RIP Sly Dunbar. 60 songs.
A streaming playlist primer on the innovative Jamaican drummer, producer, beat architect. Peter Tosh, Grace Jones, Black Uhuru, Bob Dylan, Sinéad O'Connor, Serge Gainsbourg, Gregory Isaacs, and more.
I had other things cued up for the newsletter this week. But the death of Lowell “Sly” Dunbar Monday morning made me set them aside.
I’ve been thinking lately about how information, and art, affects our bodies. Melody is powerful; harmony, too. But rhythm’s physicality, how it interacts with breath and musculature, moves us in different ways, quite literally. Sly’s way with a groove, the playfulness of his beats, how he could lock in, so tight and precise, but still find spaces to punch up, digitally or by hand, always delighted me. As Questlove noted in an Instagram post the other day, dancers love his beats. Although their classics are rooted in the ‘80s, Sly and Robbie jams (Robbie Shakespeare, his bass guitar teammate, passed in 2021), never get old — I still bump them in my in my car and at DJ gigs; I dance to ‘em in my living room.
I spent some deeply pleasurable hours yesterday assembling the streaming playlists below — many of their great tracks are hard to find on these platforms, listed in mysterious re-packagings tagged with misleading dates. (Fans of old-school Jamaican music know what I’m talking about.) It reminded me how many absolute bangers, in how many different styles, Sly made his mark on. If you think a drummer can’t define a song, think again — a sizable percentage of these tracks literally begin with his drum flourishes.
He played on pretty much all of Grace Jones greatest — “Feel Up,” “Nightclubbing,” “Pull Up to the Bumper,” “My Jamaican Guy,” her cover of the Pretenders’ “Private Life.” Sly played on most of Black Uhuru’s best, too, which is some of the most potent roots reggae ever tracked. There are crates worth of brilliant singles on Sly and Robbie’s Taxi label, voiced by some of the most soulful voices of the era — vocal groups like the Tamlins and the Mighty Diamonds, giants like Dennis Brown, Gregory Issacs, and Junior Murvin (yes, that’s Sly on the original version of the disturbingly timeless “Police & Thieves,” later covered by the Clash). Sly motored massive DJ tracks by Dillinger, Half Pint, Chaka Demus and Pliers. He spelunked through some of the deepest dub sessions ever. And then there are the one-off side-gigs, for Dylan and Gainsbourg and, as I was reminded, a rather astonishing collaboration with Sinéad O’Connor (see below).
Sly’s signature moments capture a tipping point in the late ‘70s / early ‘80s when programmed electronic rhythms began to challenge the primacy of human ones in pop music. The 1979 single “Pop Muzik” was an amusingly self-aware display of that, and that synth-pop throwaway — a hit, to be sure — inspired Sly to grab the reins.
“I’d heard the Syndrum on some electronic song,” he told author David Katz for the essential Solid Foundation: An Oral History of Reggae (Bloomsbury, 2002) “but I thought that was the only sound you could get — ‘doop doop.’ I heard this ‘coo coop, coo coop’ on M’s ‘Pop Musik,’ and I said ‘the groove sounds nice. How can I get that sound, but still in a groove that could fit in reggae?’ On Sly Wicked and Slick, ‘Queen of the Minstrels,’ that was the first song I played it on. The next song was ‘General Penitentiary’ [by] Black Uhuru. After that, I tried to experiment in ‘Guess Whose Coming to Dinner.’”
Sly evolved his cyborg grooves over time, using various electronic drums to push his style forward: a Roland 808 (“Revolution” by Dennis Brown), and later an Oberheim DMX (“Herbsman Hustling” by Sugar Minott). Some of his finest latter-day moments were all or nearly-all programmed beats — his lean, bhangra-flavored remake of the 1966 Toots Hibbert classic “Bam Bam”, and of course, “Murder She Wrote,” cut over the exact same Sly & Robbie track, by DJ-singer duo Chaka Demus and Pliers.
