Word: jamaican
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This white Canadian ragamuffin's blazing debut album, Twelve Inches of Snow, fuses Jamaican dance hall and American hip-hop into the irresistibly slick mix many other musicians have been aiming for. SNOW'S groove-heavy beats and scatlike raps are burning up the charts from Kingston to New York to Toronto. Darrin O'Brien, who would rather be known by his ghetto moniker, Snow, is an alumnus of Toronto's housing projects and the Ontario penal system. Rap elitists who remember Vanilla Ice may doubt Snow's street credentials. But they need only listen to Snow...
...visited Port Antonio again to dance in a tourist filled nightclub, to purchase more sun block, to venture from the harbor in a yacht. We also reentered the marketplace to buy gifts for friends and family back home. Leaving the country, we came across a copy of a Jamaican paper. The Sunday Gleaner. Its top story was a glowing account of the prime minister's inauguration. His win, the article said, represented an overwhelming mandate to improve the nation's economic status...
...BOTTOM LINE: This is a Jamaican bumper crop of the last great soul music -- and some of the best ever...
...many ways, Bob Marley was the beat. He was the first superstar from the Third World. He popularized, even personified, the rhythm of reggae and its roots in the pitiless poverty and mystical spiritual aspirations of the black Jamaican underclass. His voice sounded like sugarcane but cut like a switchblade. His love songs, like Guava Jelly, Stir It Up and Three Little Birds (included here in a previously unreleased and altogether ravishing alternate version), were lighted with a sexual fervor suggesting that passion itself is a kind of temporary redemption. His political songs, whether metaphorical (I Shot the Sheriff...
...Marley's unbridled and unapologetic partaking of this and other devotions, in fact, that gave him a kind of enigmatic, outlaw cast. In Jamaica he was not only a star, he was a political hero, a status that was confirmed by a medal from the U.N. and by the Jamaican Order of Merit, which he received in 1981. But long before that, back in 1966, his wife Rita had had a vision of stigmata on the palms of Haile Selassie and had begun to tutor Bob in Rastafari...