Burn, Babylon. Sylford Walker. 1975. Belmont.

 While Babylon is aflame in an endless cycle of disrepair and repair, the indefatigable Natty Dread is tireless in the effort to slow acceleration of the operational speed of global power structures. The tension generated between individual members of both camps—those who are able to negotiate the requisite speeds of our merciless technological age with daredevil, sociopathic finesse and those who instinctively recoil from it—is now so much a part of our global soil that it’s soaked into rock and roll at a cellular level with all the contaminative effect of a radioactive isotope. Like American blues and jazz, reggae is a critique of modern tension from the perspective of historical injustice. What the three disciplines also share is an origin by marginalized personalities motivated by social straits to create a rhythmic aesthetic grounded in a commercially viable and provocatively humanist sensuality that wouldn’t only sell records but also underscore its lyrical urgency. The Jamaican vocalist Sylford Walker, busted for possession of a spliff in his hometown of Central Kingston, turned his incarceration experience into the much lauded roots single, Burn, Babylon, produced by Joe Gibbs and released by Belmont in 1975. An echo effect on Walker’s vocal gives the impression of a lyric recited from a great distance, from the inside of a prison cell in an underdeveloped Caribbean nation, perhaps. The practice of resistance to drug laws is of course shared by both reggae and rock and roll artists and audiences, in part because we both have in common an awareness of the limits of freedom when applied to the worldwide misfit contingent; Proust’s madeleine becomes the smell of acrid smoke from a lit joint as it is passed from hand to hand, hand to lips, awaking sense memories, and another illusion of the practice of oneness is established. Where Natty Dread finds his spiritual universal unity by ritualistic immersion in weed for a journey inward, the casual Western user of recreational drugs expresses ritual solidarity with a local community of what Joe Strummer once called “the getting stoned world.” To ensure its commercial success, pop music must resonate with a consumer’s endless desire to be satisfied in the moment. The reggae artist, recognizing the slim feasibility of successfully marketing a plea for social and economic justice in the twenty-first century, aims instead for eternity, seeking an audience with Jah. Interception and monetization of that signal for the purposes of commercial licensing will be managed by proprietary corporate satellites. 

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