It's hard to pick a favorite track on this album but if I had to choose, it would be a toss up between Who The Cap Fit (because of the song's message) and War (also because of the powerful, simple message that is just as applicable today as it was 30 years ago when the song was written).
It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-contained artifact. The great records certainly feel that way. But albums are more permeable than solid, their motivations, executions and inspirations informed by, and often stolen from, their peers and forbearers. It all sounds awfully formal, but it's not. It's the very nature of music — of art, even. The Six Degrees features examine the relationships between classic records and five… more »
Despite the fire and brimstone that characterized reggae's revolutionary emergence in the 1970s, I have always had an abiding affection for the evolutionary period that immediately preceded that breakthrough, when the music seemed caught between two worlds. The style is usually referred to as rocksteady - post-Ska, but still experimenting with and expanding the possibilities of that one-drop, loping afterbeat; and though Rastafarian ideology was already beginning to swiftly gospelize the music (anthemed most notably… more »
