Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Toni Basil- "Mickey"

Toni Basil- “Mickey”

Album Year: 1982
Age: 0
Track Number: 7





And speaking of timelines written out of continuity, we come to Toni Basil, who is still going strong at 68 years young. Toni Basil’s CV is beyond impressive in the number of pivotal moments and members of pop culture history she has been around, but she will likely always be remembered first and foremost for the smash hit “Mickey”.

I first encountered “Mickey” as a meme. Sailing its course through musical history, the song wound up in the mouth of Wayne Campbell as he sings it to his girlfriend Cassandra while cruising around in “the Murph Mobile”. He blurts it out at first as an irritation. Like a recursive loop, it has been stuck in his head all day since it was the last thing he heard before he left the house. The song acts like an itch he can’t scratch. Soon though, Cassandra joins him and the barrier between grading infection and pop bliss is breached. Giving in to the itch, the two are free to delight in the song’s irresistibility. It’s no longer a nuisance. It’s now a shared cause, this insatiable Tourette’s-like need to sing a song.



It’s one of music’s most mystical affects, the way it commands you beyond your desires, beyond the pleasure principle. One admits to defeat, gives in to the power of the song. Often, it’s not even a song you like, a song you may want to quit, but which can’t quit you.

I watched the VHS of “Wayne’s World” over and over until the heads were worn down, so I knew “Mickey” as a symptom before I really knew it as a song. I understood its infectiousness and why, even if I never listened to it again, it wasn’t going anywhere in my mind. I got the handclaps and how they would fit into a ritualized cheerleading routine. The song almost seems to have been arranged and engineered to be a hit, with the meticulousness of a dance routine. “Hey Timmy, You’re so fine. You’re so fine you blow my mind!,” a girl would kindly write to me in a note passed between classes in high school. “Mickey” was so catchy that it was now backdrop, infinitely accessible. It still is. One line and you know exactly the song, if not the sentiment.




Likewise, Toni Basil was a bit of a cipher. It wasn’t until researching this song that I found out that Basil was already 40 years old when her breakthrough single shot up the charts. It’s appropriate that “Mickey” would help kick start MTV since television is where she got her start. As a young woman, one of her earliest gigs was the T.A.M.I. show in 1965, an iconic television event displaying the talents of The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, The Beach Boys, and The Rolling Stones, not to mention a career-defining performance by James Brown (The Rolling Stones had the bad fortune to go on after Brown, but their career seems to have recovered).



Her work on the T.A.M.I. Show as both a go-go dancer and choreographer secured her a long career working behind the scenes of music. She rounded out the sixties, as she would throughout her career, bridging the gap between the counterculture and the mainstream. She was friends with several Beatles and appeared in a couple films with buddies Jack Nicholson (Five Easy Pieces) and Dennis Hopper (The Last Movie and Easy Rider, where she was one of the prostitutes in the infamous graveyard LSD scene).



Her first film though was also her first music video. It’s unclear if “Breakaway”, Basil’s Tamla Motown-esque first single in 1966 (written by Ed “Tainted Love” Cobb), was supposed to transform her into a star, but if so she chose a strange medium for a crossover vehicle. Directed by found footage artist Bruce Conner (“A Movie”), “Breakaway” features original footage of Basil dancing and stripping in a frenzy of artistic poses rendered in motion blur zoom shost in stark black and white. Far from the piece you’d expect from a soul song of the era, the visuals almost seem a better accompaniment to some dream synthesis of This Mortal Coil and rave music. That is, until halfway through and the entire song plays backwards, far more apropos of the early psychedelia on display here.

Basil would go on herself to direct videos for Talking Heads (“Once In a Lifetime”, “Crosseyed & Painless”), in addition to directing all of her own videos. It was likely Basil then that would connect Conner to David Byrne and Brian Eno, who had Conner direct two videos from My Life in the Bush With Ghosts. Conner was also a mutual connection to Devo (he did their “Mongoloid” video), a group Basil was an early champion of. On a recent Sound Opinions podcast, hosts Jim Derogatis and Greg Kot recalled a story wherein it was Basil’s then boyfriend Dean Stockwell (of all people) who put one of Basil’s tapes of Devo into Neil Young’s hand, forging the friendship that would culminate in their collaboration on Rust Never Sleeps and “Human Highway”.



