Search - Linton Kwesi Johnson :: Making History

Dub poetry doesn't get better than on this seminal disc. Johnson drops his rhymes so that they join tightly to Dennis Bovell's basslines, giving both word and rhythm greater power. More literarily and politically savvy than his peers in Jamaica, U.K.-based poet LKJ's rhymes stand up without music, on the printed page. In "Reggae Fi Dada," he wisely eschews the general in favor of exploring the more expressive realm of the personal. He takes that tact even in the political protest of the title track, a rendering of confrontations between black youth and the British police, thereby making the poem all the more harrowing. A direct descendant of a generation of West Indian writers who emerged in the '40s and wrote from the point of view of a colonized people just awakening to their national spirit, LKJ weighs the riddims of poetry and reggae and finds them equal. --Elena Oumano