Fashion dread Rasta - Jamaican music since Bob Marley's death; includes glossary of reggae terms

Whole Earth Review, Summer, 1988 by Gregory Stephens

DANCE HALL CAN BE SEEN AS AN extreme reaction to Rasta piety. The gap between the sensual, musical side of Jamaican popular music and the Messianic, message-laden Reggae Rasta has grown rapidly since Marley's death.

In some ways, poet-singer Mutabaruka epitomized this split. He embodied the Rasta message in its most analytical form, almost devoid of an entertainment sensibility as such.

Mutabaruka burst upon the scene shortly after Marley died, the leading light of a movement called "dub poetry" that also included England's Linton Kwesi Johnson and fellow Jamaican Michael Smith, who was stoned to death by a political gang for his brutal honesty.

With his trademark streak of white hair parting his dreads, Muta cast a striking figure. He had the raw power of the prophet fresh from the wilderness. The opening lines from his debut album Check It set forth his credo, a new theory of aesthetics:

"Of course we can't write about flowers

& bees & birds & trees And lovers in the park & all them someday. What use we 'ave a write about someday?

Right now the reality different,

We haffa write about South Africa,

the youth in the ghetto

We haffa write about Inglan, we haffa write

bout all dese tings."

Muta was like Bob Marley's intellectual cousin - Franz Fanon set to reggae. And almost alone among the Rastas I've been exposed to, he is an ardent feminist. Muta's Sunsplash booth, representing his Kingston store ("Food For Life") was the vortex for an enclave of talented Jamaican women.

Muta's Sunsplash set wiped out any doubts about his place near the top of the Reggae Rasta world.

After entering in his customary white prophet's robe, he skinned down to a pair of white dungarees and launched a tirade against the slackness of the DJs. He called them "bloodclots" and worse. The audience roared, many of them egging him on as a black congregation would encourage the preacher.

During Muta's incendiary reading of "Dis Poem," I got the eerie feeling of looking the entire black race straight in the face. The poem was revolutionary in style and content, written on the run, in the streets, outside known literary tradition but perhaps the root of a new tradition.

The manborn Alan Hope made a few self-deprecating comments admitting he was not really an entertainer like the DJs. But he had obviously connected on a gut level. By the time Muta and the band kicked into the rude urgency of "White Mon Free Up The Land," the crowd was electrified. Muta was back on the One.

ANYONE WHO CAN'T SEE THE Economic as well as artistic potential of reggae crown prince Ziggy Marley hasn't yet understood the Messianic fervor that runs among Third World peoples, especially in Jamaica. Jamaican music has been able to infect nerve centers in the New World - particularly New York and London - spreading a less severe case of Messianic expectations among American Dream refugees and entertainment consumers. So there is a potentially immense audience for a young, sexy, fashionable, implicitly spiritual Third World superstar.