Contents - Beth Lesser

and gold be-jeweled teeth and smiling his broad grin, Big Youth made a big
impression wherever he traveled. With his head full of thick dreadlocks, at
a time when performers were almost universally ‘baldheaded’, Big Youth
launched a Rasta revolution in the dancehall.
Bunny Lee remembers, “Big Youth come in the midst of I Roy and U Roy
and turn the whole thing upside down. Dreadlocks Dread * , man, that album
was a phenomenon! Change the whole deejay concept and everything. Cause
Big Youth come in a different style - with dreadlocks. He had an LP come
out same time in England, and it sell like a 45. Bob [Marley] was just starting
with Chris Blackwell. Bob, them, did trim off them hair. When Big Youth
[became a] dread now, Chris Blackwell see the potential of it and make Bob
them dread back.”
As a new beat came in, with a different pace and a different atmosphere,
the newer deejays developed a fresh approach that complimented the current
sound. “Big Youth came in a different era really”, Dennis Alcapone remembers.
“People like me and U Roy, we were working on the Rock Steady
rhythms that was laid down from in the ‘60s. Big Youth started working on
the new drum and bass [style]. That’s when the music was changing. The
rhythm change. The style change in Jamaica. And the rhythm keep changing.
You have so much different deejays that come along and take over from
another deejay cause the rhythm the deejay is working on change on him, and
he cannot handle the other one as a new deejay [could] that come when that
style change. There’s always changes.”
BiG youTh
At first, Big Youth sounded a lot like both Dennis Alcapone and U Roy.
He yelled, he shrieked, he hollered. Like Alcapone, he incorporated nursery
rhymes into his lyrics. But, as Big Youth matured, the influences he drew on
broadened. For example, Big Youth began to borrow bits and pieces from
American rap, even extending to rap’s predecessors, the Harlem masters - The
Last Poets **
Big Youth was working as a mechanic by day and toasting with Tippertone
sound system by night. His first record, the 1972 ‘Movie Man’, was not
recorded for any of the top producers of the day, but as a joint effort between
him and his good friend, signer Gregory Isaacs. As a first effort, it got a positive
reception, but didn’t go far enough. The record that really made him a
household name was Keith Hudson’s production, ‘S 90 Skank’, a lyric about
* 1975, Klik records, produced by Tony Robinson. The album contains all Rastafarian inspired lyrics
like House Of Dread Locks, Natty Dread She Want, Some Like It Dread and Marcus Garvey Dread
** This group of literary rebels, formed in 1968, predated and influenced the rappers and dub poets
who followed. Their records included titles like Niggers are Scared of Revolution, This is Madness,
and When the Revolution Comes. Referred to, in hindsight, as the Godfathers of Hip-Hop, the Last
Poets worked to define and articulate a black identity within the North American environment, and to
communicate these ideas to urban African Americans.
20 | RUB A DUB STYLE – The Roots of Modern Dancehall