Consumer Guide Album

Big Youth: Progress [Negusa Nagast, 1980]
To the sexy singsong, colorful patois, and spacy tracks of Jamaican toasting, Manley Buchanan adds something like unalloyed joy--he looks and often sounds like the happiest man on earth. It's not just ganja, either--if ganja could do that, Peter Tosh would be the happiest man on earth. Somehow Youth embodies everything most benign about Rastafarianism--even when he's berating Babylon, which is often, he's unsectarian about it, suffused with humanitarian compassion for all victims of wickedness, Babylonians included. His most songful album is full of suffering and violence, yet its fundamental mood is one of gentle transport, the spiritual certainty of the born prophet. And for a sample of heaven ganja-style, it closes off with two sweet dubs. A−