Fierce. Passionate. Uncooked. Uncompromising. These are simply among the adjectives that describe Michael “Mikey” Smith, one in every of Jamaica’s foremost dub poets. Smith’s life was abruptly ended by his violent homicide on the streets of Kingston on the age of 39 in 1983. Although silenced by some who disagreed with him, Smith’s highly effective phrases dwell on, largely because of the enduring brilliance of his solitary solo album, Mi Cyaan Consider It, launched by Island Information in 1982.
The son of a stone mason father and manufacturing facility employee mom, Michael “Mikey” Smith was born in 1954 in Kingston, Jamaica. He felt a pure affinity with poetry as a young person within the late Nineteen Sixties when he first started expressing his emotions utilizing rhyming couplets. A spell on the Jamaican Faculty of Drama within the late 70s helped Smith develop his verbal communication abilities. There, he cultivated a magnetic on-stage persona, which turned an efficient device when he started reciting his poetry in public.
Earlier than Smith graduated, he was already tasting acclaim in Jamaica for his poetry readings in neighborhood facilities and at political rallies. In 1978, he obtained worldwide publicity by representing Jamaica on the eleventh World Competition of Youth and College students in Cuba. The identical 12 months, he made his recording debut, guesting on an independently launched 12” single by the Jamaican group Gentle Of Saba, a mix of reggae and Afro-disco whose B-side featured his poems “Mi Cyaan Believe It” and “Dem Roots.”
Smith’s rising renown put him on the radar of fellow dub poet, the UK’s Linton Kwesi Johnson, in 1982, who persuaded Chris Blackwell at Island Information to signal him. Johnson, who by then had three acclaimed Island albums to his title, turned Smith’s producer collectively together with his valued and much-trusted sidekick engineer/producer Dennis Bovell; the pair’s expertise of marrying spoken poetry with dubby reggae grooves made them Smith’s good collaborators.
Mi Cyaan Consider It was recorded in London with the multi-talented Bovell taking part in bass, keyboards, and percussion. On drums was Aswad’s famous tub-thumper, Angus “Drummy Zeb” Gaye. Among the many different contributors have been guitarist John Kpiaye and flugelhornist Patrick Tenyue, each members of Bovell’s reggae band Matumbi. Collectively, the musicians created skanking soundscapes with rumbling basslines that have been excellent platforms for Smith’s uncooked poetic eloquence.
The album opened with a brief spoken poem, “Black N’ White,” highlighting Smith’s nuanced but dramatic vocal supply and ability as an orator. The 30-second piece segued into one of many album’s key tracks, “Mi Feel It,” the place Smith painted a vivid portrait of Jamaica within the early 80s over a tense reggae groove. He mirrored on the nation’s aimless youth struggling to outlive in a “concrete jungle” created by an uncaring society the place political corruption, inequality, and injustice held sway.
Different highlights included the meditative “Trainer” – that includes Steve Gregory’s dancing flute – the extra fluid “It A Come,” which predicted a coming apocalypse over an infectious reggae beat, and the extraordinary “Roots,” a sluggish, hypnotic percussive quantity about ancestry the place Smith chanted loudly, enunciating the phrase “Lawd” utilizing lengthy, deep guttural tones.
The keystone of Mi Cyaan Consider It was undoubtedly its spellbinding title piece, a musically unaccompanied efficiency of a late 70s poem that made Smith well-known in Jamaica. Peppered with dry humor and nursery rhyme allusions, it discovered the poet expressing his incredulity at outrageous conditions.
Given its radical mesh of incendiary rhetoric and dubby grooves, Mi Cyaan Consider It wasn’t an enormous mainstream industrial success. However the document introduced Smith many admirers, particularly within the UK. The NME lauded the album, hailing Smith’s “lightness and agility of style that is wholly his own,” additionally noting the poet’s “hard directness that provides the perfect counterpoint to his almost playful approach to language.” Such was the affect of Mi Cyaan Consider It in Britain that Smith was the topic of a BBC TV documentary. He was championed, too, by DJ John Peel, which led him to document a session for the influential broadcaster’s BBC radio present. Smith additionally took London by storm together with his sold-out poetry readings, organized to help his album.
Tragically, on August 17, 1983, Smith was stoned to dying after an argument with three activists from Jamaica’s right-wing JLF celebration, in a homicide that many individuals thought was associated to his heckling of the nation’s Minister of Tradition at a political rally.
Smith as soon as mentioned that he regarded poetry as “a vehicle of giving hope,” describing the artwork type “as part of the whole process of liberation of the people.” He was, then, a real individuals’s poet, articulating with an unrelenting conviction the hopes and fears of the oppressed and dispossessed and exposing injustice. After his dying, his poetry started to be extensively printed; later, in 2010, he impressed producer DJ Koze to document “Mi Cyaan Believe It” which sampled Smith’s unique, and two years later, was the topic of Jamaican composer Peter Ashbourne’s 2012 opera, Mikey.
Although its creator is lengthy gone, Mi Cyaan Consider It stays one in every of reggae’s most potent collections of dub poetry. In a world the place battle, poverty, racism, political oppression, and injustice proceed to rule, its messages nonetheless resonate.
