Take a look at Elephant Man now and you'll see a manic dance instructor yelling "Pon Di River, Flowers a Bloom, Sunlight, Sunlight", a weddy-weddy-weddying Krusty the Klownalike driving the celebrations along with crazed bellowing and nonsense rhymes. It's all good clean fun, and there's no limit to Jamaican music's demand for party-starting voicings of the biggest riddims. He's certainly the right man for the job, too-- after all they don't call him "The Energy God" for nothing. But go back a few years and things were much more promising.
From 2000 to 2002 the young O'Neil Bryant released three albums on Greensleeves: Comin' 4 U, Log On, and Higher Level. This is the period concentrated on by Monsters Of Dancehall: The Energy God. Right from the beginning, he was a Master of Ceremonies to be reckoned with, hyping crowds with streams of ass-shaking orders, but in amongst the hype-man routine lay a lyrical sophistication we simply don't see today.
This ability to flip on a dime from badman badinage and menacingly precise chatting to resort-rep pep secured his place at the top of the tree for close on two full years-- no mean feat in dancehall, a music where careers are made, broken, and often resurrected again in less than one. Sadly it's tough to imagine he'll ever get back to such a point again, especially now that a major deal has been inked with P Diddy's Bad Boy Records.
Always there with a snappy catchphrase-- "shizzle my nizzle," "run for cover, save your mama," and "bomb a drop!"-- Ele was never scared of appearing ridiculous, a fact largely responsible for his popularity and borne out by tracks including "On Line" and "Give Her It Good". However, he also knew when to play down the silliness and put on a serious face, as shown on "Bad Man a Bad Man" and "Replacement Killer".
Featuring productions by Byron Murray, Donovan Bennett, King Jammys, Steven "Lenky" Marsden, Jeremy Harding, Stone Love's Winston "Wee Pow" Powell, and Cordel "Scatta" Burrell, this album also serves as a collection of some of the best riddims of the early millennial golden age of digital dancehall. Tide-turning instrumentals such as the Coolie Dance ("Genie Dance"), the Egyptian ("Egyptian Dance"), and the Diwali ("Elephant Message") are all present. Meanwhile, the 9/11-referencing "The Bombing" points at a certain naïve political consciousness. Unfortunately, this doesn't extend to "Log On"'s homophobic ranting.
Still, if you can look past that, Monsters of Dancehall offers bittersweet thrills, both as a cracking retrospective of an artist's past glories and a suggestion that he'll never reach those heights again.
