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>* Which I totally respect. But in my opinion...
Goes without saying, you can't have a music discussion without opinions entering into it.
>are you really a big reggae fan?
Oh, yes. There's a shot that I own more reggae albums and spend more time listening to them than anybody on this site - if not quite that, I'm pretty sure I'm in the top three. My reggae/dancehall playlists in iTunes are close to 8000 tracks and 99% of that was paid for, not torrented (I make exceptions only for rare vinyl tracks that can't be had legally).
>Burning Spear
>Calling Rastafari 2000
>Free Man 2004
>Our Music 2005
>The Burning Spear Experience 2008
>Jah Is Real 2008
To me there are some really good albums there, but they're not fucking with pre-'86 Spear. I have to cop to a particular bias though: these old guys, I tend to vastly prefer the work they did in the 70s and first half of the 80s. Like the Wailing Souls are one of my favorite groups in any genre, period, but after about 1985 they got pretty bad and started using too many keyboards and drum machines, and winning Grammys for far inferior work. Burning Spear had some bad years as well, though generally he kept it true to his roots and didn't succumb half as badly as some of his contemporaries. His best albums after 1990 are some good shit, no doubt - yet every time I hear them I kind of want to just hear "Marcus Garvey" or "Hail H.I.M." instead. Maybe this is a personal stumbling block though. Spear's chanting, somewhat non-melodic style of reggae gets a little monotonous to me, so I don't go to his albums (even his classics) as often as I should. Maybe I can get by on the "he's a solo artist" technicality? If we weren't ruling out solo artists, I could think of several modern artists I'd want to include in the conversation - unfortunately reggae isn't a group-oriented genre any more though, and dancehall never was.
>Sly and Robbie DJ Riot 1990 Island
>Sly and Robbie Dubs for Tubs 1990 Rohit
>Sly and Robbie Sixties Seventies and Eighties 1991 Mango
>Sly and Robbie Dub Rockers Delight 1991 Magnum Music Group
>Sly and Robbie Sound of Sound 1991 Pow Wow
>Sly and Robbie Remember Precious Times 1992 RAS Taxi
>Sly and Robbie Ragga Pon Top 1993 Pow Wow
>Sly and Robbie Many Moods of 1994 Sonic Sounds
>Sly and Robbie present Mykall Rose 1995 Taxi
>Sly and Robbie Funkcronomicon 1995 Axiom
>Sly and Robbie Hail up the Taxi 1996 Island
>Sly and Robbie Mysteries of Creation 1996 Axiom
>Sly and Robbie meet King Tubby 1996 House of Reggae
>Sly and Robbie The Punishers 1996 Island
>Sly and Robbie Mambo Taxi 1997 Island
>Sly and Robbie Hail up Taxi 2 1998 Tabou1 / Taxi
>Sly and Robbie present Taxi Christmas 1998 RAS
>Sly and Robbie Friends 1998 Island
>Sly and Robbie Drum and Bass Strip to the Bone by Howie B 1999
>Palm Pictures
>Sly and Robbie Massive 1999 nyc music
>Sly and Robbie Sly & Robbie 1999 Rhino
>Sly and Robbie Version Born (produced by Bill Laswell) 2004
>Palm
Like 2/3 of those are forgettable to me (though some I've never heard, to be straight with you). Sly & Robbie are great but they made a lot of interchangeable stuff, which is an issue in reggae generally (well - to be clear, it's an issue when you're comparing them to the discographies of song-oriented bands like Wilco and the rest; me personally, I will listen to a good enough riddim even without a vocal on it, but that's not what most people would think of as an awesome SONG).
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