May 9, 2021 - Althea & Donna’s “No More Fighting.”

As a Black man with ties to the Caribbean (my paternal grandfather was from Barbados), I’ve long wanted to immerse myself in the ethos, zeitgeist, and spiritual cadences of reggae. Over the last decade, although listening to classic reggae artists such as Toots and the Maytals, Peter Tosh, Niney the Observer, and the Heptones has helped me connect with my heritage and identity; these connections, often, have been too difficult to face.

Yet the difficulty hasn’t been a visceral sadness; or even one that’s easy to trace. It’s a difficultly that’s more akin with what pop-psychology would frame as a fear of being successful, while also blended with guilt. But where does the guilt and the fear of being successful come from?

The fact that these questions (as well their answers) have been so deeply-embedded within my psychology is a testament to how invasive these false dictates of what it means to be a Black man, have been. Yet to those dictates, I can now ––– for once and for all say: be gone. The mental chains, which I used to allow my heart and mind to wrap around what it feels like to listen to reggae –––– and by extension –––– to enjoy and be proud who I am, have been broken.

At last I have grown to a place where I can liberate myself from the cartoonish depictions of the Black male reggae artist. You’re familiar with this stereotype of a man, of course: he can only be found within a deep and thick cloud of marijuana smoke; and when he’s not high (though also, perhaps, while he is high as well) ––– he’s indiscriminately spreading “good vibes” and words of peace, unity, and love.

Although I’ve long known that these images were merely mischaracterizations of “the rasta,” still, I allowed them to push me away from enjoying reggae, and as result, from loving and honoring my heritage, my history, and myself. And even though I had listened to –––– and on a surface level understood –––– the imperatives of songs like Peter Tosh’s “Downpressor Man,” (Equal Rights) (1977), I just wasn’t ready to truly accept them, embrace them, and rally around their ideas.

However there is one album, start to finish, which I would call a bridge between where I was –––– wanting to enjoy reggae without any guilt or fear –––– to where I’ve now arrived. That album is Althea & Donna’s Uptown Top Ranking (1978). Here’s an album that I’ve played all the way through ––––time and time again, without any guilt or hesitation since the Autumn of 2016. And although I had heard the lead single, “Uptown Top Ranking,” in the early 2010’s, it wasn’t until six years later that I took the time to listen to the entire album. The album’s first track, “No More Fighting,” expresses so much of what I’ve always wanted to feel, and at long last, have grown to embody:

Alone I sit in deep meditation (deep meditation),
Wondering why the wicked still survive,
Killin' and stealin' is part of the daily life (daily life),
I wanna know, I wanna know, I wanna know,
When it's all gonna end.

No more fussin' and fightin',
We want no more, we want no more,
No more stealin' and back bittin',
We want no more, we want no more,

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