Musical Youth- "Pass the Dutchie"

Album Year: 1982
Age: 0
Track Number: 5





In 1981, the subject of “white reggae” was a vibrant topic in music criticism and the
burgeoning field of cultural studies. Jamaican reggae had been imported to American and British shores for at least a few decades already, but the genre was now enjoying a surge in interest thanks to an influx of talent from the post-punk and new wave set looking to realign rock’s increasingly stale riff-centric hegemony. The racial dynamics of white appropriation was still a sore wound though and many saw the reggae-punk dialectic as a carryover of the exploitation that had allowed white musicians to get rich off of blues and black R&B while its innovators struggled to make ends meet. As we saw below with the last entry, whites with blue eyes had already started to colonize soul, once primarily the terrain of blacks, in the 80s*, and now they were coming for reggae like the bloodthirsty vampires looking to inject their pale skin with some life.

Reggae, the next frontier, shared with early blues a nativism and indigenousness. It was also bound by the fiery self-righteous political fury of apocalyptic Christianity. This latter quality made it a perpetual goldmine/landmine of both sonic and cultural credibility throughout the 70s and 80s.

Perhaps the most successful early example of foreigners adopting reggae style was The Beatles’ 1968 song “Ob-La-Di-Ob-La-Da”, with its ska bounce and its coded references to Desmond Dekker (whose “Israelites” was itself a hit in the UK in 1968). “Ob-La-Di-Ob-La-Da”, however, did not mark some kind of turning point for The Beatles, trading the maharishi for Jah and hooks for skanks. Appearing on the postmodern pastiche that is The White Album (The Beatles), the song was simply one in a series of wild sonic departures and it was this template of cultural tourism that would come to define the reggae influence throughout the seventies, as sonic motifs like the skank guitar offbeat and stepper riddims incorporated their ways into hits by the likes of Eric Clapton (“I Shot the Sherriff”), Led Zeppelin (“D’yer Maker”), Peter Frampton (“Baby I Love Your Way”), Paul Simon (“Mother and Child Reunion”), and The Eagles (“Hotel California”).

For the most part, rock musicians ignored reggae’s political fury, its sense of social justice and discontent for the status quo, until punk emerged. While much punk itself was fairly conservative in its approach, the punks soaked themselves in rude boy culture. The Clash were the most obvious example of a group enamored of reggae, but reggae and particularly dub were also crucial to the work John Lydon nee Rotten did in Public Image Limited immediately following the dissipation of The Sex Pistols. At The Roxy, ground zero for British punk, Don Letts spun little else but reggae between sets and forged a bond between two disparate cultures, creating legions of new fans in the process. Elsewhere, the 2 Tone movement (The Specials, The Selecter, Madness) was practically a revival in new wave garb and dub production techniques made daring and groundbreaking work by The Slits, The Pop Group, and Martin Hannett’s various projects at Factory Records sound even more vital.





Reggae’s most pervasive and appealing reach in musical culture though stems from its devotional ties to marijuana. This relationship alone has likely secured reggae as an eternal teenage staple, a unifying touchstone whose hymn-like odes to getting high can be applied by secular stoners for whom pot-smoking is like a religious ceremony. To Rastafarians, smoking cannabis actually is a religious sacrament. In the Rastafarian belief system, ganja is said to be a cleansing herb intended to bring oneself closer to Jah. For them, there can be no distinction between their political indignation and the smoking of marijuana since it is the very illegality of the latter (in Jamaica and larger expatriate cultures like the U.S. and the U.K) that proves the illegitimacy of centralized authority, who seeks to shield everyday citizens from God’s truth as communicated through the herb’s higher states of consciousness.

With marijuana so central to reggae’s religious culture, reggae artists were known to record odes to smoking it. One of the aforementioned cannabis anthems was “Pass the Koutchie” by The Mighty Diamonds, which is perhaps best known by its cover version, reimagined as Musical Youth’s “Pass the Dutchie”. For all the bile spewed at Musical Youth for cannabilizing the original, “Pass the Koutchie” is a pretty breezy song, with its narrator telling a tale of waking up on a beautiful day, realizing he had no weed, and finding some nice young dreadlocks who were willing to share some.



