Don't call Santi White an R&B artist: on her debut album Santogold, this former music biz A&R and pop songwriter for hire is challenging race stereotypes and playing fast and loose with genre, mashing up dub, punk, and electronics to make an energetic, anger-fuelled music that blurs the lines between the dancefloor and the moshpit. Comparisons to MIA hold some water, especially on the ...
Jamaican filmmaker Perry Henzell made reggae an integral player in The Harder They Come, his gritty 1973 saga of a renegade Kingston singer who becomes a modern Robin Hood, casting one of the style's earliest stars, Jimmy Cliff, in the lead, and filling this soundtrack--here presented in a remastered version--with classics from Toots & the Maytals ("Pressure Drop", "Sweet and Dandy"), ...
The beat that got a generation dancing and brought ska back into the public eye. Produced by Elvis Costello, then still a boy wonder himself, the album built on the sound of the Specials' first two singles, and gave the world its first extended look at Two Tone. Inspired writing and arranging (much of it down to founder Jerry Dammers) with Terry Hall as the laconic front man made for a perfect ...