ZINC FENCE RECORD OF THE WEEK

Sufferer - Bounty Killer (40/40)

Producer "Lenky" Marsden's Diwali rhythm is currently the rhythm of the summer and there seems little doubt that by January 1st 2003 it will turn out to have been the rhythm of the year. Over a monumental one drop bass, a sprightly guitar figure hops and leaps like a dervish in a religious trance, while digitised handclaps and an indistinct multitude of voices heighten the sense of otherworldly exaltation.

Named after the Hindu festival of lights, this rhythm marks one more chapter in the enduring fascination of Jamaican music with the sounds of the mystic East. Further back in the dancehall era, we had Sly & Robbie's bhangra sound of the early nineties, best remembered in the notoriously bass-less Chakademus & Plier's Murder She Wrote on the Taxi label. More recently we had the swirling snake charmer pipes of Baby Cham's The Return over the rhythm of the same name on Dave Kelly's Mad House label. Looking back to the Seventies, we had Augustus Pablo's fabled Far East sound, expressed in such ethereal and haunting melodies as Java and East Of The River Nile. And further back still to the ska era, a deep vein of eastern mysticism ran through such classics as El Toro and South China Sea.

Bounty Killer's scorching lyrics are a full frontal attack on the endemic poverty and injustice of life for the "sufferer", the very poorest sections of Jamaican society. They confirm what his Outcry showed last year, that Bounty Killer has developed into a major lyrical force for the concerns of the poor and voiceless:

Born as a sufferer, grow up as a sufferer, struggle as a sufferer

Fight as a sufferer, survive as a sufferer

Grow up in the ghetto where most of them a sufferer

Food for the sufferer, shelter for the sufferer

The system designed to keep the people as sufferer.

More than twenty cuts of this rhythm are currently available, too many to mention here. But running Bounty Killer a close second are TDK with Galong Gal. Also worthy of mention is Tanya Stephens with Touch Me No More.

Lastly, listening to Bounty Killer's Sufferer, one can't help but think of another tune with exactly the same title but recorded moe than three decades ago. The early reggae masterpiece Sufferer from the mighty Kingstonians. The melancholy defiance of the earlier record is replaced here by a more intransigent militancy but in years to come Bounty Killer's Sufferer will be considered a masterpiece of the dancehall era, just as The Kingstonians defined their own musical era.