Real reggae with Livity

A late and highly respected colleague, La Prensa's Herasto Reyes, once railed in print against reggae, which he opined had no redeeming social or artistic value. I differed with him about that.

Successive Panamanian administrations have issued various silly decrees about the artistic content of the November patriotic parades. It got weirdest of all during Mireya's time, when the Ministry of Education tried to ban many school's uniforms over their colors, baton twirlers were not allowed to perform the terroristic baton toss and pirouette moves and so on. One of the "and so ons" that the Torrijos administration carried on was the ban on reggae music in the parades.

But the musical genre to which Herasto, Mireya and Martín were referring wasn't what I consider reggae. What they called "reggae" is what a lot of people call "regueton," but which many aficionados of that latter genre distinguish from their preferred Puerto Rican - style genre as "reggae rap" and denigrate for its lack of actual music.

Spanish or Spanglish hip hop rapping over an electric drum machine, quite often to impart messages of hatred and intolerance, is not reggae as far as this reviewer is concerned.

Reggae is this musical genre with a distinctive beat that came out of Jamaica, breaking into world culture in the 1970s. In its roots the messages were profoundly religious --- largely but not exclusively Rastafarian --- and passed universal moral and political judgments:

"If you get down and you quarrel every day
you're saying prayers to the devil I say...."

"I and I build the cabin; I and I plant the corn
Didn't my people before me slave for this country?
And now you treat me with scorn, and you eat up all of my corn...
We're gonna chase them crazy baldheads out of town...."

... and so on.

And if Rasta no work for no CIA, Panama's Rastafarians are also not fond of Noriega or Norieguistas.

So explained Ras Daniel, the leader of the Veracruz-based reggae band Livity, which played to a small but appreciative crowd on October 3 at the Handicrafts Fair that was held at ATLAPA. He has dreadlocks that tumble nearly to his feet, but to grow those he had to go into exile in Noriega times, when the intolerant dictator and his murderous, sticky-fingered minions equated long hair with being a maleante. Every now and then those guys would take a break from their many self-enriching scams and beating up or disappearing dissidents, and entertain themselves by grabbing some guy with long hair off the streets and shaving his head.

The Rastafarians are so named after an Ethiopian ras (prince), Ras Tafari Makonnen, who ascended to the throne in Addis Ababa and took on the name Emperor Haile Selassie I, saw his country attacked by the pompous Italian dictator Mussolini as the world stood by and watched, mobilized every man who could walk, see and carry a spear and eventually, with British support, routed the Italians. Rastafari went on to found the Organization of African Unity and was the senior African statesman as the continent undertook a long but now nearly complete process of shedding its colonial masters. It was more or less as the great Pan-Africanist leader Marcus Garvey had predicted, and the Rastas, rooted in the Ethiopian Coptic tradition of Christianity that antedates those of any of the western churches, took Garvey and Rastafari to be the divine prophets of black liberation and universal decency.

There may be a few leftists here and there who revere the memory of the Soviet-backed Dergue military junta that overthrew, jailed and murdered Rastafari. Such folks don't consider the Rastas to be "brothers" or "sisters," but Panamanians in the peace and justice camp do tend to consider this community, which has noteworthy and active concentrations in Colon and Veracruz, to be part of "us."

Ras Daniel didn't go into all of that, but he did emphasize to the audience that Rastafarians aren't maleantes, and actually tend to be highly moral people.

He didn't have to say that this particular collection of Rastas is also composed of some highly skilled people. All they had to do was play. They're a tight band, founded in exile in the United States in 1992, that makes original Panamanian reggae music based on traditional Nyahbinghi drumming and chants.

If you hear Livity's music you will not confuse it with that angry shouting that government types mislabel reggae, and you are even less likely to identify it with those insipid radio commercials by which the Norieguistas try to attract young voters' support.

If you hear Livity play and your tastes in music have much in common with this reviewer's, you will want to hear them again. Dem irie.