Other Voices, Other Countries

By Devin McKinney, The American Prospect. Posted December 22, 2004.

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that has Dylan rolling a Rasta-licious joint amid the familiar iconic droppings – except that Robert Johnson has been replaced by Jimmy Cliff, and LBJ by Haile Selassie.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.

The album sounds like a liturgical mass sung by a parish of helium-huffers, and it drives you to imagine the pictures that might animate its sounds. The opener, "Pleasure is All Mine," folds a sinister cathedral of melting voices around the singer's orgasmic rasps, while the congregated choristers of "Oceania" whoop and swoop as if goosed by a dirty-minded Holy Spirit. The explosive "Where is the Line" features machine-gun mouth percussion, the whistling of evil children, and bursts from a diabolical whoopie cushion. The whole album is like this: Over and around Björk's leads runs a gamut of oral ecstasy – panic-attack grunts, and the glug-glug absurdities of Spike Jones' records.

It's a strong mix, catchy and creepy. From one track to the next, there is no telling whether Björk's tonsil-testing escapades will be euphonious or dissonant, a mattress of echo or grid of crisscrossing cries. That's the album's dark wonder, and it's what makes Björk interesting. She whispers you near, then shrieks you back; finds your pleasure center, then sticks a poker in it. Would that more artists had such robust contradictions, as much sense of nefarious play and focused adventure; not since David Bowie first visited Berlin has an ostensibly mainstream artist so voraciously pursued an alienating course while retaining a sense of pop's gut thrills.

Spinning the globe like a record album, melting cultural difference into a hot and spicy ball of sound are Thievery Corporation – the collective name of Eric Hilton and Rob Garza, two District of Columbia DJ/remixers. They fashion extended musical montages from existing recordings, boosting bass and layering effects, occasionally overdubbing voices or instruments. Their latest, The Outernational Sound (ESL Music),is an uninterrupted hour-long matrix of integrated excerpts from a host of culturally and musically diverse sources – many old enough to retain the blessed crackle of vinyl, almost all so obscure that they will visit most listeners as modest revelations. "Slow Hot Wind" spirals atmospherically outward from the base of an old Sergio Mendes record; Big Boss Man's "Sea Groove" chugs like classic garage rock; "Cramp Your Style" hauls in James Brown funk; "Cookin'" is a hard-Latin, post-Tito Puente butt-shake. All are made to groove like mad, and everything feeds into and emerges naturally from everything else.

Devin McKinney is the author of Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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