Basil also knew David Bowie. She had done choreography for his 1974 Diamond Dogs tour, by far the most elaborate Bowie stage show, and even though she didn’t hand Bowie and Iggy Pop the demo tapes that got Devo signed, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility to suggest her opinion had some affect. Regardless, her relationship to Devo would tighten and she eventually wound up not only covering 3 Devo songs on her debut, Word of Mouth, but dating Gerry Casale himself.




Between forging artistic connections, Basil did some of her most groundbreaking work as a member of the dance troupe The Lockers. The Lockers were infamous for introducing “street dance” to mainstream audiences with appearances on Saturday Night Live, Soul Train, and The Tonight Show. Though Basil left the group in 1976, The Lockers had already cemented their influence on the burgeoning hip-hop culture by introducing a unique set of dance elements, such as their namesake piece, locking (now known as poplocking or popping and locking).

This was all before “Mickey”, which immediately vanquished all this entire ouevre behind the smokescreen of what might be the ultimate one hit wonder song. An anthemic beckoning for affection in the form of a cheerleading routine, “Mickey” was part of a wave that set out to prove synths were far more effective than traditional instruments in creating bubblegum. Like Devo, Basil was a pioneer of music video. She shot the iconic high velocity, high energy cheerleading video on her own over a year before MTV even existed. When MTV came around, the song went into heavy rotation and knocked Lionel Ritchie out of the number one slot on the pop charts.



Essentially a spot-on cover of “Kitty” by the forgotten powerpop band Racey, “Mickey” was named after Mickey Dolonz of the Monkees (Basil had done choreography for The Monkees’s “Head” film and appears as a backup dancer in the spectacular video for “Davy’s Song”), but appears on the surface to have no original sentiment to it beyond the name change. Yet, if that’s so, then why did Robert Christgau call Basil (quite crudely, mind you) “The only woman ever to offer to take it up the ass on top 40 radio”?

Perhaps it’s because when converting “Kitty” from a woman to a man, Mickey turns out to be quite gay. For the first half of the song, Mickey consistently resists Basil’s charms, so in the latter half Basil’s pleas become more revealing. “Now if you take me by the hooooo, who’s ever gonna know?/ Every time you move, I let a little more show/ There’s something you can use so don’t say no, Mickey/ So come on and give it to me anyway you can/ Anyway you wanna do it, I’ll take it like a man/ Oh, please, baby, please, don’t leave me in the damn, Mickey!”

Basil did a number of other interesting film and musical projects after the “Mickey” craze wore down, but her most interest legacy might be what arose in the song’s wake. “Kings of Rock” Run DMC copped a sample of The Knack’s “My Sharona” for “It’s Tricky”, but the song’s chorus openly riffed on “Mickey”, singing the “It’s tricky to rock a rhyme” line to the tune of “Hey Mickey, you’re so fine”. It’s unclear whether the group was aware of Basil’s roots in hip-hop street dance or whether they were just looking to appeal to the new wave kids alongside the metalheads, but the impact on one of hip hop’s first big singles is not insignificant.



The track also received the very first “Weird Al” Yankovic treatment on his self-titled debut album as “Ricky”, an ode to the I Love Lucy character. Weird Al’s early single “Another One Rides the Bus” had spun in regular rotation on Dr. Demento’s show, but for the bulk of Americans, “Ricky” was the first exposure to the parody musician eccentric who would go on to produce the first record I ever owned (more on that one later).



Though I don’t know of any artist who has cited the song as a direct influence, “Mickey” has to have at least subconsciously brought about the naughts trend of bringing pop onto the football field. Drumline songs by the likes of Gwen Stefani (“Hollaback Girl”, “What You Waitin’ For”) and Beyonce (“Get Me Bodied”, “Girls (Who Run the World)”) may have the opposite poise of Basil’s tongue-in-cheek boy crazy vapid cheerleader, but the song at least serves as a sonic ancestor who mapped the sociological terrain of high school sports first. Closer still in relationship is the call and response rah-rah chants of Avril Lavinge and Dr. Luke’s “Girlfriend”, which, like “Mickey”, is practically a cover of a powerpop song (The Rubinoos’s “I Want to Be Your Boyfriend”). Likewise to its spiritual kin, Lavigne, in twisting the gender of the original, puts forth an oppositional posture to the original (“I want to be your boyfriend” becomes “I don’t like your boyfriend”).

It’s likely Basil will never get the credit she deserves for any of her lasting influence because “Mickey” comes from a place of pure commerciality, the novelty song (making Weird Al’s gesture extra meta- a novelty parody of a novelty song). Yet, she’s already had so much influence and had her hands in so many interesting moments that it almost doesn’t seem worth it to fight for the recognition. Basil seems to do a better job in the background, choreographing music’s foreground as it passes by.

