Version Galore, Joe

The act of describing anything, let alone music, is extremely difficult. I don't begrudge anyone for using buzzwords to complete the task. Still, there are some buzzwords that annoy the hell out of me. "Bop" and "slap," for example. The big one, I think, is "vibes." I really don't like when someone describes something as having a certain "vibe."

I don't think it's a generational thing, though I do mostly hear the word from people younger than me (and from people my age or older who are addicted to the internet). Like I said, I understand the struggle, and I acknowledge that shorthands in the English language are sometimes warranted. I just think that "vibes" is too much of a cop out for me to handle.

Saying something has a certain "vibe" means that you are shirking your responsibility to interpret the world around you. It's refusing to acknowledge the context that surrounds the thing in which you are striving to understand. "Vibes" is all action, no reaction. There was a girl in one of my classes last week who said that the World Health Organization's description of mental health had "bad vibes." It elicited an eyeroll from me (the first of many so far this semester) because here is a person who is just reading a simple description from government agency and giving her opinion on it and completely disregarding her own role in the matter. It couldn't be that social workers take everything way too seriously and that they are too willing to get all cannibalistic about the structure in which they operate, it's that there are bad vibes. C'mon now.

It's tempting to say that U-Roy's Version Galore has "good vibes," and just leave it at that, but I know that that's too much of a cop out. It's true that listening to this album makes me feel good, but commenting on its vibes would mean completely discarding the question as to why Version Galore makes me feel good. At the same time, the question of "why" is really difficult to answer, since one's emotions are not always translatable into words.

Okay............. fine. I'll admit that I'm pushing too hard against the word. Sometimes there really is one word to describe something, and sometimes that word is "vibes." Maybe I'm protesting a little to much to compensate what I ultimately know is the truth. There are good vibes here. I hate myself for saying it, but it's true.

A lot of the good vibes probably have something to do with the commercialization of reggae music, which makes me feel a little icky. I said this about Johnny Nash's adjacent brand of reggae music, and I'll say it again about U-Roy's dancehall music: reggae is recognizable because people want to sell you time shares in tropical locations. Bob Marley spoke about revolution, but his estate was built from privileged people's desire to attend an all-inclusive vacation in Jamaica. Not saying this is necessarily a bad thing—Pam and I had a really great honeymoon, like it was probably one of the best weeks of my life—I'm just working through the "why" of reggae's "good vibes," and I don't think this is an avoidable arm of the conversation.

But that's also too simplistic for an album like Version Galore, which definitely sounds like reggae (guitar as rhythm, bass drum on the 2 and 4), but also has slightly different timbre than something like Johnny Nash. The clearest way to make the distinction is to say that reggae feels like music to play as the sun is coming up, while dancehall (or deejay, or toasting, or however you wanna describe U-Roy's music) feels like music to play as the sun is going down. DIFFERENT VIBES.

U-Roy builds his particular vibe by "toasting." This is the act of chanting or talking over reggae music. When we talk about reggae deejay music being a precursor to hip hop, you can draw the dotted line—lay down the beat, and then yell into the mic to hype up the crowd. I think it's pretty charming, all things considered. I literally have no idea what U-Roy is saying about 95% of the time, but it's not about substance, it's about... ugh... vibes.

I like the idea of taking something that already exists, and making it your own. Like, completely your own. More so than just doing a cover. I'm talking using samples, mostly, but I'm really talking about using samples efficiently and as a tool to create. That's where I draw the line. It's the difference between something like De La Soul's "Eye Know" (which takes four disparate samples, including Otis Redding and Steely Dan, and makes a whole new song) and Nicki Minaj's "Anaconda" (which is technically built on a sample of "Baby Got Back," but is so creatively bankrupt that it might as well just be a Sir Mix-a-Lot cover).

I'm surprised that at the end of the week I found myself considering U-Roy on the right side of that line. I mean, technically, a lot of these songs are well-known reggae/dancehall songs, with U-Roy toasting on top of them, right? In fact, that's probably where the whole "is this a compilation?" confusion came into play last Sunday—streaming services see that these are songs from other artists featuring U-Roy's deejaying, and assume this is a "compilation."

