Ska, through no fault of its own, has taken a bit of a critical beating. Dub is now seen as so essential to the history of late 20th century music that to question its importance feels almost heretical. Its brother, roots reggae, has suffered a bit from benign neglect, but its place in the canon is assured. (There's always a new generation of college kids buying Wailers' records for the first time.) Dancehall, of course, is at the peak of its hipster acclaim.
Ska was a hybrid of American r&b;, jazz, and a burgeoning move towards traditional Jamaican music, which ska-core nonsense has leached out over the last two decades. Jamaican ska is indeed uptempo, and the 2-Tone artists (like mods with their soul records) located the rave-up impulse lurking within. But the original ska was also music to work your hips to. By the time it found mass success, it was already slowing down to the swaying tempo of rocksteady and soon after that, reggae. It was also the birth of Jamaican music's enduring admixture of all-night dancing and social comment.
You Can Get It If You Really Want, Trojan's excellent greatest-hits collection of the work of Desmond Dekker, captures all of this history and evolution on two CDs. It's also a mess of music, much of it transcendent and even the mediocre stuff still pretty good. Before Bob Marley, Dekker was perhaps the island's biggest music export, and he was huge star at home. He was a committed entertainer, but he also firmly believed that music had the power to uplift and educate.
The first three songs here-- "Honour Your Father and Mother", "Parents", and "Labor For Learning"-- all extol the virtues of staying in school, listening to your folks, and getting good grades. With some nice brass and rhythm guitar to boot. The first went all the way to No. 1 in Jamaica, and soon he was rightfully calling himself the King of Ska, which provided the title of his next major hit, a smoking definition of the genre backed by the Maytals (under the name the Cherrypies).
Fired up by his own badass success, he injected a tougher than tough streak into his "yes sir/yes ma'am" persona and recorded "007 (Shanty Town)", an all-time rude boy anthem. In 1968, five years after he debuted as a polite young man, he released the gorgeous, numinous "Israelites", fraught with religious implications and sufferer's woe, as the music had slowed to the lilt of rocksteady on its way to reggae's rolling thunder fundamentalism. It went to No. 1 in the UK, and, more amazingly, made the top 10 in the U.S. These songs are the bedrock of Dekker's legend.
A charming, rinky-dink organ so irritating in the hands of later ska imitators shows up for a blip on "Problems". Dekker knows when not to let a sound wear out its welcome. This extends to the brevity of the songs themselves, a value crammed 31 on the first disc and 28 on the second. Many of the best tunes here barely clear the 2:30 mark. Dekker runs through a jaunty cover of the Beatles' "Ob-la-di Ob-la-da" (who do you think the "Desmond" in the song is?) and his generosity slips a bit of the haunting, gorgeous "Wise Man" on the outro. Blink and you'll miss it. So play it again.
On Disc 2, unexpected string flourishes play off the gentle ecstasy of Dekker's vocal on "Perseverance"; if this is commercialization, then it's a kind I can appreciate. Jimmy Cliff's "You Can Get It If You Really Want" is such a classic it barely needs mentioning. Its sentiment may have been na\x95ve even by the early 70s, but I can't help but think we could still use a little of that positivity and self-belief today. Strings crop up on much of Dekker's early-70s work, product of his move to London, which marked a softening of his sound and (ironically) and end to the hits.
Dekker's fey, fluttering falsetto makes the softening superfluous. Like many of the great Jamaican vocalists, there's an unmistakable feminine quality to his voice that contrasts the baritone croak of the toaster. (Though if you're not expecting it, his hilarious Louis Armstrong impression on "Live And Learn" will knock you on your ass.) On "Archie Wah Wah", the strings get ditched for the bounce and Dekker floats back down to an earth where the girls are so plentiful (like gravel!) he can't help but holler at 'em. Plus he could still thrill instrumentally; the guitar on "Warlock" sounds like Morse code played on a clothesline.
The later work with his biggest fans the Specials is just making time, but there's no shame in retelling the story of how you climbed the tallest mountain if you actually made it up the damn thing. You Can Get It probably could have been trimmed back to a more listenable single disc. That disc is still lurking in here and it's one of the great Jamaican albums. How many of you can say the Beatles wrote a song about you?