Hardly a revolutionary anthem, but the way critics reacted, you’d think Musical Youth were taking a shit on the Jamaican flag by rearranging it. Rolling Stone called “Pass the Dutchie” a slice of “reggae bubblegum” and the LA Times were miffed that “these kids…are now taking the Jamaican pop sound into areas of the U.S. Charts that major figures like Bob Marley and Toots and the Maytals have yet to enter.” Lofty academic articles wagged their fingers at what they saw as a “commercially calculated pseudo-pop-reggae construct rather than a fully self-contained group thoroughly rooted in core reggae aesthetics” (Mike Alleyne, “White Reggae: Cultural Dilution in the Record Industry”, Popular Music and Society 24.1, 2000).

The main gripe with the song seems to be with the fact the Musical Youth dared to change song lyrics in their cover version, but this was not an uncommon practice in soundsystem culture. In fact, “Pass the Koutchie” itself was a bastardization. Utilizing the prevalent practice of duplicating popular instrumental backing tracks (or “riddims”), “Pass the Koutchie” rips the sound of “Full Up” by Sound Dimension for its music. Other reggae songs in this milieu proudly and uncontroversially switched up lyrics, added their own verses, or remixed entire tracks at will. This is par for the course in reggae culture. The problem for critics, of course, was that the record label seemed to be behind the swap, not the artists themselves.

Reggae itself was part a grand cultural exchange between the U.S. and Central America, one that had made stars out of American artists like Harry Belafonte and Tito Puente. When the lower class residents of Trenchtown began getting a hold of early U.S. rock and R&B records, they, just as their American predecessors had, began blending American sounds with hallmarks of Jamaican folk music. So, reggae itself can be thought to be part of a more interactive, sampling/sharing culture, rather than one bound by ideas of intellectual property, authenticity, and ownership of artistry like the American and British record industries.

Musical Youth was made up of two sets of brothers from Birmingham, UK, Kelvin and Michael Grant, and Junior and Patrick Waite, and they were indeed a studio concoction, something like a New Edition of reggae, with the group’s youngest member only 11 years old when their first album dropped. In this context, one could be forgiven for thinking that the lyrics of the song were altered only to avoid the shock of having an adolescent pop group singing about the joys of illegal drugs rather than to make foreign songs sound more palatable to white audiences.

Besides, it’s not as if audiences were entirely fooled by the change-up. The “Dutchie” of the title is slang for a kind of cooking pot (like a Dutch oven), but has long since become slang for a blunt whose weed has been wrapped up in a Dutch masters cigar. Beyond the titular adjustment, the only real major change in the song was the switch from the refrain of “How does it feel when you got no herb?” to “How do you feel when you got no food?”, which to my ears almost sounds more subversive given the context of abject poverty and widespread hunger spanning Trenchtown to Birmingham. Rastas out of their stash is a bummer, sure, but it’s not nearly as bad as little kids who don’t have anything to eat.

In a setting where reggae was becoming common consumption though, it’s easy to see why many looked on the song’s existence as a mere trifle. The previous few years had seen minor reggae-tinged hits in Elvis Costello’s “Watching the Detectives” (1977), The Police’s “Roxanne” (1978), Blondie’s “The Tide is High” (1980), and The (English) Beat’s “Mirror in the Bathroom” (1980). Reggae would continue to chart after “Pass the Dutchie” too, though mainly as a novelty and in increasingly watered down form in the years to come (Eddie Grant’s “Electric Avenue” from 1982, UB40’s “Red Red Wine” from 1983, et al.). Its trajectory was sloping downward and “Pass the Dutchie” was released in the middle of this slide.

