Other Voices, Other Countries

This article is reprinted from The American Prospect.

I've never heard a piece of reggae, ska, or rock-steady I didn't like at least a little. The off-beat of Jamaican pop can make anything sound good – even the tribute album. Most tributes are a waste of time, and from the Hollies' late-'60s effort to the 30th anniversary concert held at Madison Square Garden in 1992, the many extended encomia to the music of Bob Dylan have been particularly sucky. Too much tribute, not enough pleasure. Is it Rolling Bob? A Reggae Tribute to Bob Dylan, Vol. 1 (Sanctuary/Ras) breaks the rule. Here pleasure is continuous, tribute all but incidental. It says nothing bad about Dylan, and everything good about this double-disc collection, that you can listen to the whole thing and devote perhaps ten seconds of thought to the artist whose work inspired it.

The best performances are either uncomplicated bliss (the Mighty Diamonds contribute the 300th satisfying version of "Lay Lady Lay") or left-field revision (rapper Sizzla reinvents "Subterranean Homesick Blues" merely by reaccenting its rhythm). Billy Mystic turns the biblical nightmare of "Hard Rain" into a jaunty reel through Armageddon, accompanied by lovely flutes and wide-eyed awe. Mostly performed by a band led by drummer and Dylan collaborator Sly Dunbar, there is nothing raw to this music. But the relative absence of horror and harshness from these versions does not lessen the songs; it makes them work as joyful noise with a plush beat. Not everything has to hurt: "When it hits, you feel no pain," Bob Marley once said of reggae. Positivity was always the mandate of this music.

Disc 2, featuring dub versions of several songs ("dub" meaning instrumental tracks remixed for richer echo, heavier bass, wider stereo) opens sonic funnels in the tracks, unexpected cylinders of sound. And this is not to mention the cover design, a witty derangement of the Bringing it All Back Home tableau that has Dylan rolling a Rasta-licious joint amid the familiar iconic droppings – except that Robert Johnson has been replaced by Jimmy Cliff, and LBJ by Haile Selassie. For those looking to renew their love of reggae, Is it Rolling Bob? is among the nicest things to happen since Musical Youth didn't become the next Jackson 5.

Björk can be as difficult as reggae is easy. The Icelandic pixie-freak has both garnered her cult and staved off mass appeal by creating albums that are exercises in creative perversity. Her voice is lemon-tart and knife-sharp, her production a spare Nordic electro that subjugates both rhythm and melody to an overall aesthetic of fractured, cubist pop. She doesn't make hits. She feasts on deconstruction, distrusts whatever sounds "natural" or conventionally beautiful. Yet who hasn't been turned on by her at least once over the course of her stubborn, experimental career – scintillated by "Big Time Sensuality," or tickled by "It's Oh So Quiet," or chilled by "Satisfaction," her demonic 1994 duet with PJ Harvey?

Medulla (Elektra) is Björk's toughest sell yet: an album constructed almost entirely of vocal parts – parts sometimes layered for a resonant, churchly effect, elsewhere splintered and syncopated in an approximation of hip-hop. Among the singer's guests are The Icelandic Choir, Inuit throat singer Tagaq, and human beatbox Rahzel. Save a bit of piano, unaccompanied vox provides all melody and percussion, main line and counterpoint, washing over the words in tides of human hum and sigh. Song titles like "Mivikudags" and "Sonnets/Unrealities XI" discourage ordinary textual comprehension, and even the liner booklet is hard to use: The lyrics and titles are printed black on black – you need night-vision goggles to read them.