What I know about reggae you could write on the back of a very, very small matchbox indeed. In fact you could write it on the fat, rosy head of matchstick for that matter. Reggae for me is Bob Marley, Desmond Dekker and Gregory Isaacs. Strike that (not the match, but the statement). Reggae for me is Aswad, Musical Youth and an anonymous roll-call of spliff rolling, hat wearing scary people. Very, very scary black people who like to smoke and cultivate marijuana. The fact that Rastafarianism is a legitimate and profound, deeply meditative faith in its own right in no way detracts from my own personal fear that they could do me great harm. “Reggae’s a powerful medium for strong messages”, it says on the press-sheet. And who am I to argue. I wouldn’t dare. They know my name and they obviously know my address or it wouldn’t have dropped through my letterbox like the smoking, aromatic rizzla pack of stoking hot carnival tunes that it was.
So here it is, not a compilation exactly, although it does cover a fairly sound spray of revolutionary little bullets: Bob Marley And The Wailers, The Harry J All Stars, Admiral Bailey, Linval Thompson, Dennis Brown, Richie Spice, Johnny Osbourne, The Heptones and Dandy Livingstone. Naturally they’re all from the hugely respectable Trojan stable and naturally they’ve all been given a makeover and brought bang up to date with a touch of emceeing, and a live DJ vibe courtesy of scary people like SuperFour, Chuckie Banton, and Brother Culture. A Sound System. Obviously.
Hard on the outside. Natty on the inside.