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Blood, Sweat, & Tears- “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy”

Album Year: 1982
Age: 0
Track Number: 6



Yes, this is the second Blood, Sweat, and Tears song on this mixtape. While the last two entries were presented for cultural ambiance (a means of describing the musical world I was born into), “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy” is a song that was actually probably played both around me and for me when I was a baby. As previously mentioned, the self-titled album by Blood, Sweat, and Tears was one that came on quite a bit in my house growing up. As such, the band always signified the generational divide to me while I was growing up. They were my parents’ rock band, not Poison or Nine Inch Nails or whoever I happened to be into at the time. It wasn’t that I found the group to be offensively irksome or maudlin (like I did with The Beach Boys- a band I love now). I just didn’t understand their appeal. Given the existence of other great music in the world, I couldn’t figure out why anyone would settle for BST.

Yet now, though I still don’t particularly care for the group, I find my parents’ embrace of them somewhat endearing. I can get how the group’s complex jazz musicianship and classical theatrics might have at one time sounded drastic and exciting. Their use of polyphonics were surely vibrant and new in a world where records had only recently been rescued from mono. David Clayton-Thomas’s voice could sound both sweet and gruff and it was a great mimesis of all black voices, a simulation that seemed to serve a blow to the argument for “authenticity” as the crucial crux of a good record.

Before Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, which it should be noted, only came out a year prior to Blood, Sweat and Tears, audiences mostly looked upon rock as a cheap commodity and if the word “glut” or “bloat” was to be placed next to it, it was only to emphasize the large volume of turnover in the market. By the end of the 1970s, the center had shifted and massive budgets and overproduction were the norm. Lenny Kaye/Lester Bangs types dismissed BST as symptomatic of everything wrong with music, and championed instead dumb, stripped-down, primal, adolescent noisy music (what would eventually become punk), a music that was not only anti-prog and anti-fusion, but its opposite.

In an interview with Rob Sheffield, Fluxblog’s Matthew Perpetua used a term from comic books to refer to musicians who were once big who have been “written out of continuity”. Music history, like any history, is written by the winners. For years I thought Blood, Sweat, and Tears were just some also-rans that my parents happened to like in tandem to big acts like The Beatles. But as it turns out the group was exceptionally popular. “You’ve Made Me So Happy” was the first of three #2 singles from the album, one of several to go multi-platinum. The group were even a headlining act at Woodstock.

Most infamously, the group even swiped a Grammy for Album of the Year in 1970 for Blood, Sweat, and Tears, beating out Abbey Road. To be fair, The Beatles had actually only won one previous album of the year Grammy, for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Album of the Year winners in the ensuing years included the illustrious likes of Toto, Lionel Ritchie, Celine Dion, and Christopher Cross, proving that the bar was not exactly set very high.

Another Album of the Year artist nominee in 1970, Johnny Cash (nominated for At San Quentin), had previously recorded an album called Blood, Sweat, and Tears. Although both essentially covers records, the divide between the two albums couldn’t be greater. Whereas Cash had sung gritty paeans to the working man, BST had an opulent-sounding sheen to their music, complete with gentle flutes, apocalyptic brass, and song suite like structures. It was perhaps this that so frustrated BST’s critics, the fact that they not only got rich, but decidedly sounded rich as well.

“You’ve Made Me So Very Happy” is adapted from a Brenda Holloway song on Motown. Somewhat unusually for Motown, Holloway actually retains a songwriting credit on the track, so she really does own the tune. As such though, it’s one of the more poppy songs from the Blood, Sweat, and Tears album, but that doesn’t mean that the group didn’t do everything in their willpower to add a mosaic of different patterns and shapes into the mix. At times, the group’s virtuosity even appears to drown the passion that the song’s lyrics allude to, or, at worst, divert from it entirely. With that said, it’s not a bad song. It’s just pointlessly tiered. Perhaps the best way to illustrate this is through a play-by-play.

The song starts with horns gallantly fluttering as if announcing some kind of regal entrance as the organs sing the chorus in a kind of pageantry that seems destined to secure the track as a wedding anthem hereafter. The organs soon bleed out into harmonic chords juxtaposed against a mobile cool-jazz bassline. As Clayton-Thomas announces “I’ve lost at love before”, it’s clear that the opening was a tease, as the track is now a blues, a sad lament at the singer’s previous romantic missteps.

