September 16, 2005
MyJarnot Line
I was raised not by parents but by my many groovy friends, who smoked pot and were nice to me and coerced me into pretending for many years that I liked reggae (and the blues, and Sparks, and some band called Wishbone Ash that I still think I've never heard). As a result, when I made my move (my move consisted of this: dragging a half-dozen people from a Grateful Dead concert, MSG '87, uptown to this bar with a video jukebox, and forcing them all to sit through Debbie Gibson's "Only In My Dreams," which none of them liked, but sheesh did I feel free), and was suddenly free to revile reggae, I did so with a passion which I feel it deserves and which mostly continues to this day (except when one travels to other countries and discovers that to dislike reggae in, say, Italy, would be like disliking hip-hop in the United States: it's so much a basic building block of pop that rejecting everything with a reggae component would mean effectively reneging on any deal to be part of the present).
All that said, Welcome to Jamrock (or you can download here). I have only two things to say about this song. One, it rules, with an intense and extreme rulingness. Two, Damian Marley, among all the current humans currently likely to float across my video screen here at the Western World, by far more than does anyone else, resembles a young Osama bin Laden. Once that occurs to you, this shot from the video is weird.
Posted by jane at September 16, 2005 12:55 PM | TrackBack