The drum sets an ominous marching pace, the organ sends out a series of telegraphic beeps, the bass kicks in with the thickest of notes, and Eddy Grant cries out, "Boy!" to begin the strut down "Electric Avenue," the grittiest dance track since "The Message." Although the song addresses itself to the problems of the black London ghetto of Brixton, which has been torn apart by riots in recent years, it really captures the nervous energy, and the commotion, of all big cities. Grant gets across the festering frustration of the urban poor in simple language: "Working so hard like a soldier/Can't afford the things on TV/Deep in my heart I abhor you/Can't get food for the kid." Then he angrily hollers,
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"Good God!" and gets back into the song's propulsive groove, where the bass is fattened by overdubs of Grant's lowest voice. Bob Marley may have sung "forget your troubles and dance," but Grant makes the worry and anger the reason to dance.
"Electric Avenue" is surely Killer on the Rampage's showpiece, but Grant's third album for an American label has a fistful of fine songs. The simple reggae swing of "I Don't Wanna Dance" has already made it a hit in the U.K., and "It's All in You," with drumming that sounds like handclaps, shows that he can – almost – desert his tropical funk for rock. Like Marley, Grant proves himself adept at both love songs and political tracts; in fact, the same gentleness that warms the lilting reggae of "Too Young to Fall" softens "Another Revolutionary." In that ballad, Grant sings in his sweetest nasal tenor, "Another revolutionary/God they watch him put his ship to sea/But he can't paddle waves with his hands/The Armada's got to make a stand."
A lucid lyricist, Grant also wrote all of the music, played all of the instruments and produced this album, recorded at his home studio in Barbados. He's something of a local hero there, having led a fight to keep the island's beaches open to the native vendors by cowriting a local soul-calypso hit in 1981 called "Jack (Dah Beach Is Mine)" for the Mighty Gabby. The Guyanese-born Grant is pretty well known in England, too, where he played in a group called the Equals through the Sixties and had his song "Police on My Back" covered by the Clash on Sandinista! In America, though, Eddy Grant has been an obscure figure, thought maybe not to rank with reggae's best. His address on "Electric Avenue" ought to change all that.
Even so, the Marley camp is not giving up ground. Marley left behind a musical community that is flourishing: his wife, Rita, will release her second album soon; his children have a twelve-inch single out; and Judy Mowatt and Marcia Griffiths, Rita's cohorts from Bob's backup singers the I-Threes, have new records.
Mowatt's Black Woman is a beautifully sung collection of slow, graceful songs, most of them written by Mowatt herself. The instrumentation is unassuming, even for reggae, with a few moody keyboard to