Then, suddenly, joyful horns burst out in segmented hits to crush this spell of depression. “I chose you for the one”, Clayton-Thomas says, and, contra just a few seconds ago, “Now we’re having so much fun”. The snare and the kick become a four-to-the-floor under these vocals, making the connection of the bridge to the chorus seem almost mechanical. It’s a device which allows the chorus to sound more loose and freeing in comparison, but the chorus almost becomes an afterthought to the high tension of the bridge. To ameliorate this contrast, the chorus itself is split between the tension of the “You’ve made me so/Very Happy/ I’m so glad you/” and the release of “Came into my liiiiiife”. For a moment at this juncture as that line is drawn out, the song almost resembles a mid-tempo rock song, but the affect is only temporary.

A whining trumpet then beckons in, caked in reverberation as if coming from an (tin pan) alley down the block. The band goes through another verse of sad blues, joyful horns on the bridge, and the chorus, but this time the chorus is followed by three secessions of horns echoing the melody of chorus as Clayton-Thomas bellows a guttural “Thank you baby!”.


Then, less than halfway through the songs, the horns and guitar/bass engage in a call & response before a fierce round of shouts (“Thank you baby”) are so intense that the music stops and pauses. This (for some odd goddamned reason) causes the entire group to meltdown into sinister minor chords and staccato organ notes like they’re all the sudden in the middle of a Bach concerto. This is where the song loses me completely. Is this supposed to be the rocky road of a relationship? Or the thought of life without each other? If none of these reaching arguments apply, the entire mid-section where they riff on some dark groove like they’ve been transported to an Emerson, Lake, and Palmer 18 minute opus doesn’t really seem to serve any purpose other than pure, undistilled wankery.

Like it never happened, there’s then an immediate revamp of the chorus, which is back in a major key, though the chorus is now sonically different. The instrumentation has multiplied and the rhythm section is maintaining the intensity of the solo, which makes the final breakdown into sweet piano and organ all the more cathartic. This last part, which is probably the most conservative part of the song, is also probably my favorite part of the song.




In comparison, the original by Brenda Holloway sounds practically minimalist. Her version is driven by bass, which may be why BST’s Jim Fielder sounds like he’s competing against it (and amazingly enough, seems to win vs. The Funk Brothers). Though Holloway has a fantastic voice, she seems to be layering a too-loose melody on top of a kind of stiff composition, approaching almost Tori Amos levels of melisma and staggered syncopated articulation.

In my opinion, this Little Miss Soul rendition is the better Motown version:



Of course, this was cut in 1970, after the BST version. The success of the Blood, Sweat, and Tears rendition caused this song to have something of a massive shelf life, to the point where it’s practically a standard now. Do a YouTube search and you’ll find the archives flooded with covers, ranging from treacle crap to the sublime. Here’s a few of the good ones.

The bass work of the original may explain why the song seemed a good fit for reggae stars like Alton Ellis and Barrington Levy:







Lou Rawls even named an album after the song. This version (produced by David Axelrod) may be the definitive version of the song. It was also sampled by Kanye West:





I think the energy of the instrumental on this Sammy Davis Jr. version (released on Tamla Motown) matches the energy level BST was looking for in its weird asides, but overall Sammy’s vocal is a bit lacking. You can even here his voice cracking in parts. Wish they’d cut a version without Sammy:




These aren’t really quality versions, but to those who think BST took a black song and made it white, you obviously haven’t heard how white this song could be:






And here’s a French cover, to prove the phenomena was not restricted to our shores:




Amazingly enough, my second favorite may be Cher’s cover, which was an unreleased track left off her self-titled 1969 album.



Then there’s this one, by Chris Clark. For some reason, this song was from the only album (C.C. Rides Again) released on Motown imprint Weed. Their infamous byline was “Your Favorite Artists Are On Weed”. Notable in the below is a musical quote from Nina Rota’s score to Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet.





And it’s the Romeo and Juliet aspect of the song that will make me never able to hate the Blood, Sweat, and Tears version. As a song, it’s kind, polite, and patient, everything people like Bangs despised, but hardly less-than-admirable. It will also always make me think of my parents hearing the song and thinking of one another. Though, I’m not sure Clayton-Thomas was entirely sincere in transforming this song into a hit, I know at least my parents were, as were the myriad people playing it at their weddings, as they sang along to an expression of their mutual admiration. Even if it’s a bit overindulgent, it’s the sweetness of Holloway’s sentiment that shines through in the BST version’s best parts.

Monday, April 2, 2012

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.