What on earth do I mean?
Well, I guess I mean stretching conventions until they almost collapse.
Playfully testing how far you can take something.
Shifting. Transforming. Advancing.
I saw U Roy – unexpectedly, at a festival in the blazing summer of 76. I was 16.
I liked reggae music. I liked all kinds of music in fact. But this was something strange and new.
He wasn’t singing – as such. There were no recognizable melodies.
He was chanting. He was declaiming. He was rhyming. Everything was about rhythm. The words were very difficult to decipher – a combination of unfamiliar vocabulary, a heavy Jamaican accent and head-spinning echo reverberating through the speakers.
Rhythm and repetition.
A drummer and a bass player were on stage with him. They were, I later found out called Sly and Robbie. Hypnotic, stripped down and precise. No guitar. No keyboards. Not necessary.
The DJ John Peel had to intervene at one point to tell off a small but irritating bunch of racists, who were finding it not to their liking. They’d been shouting drunkenly at the occupants of the stage.
They were quickly banished back to the 10th century while the rest of us lapped up the joyful experience of someone who’d come from the future to entertain and educate us. To take a musical genre and shift it into a new shape. Rap had yet to arrive. This was an innovation in it’s raw state. Imperfect, exciting and ultimately full of joy.
A precursor. A premonition.
The shape of things to come. I suppose sometimes in art someone has to go too far at first, to find out how far out is too far for some people!
When I have trouble keeping the faith I summon up the memory of this experience. I listen to some U-Roy and get out my busy brushes…