110. Two Sevens Clash

Culture: Two Sevens Clash (Joe Gibbs Record Globe, 1977);
composed by Albert Walker, Errol Thompson, Joseph Hill, Roy Dayes, and Vincent Gordon

One of my proudest possessions is a scratchy Jamaican 45 of “Beat Down Babylon,” by Junior Byles, that features the sound of a repeatedly cracking bullwhip with no apparent attempt made to sync it to the music – undoubtedly Lee Scratch Perry’s point: why should there be? Scratch’s colleague Joe Gibbs (also an occasional fill-in Wailer) intended a similarly aggressive aesthetic configuration in his production of this ultra-Roots vocal group’s debut, the title track of which details a long bus ride during which Joseph Hill espies a cottonwood tree destroyed by lightning (next to a police station, of course) and recalls a Marcus Garvey foretold cataclysm said to break over Babylon on 7/7/77. Supposedly, Kingston came to a near halt that day. “Wat a liiv an bambaie / When the two sevens clash,” or “How do we live by and by” when the world ends. “It dread” is the answer. Burning Spear had a similar vibe, but protean and primal as the truly great Winston Rodney sounded, he is almost Alan Lomax compared to the you-are-there gestalt here. It sounds like a crashing airplane’s black box recording, if the pilots just took their hands off the controls and sang Jah’s praises.

Note: Secular essays about individual songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (or at least regularly) until Donald goes away.