If there’s one track that transports me to the Cockpit Country, by way of downtown Kingston, it’s this one. Which is funny because I’ve never been to Jamaica. Big Youth’s ‘Screaming Target’, from his eponymously titled debut album has one of the slinkiest grooves imaginable. It’s the musical equivalent of a snake sloughing its skin. It feels like it’s falling off the edge of a very high mountain. A song that is just at home in pastoral, as urban, surroundings. I feel that reggae really peaked in the 1970s. I know that sounds like a boring and predictable take, as throughout the 1980s there was plenty of amazing music being made, but the context of the decade and the other emerging parallel genres all layered and coalesced to really elevate the sound. Big Youth was a reggae DJ/toaster who was more associated with dub than most of those who had gone before. Something that simultaneously thrust him into the limelight while keeping him left field.
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