But it's not. This is U-Roy's album. Somehow, against all odds, that toasting was enough for me. I gave him a pass. I'm not really sure why, because some of these really are just complete songs from other people with U-Roy deejaying and saying his spiel. Probably didn't hurt that I only recognized one of the songs that he was deejaying, so it was overall more "fresh" to me personally then it would be for a reggae connoisseur. But it's more than that. It sounds like U-Roy is having fun, and that's really what matters. This isn't calculated or cheap. This is warm. It feels original, even though it's not. Is that the charisma? Maybe. It sounds like he's the party captain at some late-night underground shindig that I would never be cool enough to be invited to.

It's possible that this is the specific VIBE I'm picking up on because of Lovers Rock, the Steve McQueen movie in his Small Axe anthology. It's been a couple years since I've seen it. There was a decent amount of reggae/dancehall in that one, right? And the dudes who set up the party were toasting, no? Man, you wanna talk about vibes—that movie didn't really have much in terms of plot, but the vibes, aesthetics, mise-en-scène, however you wanna describe it, was superb. I've thought about this film a lot since it came out, and I thought about it even more this week.

Both Lovers Rock and Version Galore speak to one idea: joy. A simple joy. And that idea is tied irrevocably to music. I said I couldn't understand what U-Roy was saying, and that remains true, but if I had to guess, I'd say that U-Roy is talking about how great it feels to be doing what he's doing, how amazing it is that people are coming together like this, how fortunate he is to be serving this particular function in his community, how fun it is to witness the power of music in this one tiny space that we've squeezed into together. He's setting it up so that I can feel the viiiiiiiiibes, man.

This is not a cop out. I'm not just applying the label of "good vibes" to U-Roy. I am taking responsibility on my end of the bargain as well. I am here and ready to accept these vibes. I am in a comfortable place emotionally that I can be soothed by these vibes. I know that worse weeks would've found me "pushing back" against this music, and perhaps even labeling Version Galore as "bad vibes." God forbid.

I didn't find anything new here, to be honest. This is a sound I know, even if it was from an artist I previously didn't. The only thing I found was a peace and a calm, and, well, an acceptance. Acceptance that sometimes there is just no other way to describe something.

GRADE: 3.5 pukes out of 5

POSTSCRIPT: I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I have a bit more to say. This isn't relevant to any of the themes (or vibes) I was speaking to in the above review, and I couldn't fit it in without ruining the flow, but I still think it's fun and worth mentioning.

Alright, so the song I said I was already familiar with was "Tide Is High." It was originally recorded by the ska/rocksteady band the Paragons in 1967 (and then toasted over by U-Roy four or five years later). Everyone recognizes the song by ear, though, because Blondie brought a cover of the song to #1 on the Billboard charts in 1981 (which feels like a weird choice for Blondie, but really just exemplifies their range).

It was one of those weird coincidences to hear U-Roy's version this week, since I was literally just telling Pam maybe two or three weeks ago about my confusion over this song (ask her, she'll back me up). Because I've long held a theory that the end of the chorus in "The Tide is High" sounds exactly like the end of the pre-chorus in "We Go Together" in Grease.

Check it out for yourself. I'll link directly to each part in the YouTube videos, please click: Blondie / Grease.

Back when I knew nothing about Blondie, or even knew who sang the inexplicably popular, vaguely tropical pop song, I assumed that whoever sang "The Tide Is High" had stolen from Grease, but I've been wondering these days if the other way around is possible. Did Grease's music collaborators Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey hear U-Roy's version of "Tide Is High" in 1971 and include a snippet of its sound in the original 1971 production of Grease in Chicago? Or is that timeline too tight? Could this really be coincidence?

I'm not angry or anything. It would be hypocritical to celebrate U-Roy swiping the Paragons and then be upset that Grease swiped the Paragons. It's just weird that no one seems to be talking about this, that's the only reason I bring it up.

And yes, it's weird that Grease keeps coming up in my album reviews. Maybe We Are Scientists will cover "Beauty School Dropout" or something next week.