Our Jamaican Guys

How long have Sly & Robbie been in the music business? Since the
moment ska became ska and reggae became reggae. Soon after the complete
break of the two forms, around the mid-1970s, Sly Dunbar (drums,
sometimes “Sly Drumbar”) and Robert Shakespeare (bass, sometimes
“Robert Basspeare”) began to record as a team. Known for their
tightness, their machinelike precision, the duo’s impact on Jamaican
pop can never be overstated. They not only further consolidated the
very sound of roots reggae (“Pass the Koutchie,” a tune that has the
most perfect reggae riddim), they also went on to continually change
the form they helped consolidate (“Two Sevens Clash,” “Bam Bam,” “Rub a
Dub Sound Style”). Stranger still, they also played a role in
establishing reggae’s digital moment, in the mid-1980s, and its final
computerization, in the 1990s. The riddim duo have never been scared of
technology.

Praising Sly & Robbie is the easiest thing to do in the world,
because there is no end to their achievements. For one, very few
musicians in the reggae world have Sly & Robbie’s range. It extends
from something like Jimmy Cliff’s soulful “Dear Mother” to Chaka Demus
& Pliers’ hardcore digital “Murder She Wrote.” (I must digress for
a moment: I have heard a certain roots-reggae musician—not naming
names, but he was in the Gladiators and currently lives in
Seattle—
bitch about how “Murder She Wrote” turned reggae
into soulless robot music. But this particular person—name still
withheld—failed to mention that the computer-
programmed jam
was produced by a duo who were vital to the roots tradition. End of

digression.)

The difference between “Dear Mother” and “Murder She Wrote” simply
boggles the mind; it’s almost impossible to believe that the same minds
are behind these disparate tunes. But not only are Sly & Robbie
famous for instigating or finalizing breaks, ruptures in Jamaican pop,
they also made great bridges. For example, on “Murder She Wrote,” Sly
& Robbie bridged the long and rich tradition of melodic male
singing (Cornell Campbell, Jacob Miller, Gregory Issacs) to the
then-new (1993) rough, hypermale (often hyperviolent) vocals of
dancehall DJs (Shabba Ranks,
Elephant Man, Bounty Killer).

Then there’s the globalization of Sly & Robbie. It first began
when the world came to them. From an article I wrote a few years back:
“In 1979, French pop genius Serge Gainsbourg flew to Jamaica and became
the first white man to record a full-length record, Aux Armes Et
Cætera, with a duo called Sly & Robbie.” The album was
not that great (French and Jamaican pop were not the easiest things to
blend), but the fact that Gainsbourg recognized their brilliance and
sought them out for the purpose of making history shows the kind of
respect the duo had outside of the small island.

Then there was the great Grace Jones. (A small digression: Grace
Jones is my favorite pop star in the whole realm of pop stardom. She
dominated my youth with her blackness, her hardness, her longness, her
madness—she will always be for me the queen of all things human
and superhuman. End of digression.) Grace Jones’s best work was done
with Sly & Robbie: the mysterious Parisian noir of “I’ve Seen That
Face Before (Libertango),” the pornographic “Pull Up to the Bumper” (a
celebration of the pleasures of doggy style), the hyperdub of “Walking
in the Rain,” the ultrafunky “Nipple to the Bottle,” and the always
popular “My Jamaican Guy.”

There is no end to the globalization of Sly & Robbie. The
process was initially facilitated by Chris Blackwell—the man who
made Bob Marley a rock god—at the Compass Point Studios in
Nassau. While there, Sly & Robbie did production work with Talking
Heads (“Born Under Punches [The Heat Goes On]”), Tom Tom Club (“Genius
of Love”), and… and this is getting ridiculous. Let’s just say it
simply and directly: Sly & Robbie are amazing. But wait—they
even had a big hiphop hit back in 1987 with “Boops (Here to Go),” which
was produced by Bill Laswell and starred the rapper/toaster Shinehead
(remember Shinehead? “I’m an alien, I’m an illegal alien, I’m a
Jamaican in New York”). Enough. Enough. Enough. We get the picture. Sly
& Robbie are fucking amazing.