However, the song was not in and of itself a decline. “Pass The Dutchie” exists somewhere within the liminal space between Regatta De Blanc (as The Police album called it) and “authentic” reggae (the band was schooled by reggae legend Jackie Mittoo, who, as one half of Sound Dimension, wrote the “Full Up” riddim that Mighty Diamonds lifted for their version). There’s an undeniable sheen to the music, a bright and bouncy playfulness that screams pop, but the beat is infectious and the vocals show an incredible depth for a bunch of pre-teens. Just check the flow of “Patch the Dutchie” versus the tween-pop of similar board room confections of the following decade like Kriss Kross, Another Bad Creation, or New Kids on the Block and Musical Youth practically sound like KRS-One in comparison. Better yet, compare “Pass the Dutchie” to Musical Youth’s own enervated version of Desmond Dekker’s “007 (A Shanty Town)” from just a year later:



Or the extra treacly cheap keyboard muzak of their Donna Summer Collaboration:



By this point, their music had been completely drained of reggae’s sonic structures, but on “Pass the Dutchie” they sound alive and free. When Kelvin Grant shouts out “This generation rules the nation!” at the song’s inception, one is almost reminded of the cocky pre-teens at the end of Wild in the Streets, ready to make their twentysomething elders appear as dinosaurs and bomb them into extinction.

It’s little wonder the tune was a smash hit, making it to #1 on the charts in the UK and #10 in the U.S., where it was one of the few music videos pre-Thriller to make it to heavy rotation on MTV with a cast of black faces. The video, depicting the band evading truant officers and winding up facing an uptight court of manners, was directed by Don Letts, the very man who had spawned Britain’s lingering punky reggae party at the Roxy several years earlier.

But a music is often defined best by its uses. Ultrahip 90s icon Beck’s hit song “Where It’s At” made a sly reference to “passing the dutchie from coast to coast” as a form of cultural capital on an album overflowing with such off-the-cuff citations. Public Enemy’s Terminator X noticed the charged potency of Kelvin Grant’s commencement line above and embedded it into the chorus of “Revolutionary Generation” off their Fear of a Black Planet album. The refrain of The Black Eyed Peas’s “Dum Diddly”, on the other hand, jacked the line “you know the music make you jump and prance” (mashed with a “oh-way-oh” response swiped from The Bangles’s “Walk Like an Egyptian”) as a chant to incite dancing.



Here, within one song, was cultural capital for white hipsters, political aggression for black militants, and dumb dance fodder for dispassionate club bangers. Similar to the way “Pass the Dutchie” provided ammunition to critics arguing that the reggae had become commercially diluted and was being savaged by colonialism, “Pass the Dutchie” became a cipher, a cultural riddim, the song as artifact to be molded and reshaped to the delight of the user. It proves that the channels that pop and folk idioms travel through share more in common than many would like to believe. Corporate channels in the early 80s facilitated the creation of new clichés, new archetypes, and new paradigms. In short, postmodern culture was becoming a sampling culture, a reggae culture.

But Musical Youth, 4 poor kids whose careers never recovered from the fallout of their one hit wonder, shouldn’t be blamed for globalization just because they were the temporary benefactor of it. When Patrick Waite (12 years old upon the release of “Pass the Dutchie”) died at 24 of a hereditary heart condition while waiting awaiting trial for drug charges, his life having spiraled sharply downward, it was clear that Musical Youth hadn’t come to replace Bob Marley and Toots Hibbert. They were, in fact, mere pawns in a project of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, the same one that left those blues and early rock icons penniless and destitute. Had Musical Youth not scored a scorching single, they may have disappeared back into the ghettos of Birmingham without a trace, but instead “Pass the Dutchie” carries on. To proclaim that Musical Youth owed something to reggae or to Western music at all is absurd and dances around the fact that it’s culture that owes us, that owes Trenchtown, that owes blacks everywhere for the atrocity of slavery, that owes those jailed and killed in the war on drugs, that owes those who’ve got no food, and that owes those whose ears bleed at the sound of mere entertainment in any age that demands so much more.



*Soul had already troubled by The Beatles’s and Bowie’s Rubber and Plastic Soul varieties respectively, but each of those names since to hint at a kind of ironic acknowledgement of one’s own inauthenticity. The 80s found white singers like Rick Astley praised for the uncanny ability of their voices to sound indistinguishable from the grain of peer black artists, a legacy that continues on through Adele.