Jimmy Cliff

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I always swore I was going to name my son James Clifford.

I love Jimmy Cliff. He has the greatest voice ever. Peter Tosh had the guts to come on late after Jimmy had already played one of the times I saw him. pfffft We left. You don't need to stay after Jimmy sings. :)
 
Two things....

1. Ever hear Keith Richards' cover of this song from the late 1970's? Now there's a fine vocalist if there ever was one ;] Here it is.. YouTube - Keith Richards / The Harder They Come

2. Yep. I like Jimmy Cliff. When I was a kid, I think the first song I ever remember liking was his song "I Can See Clearly Now (the rain is gone)". I still love that tune. It's so upbeat and positive.
 
influence stretches through punk rock, everyone from joe strummer up to rancid.

everybody covers "the harder they come."
 
One of the least discussed/most interesting pieces of 20th Century musical history, for me, has to be the fact that it was basically a corporate decision by Chris Blackwell that led to Bob Marley, rather than Jimmy Cliff, being the global face and main superstar of reggae music. It is fascinating, when you spend some time thinking about this and the obvious and many impacts which the decision had upon reggae music (and its countless offshoots and sub-genres), Rastafarianism/religion, Jamaica/Jamaican culture/global perception of Jamaica, opinions on and of marijuana, Caribbean politics, and the entire punk movement (which itself has had literally innumerable ramifications on the music industry, fashion, youth ideology and iconography, and economics). Wild stuff.

I just can't get over that Bob Marley was the choice; Jimmy Cliff was not, following the death of Leslie Kong. And that's all there was to it. I guess that I can't complain, given that Marley proved to be the more interesting musician, post-Kong, and recorded several classic records to just one or two, from Jimbo...though Cliff has indeed somehow stayed borderline-relevant, even sporadically commercially successful on a global scale, for, like, 40 fucking years, now. Fascinating.

In any even, The Harder They Come is the greatest reggae album of all time. One of the greatest albums ever, too, regardless of genre. Not too shabby a film, either...!

"Who's a bad man? Who can draw?"
 
One of the least discussed/most interesting pieces of 20th Century musical history, for me, has to be the fact that it was basically a corporate decision by Chris Blackwell that led to Bob Marley, rather than Jimmy Cliff, being the global face and main superstar of reggae music.

I'm a bit unsure of the exact order of events, but didn't Jimmy Cliff also leave Island just after the release (and success) of The Harder They Come? Now, it's of course the question of what came first: Jimmy leaving Island or Chris Blackwell putting his bets on Bob Marley.
 
Yeah, but Jimmy didn't write or perform all of the Harder soundtrack. Bob was a superior overall musician.

Yeah, I know. Like I said, "Marley proved to be the more interesting musician, post-Kong." I just think it's interesting that if Cliff'd been picked, an obvious army of songwriters, especially if Kong'd survived, would easily have kept him at the top of the pile. He was already recording number one hits in his early teenage years! He had, like, 10 of them!

And pm, Cliff left Island after the Jamaican release of The Harder They Come (1972), but well before the U.S. release, which wasn't until 1975, long after he'd left--part of the problem, all of the screwy timing of things. Leslie Kong died in 1971, and Cliff drifted for a bit, working to finish the film and soundtrack (for which he was supposed to provide the full soundtrack, but was too decimated and directionless to fully flesh out, forcing Perry Henzell to compile what became the greatest compilation, for lack of a better word, in the history of music), and a record or two, but his decision to leave Island in 1973 was, as history tells it, based primarily on the lack of any support for him which the label showed, in the wake of Kong's death and their subsequent choice to begin pushing Marley as the superstar. Motivations notwithstanding, it was indeed after the Marley decision that Cliff departed from Island, moved to Africa for a while, and started making solid, but rarely, if ever, great, records.
 
Saw him live, great! and I absolutely love the film, its the reggae classic and one of the best cult films ever.
 
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