The release of my new track Giants pays homage to the pioneers and those who laid the foundations, be they musical, political or cultural. It’s dedicated to those who led the way, offered new insights, opened up the world to different ways of seeing, those who have gone against the grain.
The track came about as a result of a conversation between me and the producer Anthony Marshall. I wanted to take a new reggae-inspired musical direction. It’s odd for me to say “new” and “reggae” in the same sentence as it’s the music I grew up with, and the classic era of 70s roots reggae remains my favourite era of music (please don’t tell the hip-hop heads).
I recently filmed a documentary called Roots Reggae and Rebellion, which will air on BBC4 in October, and I have been travelling back to Jamaica a lot in recent years, so the time for this musical “return” seemed perfect. Featuring the brilliant Kabaka Pyramid, the song is a homage to the best aspects of our shared culture and to positive-thinking people everywhere. It’s a song that feels triumphant.
Reggae was, and is, unapologetically pan-African music. It came from one of the toughest environments on the planet and yet it has been able to inspire countless millions of people of all creeds and has spread a message of love and political consciousness to every corner of the globe in a way that no other music has. Whether through producing music giants such as Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, marketing political figures including Marcus Garvey and Paul Bogle to successive generations, or profoundly influencing the origins of hip-hop, garage, grime and jungle, the legacy of reggae is all too prevalent, particularly in the UK.
However, reggae, like any form of rebel music that generates serious revenue, has been much diluted. It has had its politics played down and its giants misrepresented or replaced by safer alternatives. This is most obvious in the way Robert Nesta Marley is remembered, and not as the pan-African, pro-poor man – Marley used his fortune to support countless families in Jamaica – who sang at Zimbabwe’s independence celebrations. Often he is remembered as little more than a weed-smoking poster boy for gap-year students to get high to. If you’ve been lucky enough to travel though Latin America or across Africa, you will have no doubt noticed a much more accurate memory of Marley and reggae’s revolutionary message than we seem to have here.
Black music can’t fail to be political because blackness is politicised in racist societies. At its best, the musical tradition of the African diaspora has been the soundtrack to people’s movements, the vocal manifestation of interpersonal and communal love, a message from below and a challenge to dominant cultural powers. Perhaps, most importantly, they have formed an incredible corpus of songs which has been one of the central drivers of popular music.
This subtext was well understood by my collaborators on this track. Kabaka, Marshall and I share a knowledge of this body of work and understanding of the roles played by the likes of Burning Spear, Marvin Gaye and Public Enemy in telling our side of the story.
Without the giants that have gone before and paved the way creatively, or made sacrifices to create social change, we would not be here doing what we are doing. In these politically tumultuous times, where artists seem to reflect that reality less and less, we need new giants more than ever before.
