Michael Smith ~ Mi C-Yaan Believe It
I first heard Michael Smith on the late, great John Peel show when I was 16 or so. As was my habit, I recorded the track (Trainer) – on a tape, now long-lost, but the power of that one song has stayed in my memory ever since, more than 20 years down the line. It was the marriage of that voice, the deep, almost impenetrable accent, the commitment and intensity audible in his voice and the equally deep dub track (production courtesy of Dennis Bovell and fellow dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson) that contributed most to my fascination, but it was also fed by the horror of learning that he had been stoned to death in his homeland in the same year that he recorded this one album. It’s currently long out of print, I’ve bid a few times on eBay for a vinyl copy of this album, but lost each time. Today I came across an excellent roots blog which had posted the whole album online, here’s the relevant post. Much as I love the whole output of the label, to these ears the awkward, pendant and remarkably insistent bass repetition of Roots prefigures much of the music released by Rhythm & Sound these past few years. And that way Michael Smith has of drawing out a single syllable with a guttural rasp over what seems to be an ever-extending number of bars is unsettlingly impressive. In fact, ignorant as I am of the breadth of the reggae canon I’m really struck by the sheer poetic form of his delivery. If he’d lived, who knows what he would have achieved with the combination of consciousness and creativity he was clearly blessed with.
MP3: Michael Smith: Black ‘N’ White and Trainer and Roots
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