Chill Out

Speaking personally, and I can do little else at any time, my fondness for reggae music arises because I feel a continuous need for a groove that is both basic and sexual, inherently yearning and uncompromising, threading a sensuality of expression with a nimbleness that coaxes a bloke to partake of the pleasures.

Reggae music understands that a simple repetition needs not numb or obscure, but that it can instead communicate. This wealthy groove can be so gleefully physical as to joyfully liberate. It swallows sound like a bullfrog, envelopes greedily, wraps its bass around you like slender female fingers on the back of the neck.

This physically can only be aided by the spirituality that annotates Jah music. Like jazz, reggae music is only a tool for believers to shift consciousness and universe, it begins effectively where others cease. Thus when Black Uhuru steal some r’n’b guitar licks from Black America, they shift the impulse of the music one step further, somewhere out into a realisable sensuality; one must no longer listen, one bathes in sound and feeling.

In contradistinction to white acts watering down the black pop of yesterday (ABC, Adam etc) reggae is the logical stride forward. It places its ethic on spirituality, its message on a soul saving that won’t close its eyes, and its sound on a groove that will move once it is imbibed. Black Uhuru don’t want to be fodder to the consumer society, they want to be food for soul and heal.

This not new, of course, Faure’s Requiem, I am told, is a piece of religious music that drips sensuality. My friend Therese tells me that for sexual music Richard Strauss cannot be beaten.

But, in our current times, when Sly and Robbie begin to multiply the beat and burble the bass, when they twitch the guitars and breathe into the melody, then a chap can relax and concentrate. Chill Out is a pro-refined Uhuru, ‘Right Stuff’ will chill on the dance floors with ease and ‘Emotional Slaughter’ lays down some melancholy piano with a quiet bass fitting like a collar. This is as far as Michael Rose’s songs can go towards the charts. His chants are physical, not sweet and structured, and the efforts with Sly and Robbie are a compromise that succeeds successfully, a mixture of Africa and afterthought.

Rose really pours some cold water on the thrill of the rhythm, however, with an almost sage religious melancholy that acknowledges the continual psychological pressure of a Babylon fast consolidating its grip on world affairs. Awkwardly, and thankfully, Rasta doesn’t preach that we must abnegate responsibility. Thus we can tie choking cliches around a gorgeous beat and shuffle.

The result is immeasurably pleasing: rich, poppy and strong. Occasionally one wants a vocal line that will debunk the Black Uhuru repetition and reshuffle the harmonies. While thought has gone into it, still there is too little alteration. Without Sly and Robbie to play and arrange, Black Uhuru records would be almost exactly the same. With their genius, there is a richness here rewriting the style of popular rhythms. No mean feat.