"You take people for fools, and use them as tools..."
Once again I've availed myself of the largish CD collection at one of the local public libraries in my area, and, once again, I've stumbled across some pleasantly surprising discoveries, to wit:
- I'd never gotten around to picking up Jackson Browne's 1986 album Lives in the Balance, but listening to it now has been a bit startling and depressing, rather like finding a quatrain by Nostradamus that unambiguously predicts a future event. Lives in the Balance may have been written in high dudgeon over Ronnie Ray-gun's Central American policies, but when Browne sings "You might ask what it takes to remember / "When you know that you’ve seen it before / "Where a government lies to a people / "And a country is drifting to war," goddamn if it doesn't sound like he's singing about our current bellicose drift. Unfortunately, this one may well prove to have a lot more impact than our Central American diddling.
- Trojan Records' 2-CD compilation Let's Do Rocksteady: The Story of Rocksteady, 1966-68, is a revelation to me; though I can pretty much take or leave reggae or dancehall -- about a half hour's worth of either, and I'm good for a week or two -- I really like just about everything gathered here (54 songs!), and love quite a bit of it. (No, not just Desmond Dekker and The Aces's "The Israelites.") It's amazing how fresh most of this stuff sounds; I can understand why Curtis Mayfield is sometimes called the godfather of rocksteady. The liner notes say that rocksteady and the concomitant rude boy phenomenon were partly inspired by the Jamaicans' love of the James Bond movies; nonetheless, I got a chuckle from two tracks inspired by mid-'60s TV show The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Lyn Taitt & The Jets's "Napoleon Solo" and Ike & The Crystallites's "Illya Kuryakin." I also was bemused over these findings on the second disk:
- Ken Boothe's "Lady With the Starlight" uses the same music as Nat King Cole's 1963 hit "Those Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer."
- The aforementioned "Ilya Kuryakin" uses music from the Theme from A Summer Place -- pretty mind-snapping for an instrumental piece ostensibly about a pop-spy TV show.
- The Uniques's "Watch This Sound" is a rocksteady cover of Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth," which subsequently became seen as a seminal protest song from the Vietnam War era. I guess I don't have to feel guilty for having a less than complete understanding of Jamaican patois, because The Uniques apparently didn't fully understand Stephen Stills's lyrics: "What's that sound?" is misquoted by The Uniques as "Watch This Sound," while "What a field day for the heat" ("heat" here meaning law enforcement personnel -- the po-leece, if you will) is rendered as "What a great day, feel the heat." If the intention was to translate the implicit protest against over-zealous cops thumping on rowdy youths to a Jamaican context, the effect is diluted a bit by the misreading of some of the lyrics and by the more upbeat tempo. This one isn't one of my faves from this collection, but it is an interesting oddity.
- What with the infamous Jamaican dislike of homosexuals,The Gaylads's "Over the Rainbow's End" oozes unintentional irony from its pores. Uh, yeeaaah.