The Comedy of Errors: Culture - Want Go See/Cutty Ranks - A Who Seh Me Dun (8 May 1992)

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In my selections from this show, these two tracks were separated by one record, but when that other tune fell from favour due to excessive dullness I decided to bring them both together here.  I did so because in listening to them both, I came to a choice.
The eclecticism of Peel’s show meant that you could discover plenty of sub-genres of music, and while one may not like all of it, you could at least avoid writing off styles of music for being worthless or poor because there would always be something in the pile that would be worthy of your attention.  However, while listening and comparing these tracks by two staples of Peel’s playlists over many years, I realised something.  I prefer reggae to dancehall.

This is not a particularly earth-shaking revelation I agree, and the couple of you who read this blog (Good morning to you and wrap up warm if the snow has reached your area, won’t you) are entitled to shrug your shoulders and hit the play buttons.  Especially when I tell you that the reason I reached my judgement was through a bloggers’ complaint.
I had intended to give Cutty Ranks’s A Who Seh Me Dun a post all of its own, but was going to caveat it with my usual complaint about being left fumbling in the slipstream of the flow and patois.  What did seem clear to me was that, in keeping with the dancehall style, Ranks was calling out his rivals for confrontation and intended to kill them in typical dancehall fashion, whether by gun or electric chair.  Challenges are issued to a number of artists featured here previously such as Cobra, Capelton and Ninjaman.  I was more sold on the arrangement than anything else, but it brought home to me how excluding dancehall records are.  So many times they feel like private arguments set to music, and while that can be thrilling to listen to at times, it’s doubtful that I would want to revisit much of the music were it not for the musical set-up around it.  Hip-Hop and rap music arguably went the same way as the decade progressed with the audience left out as the artists beefed across the grooves at each other, but guaranteed radio play by lifting samples from white-friendly radio hits.  A justified strategy in that it kept racial social issues in the cultural mainstream after we had listened to The Golden Hour.  Nevertheless, the impression one gets from A Who Seh Me Dun and other records like it is that the artist is all and all is the artist.

How can such self-absorption hope to compete when set alongside the more universal worldview of Want Go See by Culture?  Set up as a state of the continent address from “Radio Rasta”, Joseph Hill and friends look at their motherland, possibly in advance of their longed-for return to it, and find Africa mired in problems.  From famine in Ethiopia, apartheid in South Africa or governments tear-gassing citizens “like mosquita”, this is a slinky, grooving journey through that continent’s perennial issues - seen at that time when Culture recorded their 1988 album, Nuff Crisis! featuring titles like Crack in New York and Bang Belly Baby.  As well as taking a universal view, Culture also hit on a similarly global feeling of helpless fury at what is going on.  Watching the tear-gassing on his television, Hill feels variously furious and “vexed”, but offers no solutions or ideas for how to improve the situations, except for trying to use music as a balm in troubled times.  He expresses his feelings more eloquently than the rest of us fuming at the nightly news, but is just as impotent about dealing with it as we are.  It’s one area where Cutty Ranks has the edge on them.  Whatever he’s raging about, and whoever has annoyed him, you feel he will at least be able to do something about it on a personal level.  However, Culture speak for me - powerless, annoyed, desperate...but still believing that things can be better in small ways and that the small positive actions we carry out could, with a bit of luck and a following wind, eventually overpower the larger problems we face.

On a slightly more mundane note, Peel related the issues of trying to get Culture to do sessions for the BBC.  Andy Kershaw had nearly managed to pull it off recently, but it fell through at the last minute.  They would appear for Peel when he curated Meltdown in 1998, which coincided with a play I was doing at the time, so hopefully it’ll feature here in 10/15 years time, but it was another decade on from this 8/5/92 show before they recorded a session for him again.

Videos courtesy of matheus cunha (Culture) and 5446robo (Cutty Ranks)