That being said, this is what I know: Larry Marshall started recording in the mid-1960's for Clement Dodd at Studio One; his classic "Nanny Goat" is considered to be one of the earliest reggae (i.e. not rocksteady) tunes; in 1974, Marshall spent his own cash to finance his classic "I Admire You" album (which features the famous Barrett brothers working the bass and drums); and, by 2002, he had prostate cancer and was working a construction job in Miami to foot the medical bills (see here).
Fucking great stuff. Maybe I put up too much, but I couldn't bear to choose between these four cuts. "Oh Girl" and "Nanny Goat" are extra classic (and King Tubby totally brings it on the "Nanny Goat Dub," which kicks the funk up a notch), but "I Admire You" is nearly as good. Marshall is a damn fine songwriter - what I like about his stuff is that, to my ears, his melodies sound very simple (almost traditional), but they surprise me and they're graceful. Great stuff.
I'm trying something new in regards to hosting the files, so drop some comments if ya have any problems. Laters.
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Purchase Larry Marshall's "I Admire You" at the iTunes Store.
