Status update: Boy George has given up being the Ministry of Sound knob-twiddler we last knew him as, reunited Culture Club and turned out his first album in 19 years. The first we knew of his return was a comeback single, Let Somebody Love You, which was not good. Not good in the way his voice has blown a gasket, its narcoleptic tempo, and the depressing sense that George hasn’t taken the title’s advice in a long time. The one thing you couldn’t really criticise it for, though, was being cod reggae.
Cod is a favourite dig used by music journalists who want the final word. Even the kind of professionally daft hacks who spend all their time defending Daphne & Celeste or rhapsodising Drake will circle the wagons when you try to put more steel drum than is strictly necessary on your next dub-heavy single. But it shouldn’t be like that.
In fact, Boy George is one of the great cod reggae artists of all time. In the cod rankings, Culture Club’s 1982 classic Do You Really Want to Hurt Me stands somewhere between 10cc’s Dreadlock Holiday and every third Paul McCartney song from the 70s. In the popular imagination, cod reggae is just white reggae. It is inauthentic, a borrowing of stylistic tropes without real heart. The word itself means a lark, a low-grade gag. James Joyce mentions it in Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man: “Some fellows had drawn it there for a cod.”
Cod is a strange term, because it throws so much light on how we see authenticity in music. Cod metal? Mathematically impossible. Metal is constitutionally committed to its own debasement. Metal is already the cod of music itself. Cod rock? A quick Google reveals the first page of hits are for a beauty spot on the coast of Australia. The only other genre that can easily be called cod is psychedelia. The Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request birthed it; Oasis specialised in it from the moment Noel quit the class As.
It’s no coincidence that these are two highly spiritual genres. Milan Kundera once said that “kitsch is the absolute denial of shit”. Which means that the only types of music that can be turned into kitsch by making them even more like themselves are those with a faint pong of moral superiority. This is why reggae, with its Rastafarian roots and its reliance on a western fascination with the innate “soulfulness” of the black man, always tops the pile. Far from giving cod reggae a good kicking, we ought to celebrate its capacity to take the piss.
It’s not as if it can’t be every bit as successful as Bob Marley’s Legend. Rihanna once called Diplo’s music reggae for airports. She then semi-famously turned down his loping Lean On, which went to Mø instead. It has since had 2.4bn plays on YouTube. Don’t sod the cod.
