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Black Lives Matter: A Reggae Tribute

Forty-one records assembled in the summer of 2020, arguing that reggae had been making this case for fifty years before the slogan existed.

Black Lives Matter: A Reggae Tribute

Protest playlists made in 2020 mostly reached for the obvious American canon. This one does something more interesting: it goes to Jamaica and Britain, and it demonstrates that a complete vocabulary for talking about state violence, dignity and resistance had already been built in reggae — and had been in continuous use since the early seventies.

The sequencing makes the argument chronologically as well as musically. Roots reggae, dub poetry, dancehall and the contemporary revival all sit together, and the continuity of concern across five decades is the point.

What to listen for

Linton Kwesi Johnson opens the set, and that is the right decision. Britain's foremost dub poet wrote about policing, deportation and racial violence in London with a precision no song has improved on, and hearing him first reframes everything that follows as literature rather than mood.

Bob Marley's "War" takes its lyric almost verbatim from Haile Selassie's 1963 address to the United Nations, which is worth knowing before you hear it — it is a speech set to music, not a song about a speech.

Peter Tosh's "Equal Rights" in the extended version is the most uncompromising thing here. Tosh was the least diplomatic of the Wailers and the most explicit about what he wanted.

The Abyssinians' "Forward On to Zion" and Burning Spear's "Social Living" are the roots foundation; Steel Pulse appears four times, which is correct for a band from Handsworth who made Britain's most politically literate reggae.

Mutabaruka's "Any Which Way...Freedom" is the other dub-poetry entry and the most confrontational.

Chronixx's "Black Is Beautiful" and Jah9's "In The Spirit" close the loop with the current generation, and Lucky Dube's "House of Exile" brings South Africa into it.

Go deeper

Linton Kwesi Johnson's Forces of Victory and Bass Culture are the essential albums, and his poetry reads as well on the page as it sounds over a rhythm.

For the history: Burning Spear's Marcus Garvey, Peter Tosh's Equal Rights, and Steel Pulse's Handsworth Revolution are the three records that between them contain most of what this playlist is about.

Why it holds up: the reason this set outlasts the moment that produced it is that almost none of these songs were written about a news event. They were written about a condition, which is why a record from 1975 and a record from 2018 make the same argument without either sounding dated — and why the playlist reads as a tradition rather than a response.

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