The Lord is good, the Lord is great, but I'm getting f***ed! | | | | Toots Hibbert in Chicago, April 2, 1982.
(Paul Natkin/Archive Photos/Getty Images) | | | | | | “The Lord is good, the Lord is great, but I'm getting f***ed!”
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| | rantnrave:// There are more words in this sentence than there are in the three and a half minutes of one of the greatest reggae singles ever made, which just goes to show—this sentence is now officially true, the rest is padding—you don't need a lot of fancy words, or a lot of any words, to get to the heart of most universal truths, and you certainly don't need a lot of words to put the average bad hombre in his place, which is what this particular song is about. "Revenge, but in the form of karma," to quote the author, FREDERICK "TOOTS" HIBBERT, who wrote and recorded "PRESSURE DROP" with his band, the MAYTALS, early in a pioneering, celebrated career marked by all sorts of revenge-worthy bad luck, from producers who bought publishing rights for pennies (or less), to a fishy marijuana arrest that landed him in jail for a year just as his career was taking off, to a vodka bottle that hit him in the head at a 2013 concert and robbed him of years of live performing in what turned out to be the twilight of his life. "When I want to hurt people, I just tell, them, 'Pressure drop on you,'" Hibbert tells Rolling Stone's JASON FINE in a fantastic, sprawling profile (paywalled, and completely worth paying for) published just three weeks before Hibbert died Friday after being hospitalized in Jamaica for what were said to be Covid-like symptoms. No official cause of death has been released, but if that's what it was, add one more horribly bad actor to Hibbert's karma list and may pressure drop on that damn virus forever—or, in Hibbert's words, may a coconut drop on its head. "Pressure Drop," a song that's 90 percent groove and 90 percent the breathless self-assurance of Hibbert's soul-shout voice, popped up repeatedly in the formative years of my reggae education. Give it to me one time, give it to me two times, give it to me three times (wait, that's a different song): First, in the film THE HARDER THEY COME, whose main character, played by Toots and the Maytals fan JIMMY CLIFF, shares some loose biographical details with Hibbert. Then on the US version of the album FUNKY KINGSTON, the first reggae album I (and, I suspect, tens of thousands of others) owned. And then again in the hands of a handful of rock bands including the CLASH, whose covers all pale before the original and which served to remind me of, well, exactly that. Toots Hibbert, on the other hand, had the kind of lived-in vocal instrument ("a rough and graceful thing," as the Washington Post's CHRIS RICHARDS puts it in this remembrance) that could do wonders with the material of other artists, from JOHN DENVER to OTIS REDDING. And which gracefully weathered into a hell of an elder statesman's voice. His final album was released two weeks ago, when he apparently had already been hospitalized, and, damn, it sounds like this. RIP... He really really liked bass... And he had a valid claim on coining the word "reggae"... TIKTOK says no to MICROSOFT and yes to ORACLE in what appears to be an unusually complex deal, subject to intense oversight by two governments, that may or may not actually happen... But your must-read business story of the day is CHERIE HU's fact-checking deep-dive into the holdings and prospects of MERCK MERCURIADIS' HIPGNOSIS SONGS FUND, which doesn't say the emperor has no clothes but suggests he may be a tad underdressed... TAYLOR SWIFT's performance on the ACM AWARDS Wednesday night will be her first performance at a country awards show in seven years... RIP also WADE ALLISON, EDNA WRIGHT, HAL SINGER, SID MCCRAY and DANNY WEBSTER. | | | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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