Download In the Heart of the Congos

Travel editor Clyde Macfarlane enters the Heart of the Congos
And Africa dream a dream and behold darkness spread over the whole earth
and in the new dark days of righteousness
the fourth world shall begin
Prince Far I
I am always intrigued as to exactly what qualifies as ‘world’ music. A quick browse
in HMV and you may well come to the same conclusions as I did last weekend; world
music encompasses as much ambiguity as its name suggests. It’s horribly overpriced,
perhaps there’s no demand for it. Manu Chao, the French (or Spanish?) genrestraddler is neatly classed as a world musician. Ali Farka Toure, the late Malian
guitarist who was considered by many, most notably Ry Cooder and Martin Scorsese,
to house the “DNA of the blues” apparently does not live up to his title; he is also a
world musician. Bob Marley however, the only true third world superstar, is a reggae
musician.
1977, Kingston. The Black Ark studio was the setting for a landmark moment in the
history of roots reggae. A dispute between producer Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and his
international label, the British owned Island records, led to a halt in the release of his
latest collaboration: The Heart of the Congos. Perry’s opus had succeeded in
exemplifying everything the sub genre stood for- soulful, haunting vocals, thick layers
of echoed reverb, infectious hand drumming; all intertwined perfectly with the
essential roots ingredient, Rastafari free verse. The head of Island records Chris
Blackwell couldn’t see it selling outside of Jamaica. Nobody would understand what
the ‘nonsense lyrics’ were all about, it took place amongst the rest of the ‘world’ in a
realm of exotic otherness.
Row fisherman row
Row fisherman row
Keep on rowing your boat
Lots of hungry belly pickney
Deh a shore
(millions of them)
You can’t hide from the wrong you’ve done.
There is of course no reason for us to understand what it’s all about. The Rastafari
represent a tiny percentage of the Jamaican population, stranded on a small island on
the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Perry didn’t care about sales or money. His
falsetto lead singer Cedric ‘Ashanti’ Myton was a fisherman when The Heart of the
Congos was recorded, he remains one today. This makes it all the more ironic, the fact
that I can go down to market street, buy his CD (it was finally released in 1996) for a
decent price of £6.00, catch the bus home and listen to him singing. It’s grey and
raining in Manchester, yet through the rough crackles of the 1930’s quality recording
I can hear heat; crickets, the irregular splash of a bucket shower, a man coughs half
way through Noah’s sugar pan. The unearthly distortion of a water buffalo mooing is
warped over a ten second hole in the bass track.
A smaller music shop further down the road does not have a reggae section. It has a
separate rack for ‘world’, hidden in a corner between jazz and blues. In this contracted
model of the music industry reggae is considered to be ‘popular music’, a far cry from
the alien sounds that provide my personal form of escape; a window into another life,
stuck in a moment of time. There could be an overriding mutual association in that
Jamaicans speak English. However, it was the language of Heart of the Congos that
Blackwell considered to be inaccessible on a global market. It was the thick accents,
the improvised chanting of half forgotten chapters of the Old Testament, steeped in
meditation and oppressive premonitions. I find a connection in the biblical imagery, a
meeting point in our strains of thought, albeit an extremely vague one. My knowledge
of the Bible is largely based on singing hymns at primary school. The names of the
Old Testament hang in a mysterious limbo of my mind, stuck somewhere between
myth and history; Moses, Babel, Solomon, Zion, Babylon. The historical roots of
reggae lie in Africa, as does much of the Bible, in the memory of the ancestral
displacement that remains embedded in the people of Jamaica. Music has the power to
transcend great distances.