I'll Be Black

Back in the early 1990s, I was "disciplined," meaning given a strict talking-to, for playing reggae and dub music in my office as I was catching up on work on a Saturday afternoon.  Unbeknownst to me, some co-worker also came by the office that day, and was "upset" and frightened by the strange and "satanic" music she heard coming from my office down the hall.  She reported the "incident" to HR, but the manager didn't really know what to chastise me for (playing music that someone else didn't like?). "What were you thinking?," she asked me about the episode.  I told her I was thinking that some Black Uhuru might help pass the time as I voluntarily worked some unpaid overtime on an otherwise perfectly fine day.  I suppose the incident is still in my "permanent file" somewhere.

Trojan Records is an old-school Jamaican record label, the reggae OG, producing ska, reggae, and dub music since 1967.  If you need proof of Trojan's credentials, they were the label that first released The Wailers' song Stir It Up as a 45-rpm single in 1968. And they're still at it - I'm pleased to note that they've already released 11 LPs so far this year, even if they are all compilations and anthologies of earlier releases. 

Back in the 2007, as part of their 40-year anniversary, they commissioned several musicians to curate anthologies of their output.  Compilation CDs were produced by the band Super Furry Animals, Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead, the producer/DJ Fatboy Slim, and their own artist Lee "Scratch" Perry. They also released a two-CD set by Dr. Alex Paterson, aka the English ambient house band The Orb, titled I'll Be Black.

The I'll Be Black compilation met near universal acclaim.  Virtually every review I've seen of the album was overwhelmingly positive.  The LP mixes classic deep cuts from the Trojan catalog, and ably demonstrates Paterson's obvious familiarity and deep knowledge of vintage Jamaican music. The album also features some new collaborative tracks by Trojan's own Mad Professor and The Orb, credited as "Madorb." I understand that a Madorb album was in the works but somehow the project got shelved and only the tracks on I'll Be Black survive today. But sadly, the album is now out of print and unavailable. Second-hand copies are listed on Amazon and Discogs for around £100 each, give or take about 20% depending on condition.  The album is nowhere to be found on Spotify, although a few of the Madorb tracks are posted to YouTube.

I once had a digital copy of CD-1 (only) on an old hard drive, but lost it when that drive catastrophically crashed a few years back.  I also burned myself a CD copy of the disc, but it has become increasingly unstable over the years, and progressively skips more on more on the later tracks, rendering the disc all but unlistenable today.

So lemonade from lemons, today I went and assembled a Spotify playlist of all the songs on the two CDs based on track lists I found online (this ROM has a lot of spare time on his hands).  I can't say the playlist is quite the same as the I'll Be Black experience - I couldn't include the Madorb tracks or a couple of the Trojan cuts from the original, and the mix isn't as skillful as Paterson's fluid editing on the album.  But it's close - as long as you're not intimately familiar with the precise sequence and timing of the original and the segues between songs, the playlist is a pretty good approximation.  

If you've got some time on your hands or if you just want a laid back and occasionally trippy soundtrack to your day, I would encourage you to give it a listen.  If you like the music, you might want to also check out the Spotify playlist titled Dub - Society Tearing Itself Apart compiled by David Byrne. It says something about the breadth of this music and the volume available that these two playlists of classic dub tracks - The Orb's 43-song list and Byrne's 7-song compilation - don't include any two of the same cuts.