Independant Intavenshan: The Island Anthology

If, as Ishmael Reed put it, "writin' is fightin'," then Linton Kwesi Johnson is Brixton's skelter-weight champeen, and like another champ in the annals of the greatest of all rhyme, it's with the delivery of his (verbal) blow, that he puts you in the know. And even though he once accused the now infallible Bob Marley of taking the dread out when he signed with Island Records (he later apologized), his own relationship with the label, initiated four years after Marley's, produced as fine a testament to his prowess in the lit-ring, as Ali/Liston did in the boxing ring for that other cat. Confused? Check it out.

Linton Kwesi Johnson was born in Jamaica in the village of Chapelton, and moved to the West Indian London community of Brixton when he was eleven years old. He came of age in the midst of racial and class unrest, violent strikes, the rise of the fascist National Front, and the Black Power movement. As a young revolutionary, and member of the Black Panther Youth League, he sought to stake out an idiomatic ground of his own, one through which he could communicate with the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. He was the first to capture verse in the vernacular of the masses of his native Jamaica, inventing both the term and form of dub poetry. He started doing readings around Brixton accompanied by the bass, funde, and repeater drums of a group of percussionists called Rasta Love.

After doing the spoken-word circuit for a while and publishing a couple of books, he hooked up with producer / keyboardist Dennis "Blackbeard" Bovell and released his first album, Dread Beat and Blood in '78. By laying vocal tracks over a stylistic form defined by the stripping of vocals--as well as studio manipulation: sound loops, echo, reverberation--and even doing dubs of his dub poems--he threw pointy headed reviewers into a hopelessly protracted tizzy over the additive / derivative structure of the dub equation.

A year and a label switch later, LKJ and Bovell got back together and dropped poliscientific lyrical fists on Forces of Victory, the first of his four Island releases. Even while dosing poetry with raggafied rhythm, LKJ, not himself a Rastamon, did not embrace the natural mystic vibrations as fully in word as in sound, evoking spirit in riddim, while communicating a more materialistic analysis of Babylon in voice. He names W.E.B. DuBois as one of his greatest influences, and it shows. His songs are off-(FranciScott)-key anthems immersing the soul rebel in rebel soul, the hope and the fear in the fight, and the fight in the fight.

Stealing the sting of the baton swing from the boys dressed in uniforms of brutality in "Sonny's Lettah," "Mama, I jus could'n stan dere an do nuttin," or calling out to "smash dere brains in / cuz dey ain't got nothin in em," on "Fite Dem Back," Johnson's dub-ious grooves prefer to pick up a stick over a spliff in the face of the oppressor. So if you're waiting for him to mellow out, don't hold your breath. By the time he comes "burstin outta slave shackle / look ya / boun fi harm di wicked," on the title cut of "Bass Culture" you'll be begging for a Spice Girls transfusion with twenty tracks to go. This collection ends, appropriately, where the LKJ/Island relationship did, with "New Crass Massahkah," an intense elucidation of a race-terrorist fire bombing of a London house party. Here, the original version, naked word interspersed with music-accompanied refrain (Island couldn't trust it and had to meddle) is restored.

Reviewed by Mike Zimny
01.25.99