This is pop
A new Trojan Records box set reframes the history of reggae.

By Jeff Chang

THIS PAST SUMMER a press release caused a small furor among reggae enthusiasts on the Web. "Trojan Records will be releasing a mammoth 5,000-CD box set, which will contain every song ever recorded in Jamaica between 1959-1999," the release read. "Every tune, every version, every dub mix, every DJ version to every song ever released will be included.

"Trojan also plans a sequel box set, which will include every unreleased song ever recorded in Jamaica," it continued. "The second box set will include 10 CDs of studio outtakes, such as Jimmy Cliff clearing his throat and a rare Tappa Zukie cough. 'If it's been put on tape in Jamaica, we will jolly well include it,' said company spokesman Lawrence Cane-Honeysett."

One bulletin board featured this classic Brit reply: "Yeah, I've got that. The mastering's rubbish." But more often than not, fans wanted to know how they could get a copy.

The joke, among cynical über-collectors of Jamaican music, was that the compilation game – a craze set off by the U.K. launch of the brilliant Blood and Fire label in 1993 – had gone too far. Back then, it was a good idea – reintroducing roots reggae to the global hip-hop generation in a smart way, with beautiful packaging and thoroughly contextualized liner notes. By the end of the decade, labels such as Pressure Sounds and Soul Jazz were helping fill a huge demand from nostalgists and new jacks alike. In 2001 Sanctuary Records paid £10 million for the Trojan Records catalog and raised the anthology onslaught to flood levels. Prices fell, new fans rejoiced, diggers seethed.

In the box

But compilations have their merits. They can shape a story, even form arguments, around vast bodies of music and give listeners a way to hear the music. In short, they can do the work of the best critics. In fairness to the reggae snobs, three-CD box sets like the Trojan DJ, Trojan Dancehall, and Trojan Rastafari comps don't so much present a narrative as they do cheaply packaged slices of the vast catalog without much context or explanation. Neophytes might get even less out of these sets than enthusiasts do. This brings us to Trojan's latest big project, the four-CD box This Is Reggae Music: The Golden Age 1960-1975.

On the face of it, the world probably doesn't need another four-CD canon of reggae – Steve Barrow's essential Tougher than Tough: The Story of Jamaican Music (Mango) collection fits the bill quite well, and Hip-O's The Reggae Box, which shares many tracks with Tougher, isn't bad either. Nor is the period anthologized here what it claims; most old-school reggae fans start reggae's golden age in 1975 and have it setting in 1979, with the demise of dub and the return of dancehall.

In fact, the title describes Trojan's own golden age. The label started in 1967 as a partnership between two Kingston-to-London frequent-flier types: Lee Gopthal, an Asian Indian accountant, and the not-yet-famous Chris Blackwell, an Anglo-Jamaican aristocrat. Three years earlier, Blackwell had broken Millie's exuberant, undeniable "My Boy Lollipop" – a cover of an obscure American R&B song by Barbie Gaye that became the "Rapper's Delight" of modern Jamaican pop – and the two saw the label as a way to broker the work of Jamaican producers to U.K. audiences.

Amid the black power ferment of the late '60s, the label hit the gold mine with artists like Jimmy Cliff, Desmond Dekker, and Toots and the Maytals. In 1970 alone, its peak year commercially and artistically, it released more than 500 singles. But Blackwell longed for bigger budgets, bigger margins, and bigger pop statements and began his Island label to focus on albums. By 1972, he had left for good.

Gopthal instead pushed what Colin Escott calls in his excellent liner notes "reggae lite," focusing on artists like Johnny Nash, the singer who hit huge with "I Can See Clearly Now" but is mainly remembered for his crossover-minded covers of his friend Bob Marley's songs, the Judy Collins to Marley's Joni Mitchell. The story of a band called Greyhound becomes symbolic of Trojan's fortunes. At Mick and Bianca Jagger's wedding, they played their minor 1971 British hit "Black and White" for an appreciative audience that included members of pop-rock second-stringers Three Dog Night. The following year, the song topped the American charts, becoming Three Dog Night's biggest hit. As the radical roots sound took over Jamaica with Marley, Big Youth, and Burning Spear by 1975, Trojan went bankrupt and was sold, the little label that finally couldn't.

First world validation

Unlike Tougher than Tough, which places Jamaican music into a social and cultural arc stretching from British colonialism into yard-centric globalism, This Is Reggae Music charts the fascinating relationship between roots and pop. The strange beginning of Desmond Dekker's "007 (Shantytown)" – the one that goes " 'Oh Oh Seven!' and Ocean's Eleven!" – takes on a completely different meaning. It sounds less like a tribute to the Kingston rude boys than a yearning for first world movie screen-size validation. If that sounds a little regressive, consider this: because of Marley and the roots movement's outsize influence, reggae tends to be heard here in America as protest music, not pop. But that's not always how Jamaican, Afro-Caribbean immigrant, and British fans of reggae consumed the music.

Disc three, which covers Trojan's high period of 1970 and 1971, offers an alternative way to hear that period's fertile experimentation. Niney's "Blood and Fire," the seminal roots classic, is placed next to the much-less-anthologized Lee "Scratch" Perry production of Andy Capp's "Pop a Top," a virtual blueprint for Missy and Timbaland's millennial takeover strategy. Niney and Scratch had equally radical, minimalist styles, relying on space and surprise. But most anthologists focus on Niney's angry lyrics or Scratch's supposedly singular genius. Niney is rarely given his due as a first-tier producer, and Scratch is rarely placed in the context of Jamaican pop. Through simple sequencing, the box set fixes that problem and raises new questions for anyone interested in reggae history: How did the roots sound become pop? How did pop become roots?

The box set does cover ground familiar to anyone who has recent crucial Trojan comps like Bob Marley's Trenchtown Rock: The Anthology 1969-'78 (Trojan) and Let's Do Rocksteady: The Story of Rocksteady (Sanctuary/Trojan), but it also surfaces a number of magical moments – Eric "Monty" Morris's incandescent mento-gone-ska "Penny Reel-O," Ken Parker's sweetly soulful "True, True, True," Lloyd Robinson's gripping 1968 version of "Cuss Cuss," and Freddie Notes and the Rudies' glorious version of "Montego Bay."

Then there's Bongo Man Byfield's astonishing "Bongo Man," which threatens to overturn all historical and aesthetic assumptions about roots and pop.

Cut in 1964, in the midst of intense governmental harassment of the Rasta movement, two years before Haile Selassie came to Jamaica, Byfield makes a "black supremacy" ska-nifesto from, of all songs, Sam Cooke's "Wonderful World." Over an inescapably infectious riddim, Byfield gleefully rhymes "European" with "philistine," mocks jungle fever, and skewers Babylon with lines like "Don't know much about Kennedy, all I heard he was the remedy, don't know much about Lee Oswald, don't know much about Jack Ruby." Is this pop? Is this roots? It's an endlessly intriguing vector and an open invitation for someone to anthologize the history of Jamaican music with the mind-twisting abandon of a Philip K. Dick novel.