Confronting Marley’s Legacy

King Tut was playing Munich when I arrived in January of 1981 to pay my last respects to Bob Marley. I remember well because I passed the museum on the way to Dr. Issels’s cancer clinic. The synchronicity was impressive: the sarcophagus and golden relics of an Egyptian king (who also died young) being in Germany while the King of Reggae was struggling against his own mortality. Continue reading “Confronting Marley’s Legacy”

Kid Creole & the Coconuts: To the Life Boats

“Strange, how potent cheap music is.”
— Noel Coward, Private Lives

AUGUST DARNELL, master of glib sophistry, is back again. Look over last year’s notices: amid the wisecracks, the nonsense and the slander there are glimmers of truth . . . but nothing that even vaguely resembles a straight answer. The Kid Creole world is rich in innuendo and intelligence, but few writers have come close to describing the Real Deal. It is neither tea party nor revolution, so neither the party crowd nor the revolutionaries have properly assessed its triumphs and its failures. Continue reading “Kid Creole & the Coconuts: To the Life Boats”