Linton Kwesi Johnson

poet; reggae musician

Personal Information

Born on August 24, 1952, in Chapeltown, British-controlled Jamaica; emigrated to England, 1963; married Barbara (divorced 1994)
Education: Tulse Hill Comprehensive School, London; Goldsmith's College, University of London, B.A. in sociology, 1973.

Career

Published first book of poetry, Voices of the Living and the Dead, 1974; performer and recording artist, mid-1970s-; released first recording, Dread, Beat, an' Blood, 1977; arts editor, Race Today magazine, 1980s; produced 10-part series on Jamaican music for British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC); became only second living poet to be published in Penguin Modern Classics book series, 2002, when poetry collection Mi Revalueshanry Fren appeared.

Life's Work

The marriage of the spoken word and musical rhythms in modern black culture was anticipated by, and was to some extent the work of, the radical Jamaican-British poet and recording artist Linton Kwesi Johnson. Known in England primarily as a poet, but in the U.S. and other countries more as a reggae performer, Johnson in reality had been consistent in his outlook, bringing music to poetry and a mixture of poetic sophistication and political activism to dance music. "I always have a bass line at the back of my mind when I write," Johnson told London's Guardian newspaper--and, more often than not, that bass line carried overtones of the violence that brewed beneath the surface of British black life as a result of decades of discriminatory treatment.

Linton Johnson was born in Chapelton, in British colonial Jamaica, on August 24, 1952; he took the middle name Kwesi, meaning "born on Sunday," in the early years of his poetic career. His father was a baker and a sugar-plantation hand, and his mother was a house servant who separated from her husband and took off for London. When he was 11, Johnson went to England to join her. Attending school in London's Brixton neighborhood he faced the same low expectations that plagued other Caribbean-born students in England; his teachers, he told the Guardian, "didn't take kindly if they thought you harboured ambitions above your station."

Joined Black Panthers

But Johnson wasn't one to take their disrespect lying down. He joined the British Black Panthers as a teenager and read the classics of black polemical writing, including W.E.B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk and Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. He dropped out of high school upon discovering that his girlfriend Barbara was pregnant, spending time in a series of low-level clerical jobs but attending night school and taking college sociology courses when he could. He earned a sociology degree from Goldsmith's College, part of the University of London, in 1973, but the degree didn't help him escape the poverty to which most of Britain's black population was relegated. He found only assembly-line work.

These experiences, Britain's increasing conservatism, and his own self-made radical education combined to shape his first book of poetry, Voices of the Living and the Dead (1974), which centered on a long poem that looked toward a future worldwide black revolutionary uprising. He gained a following of like-minded Britons who gathered to hear him read his poetry in small halls and political meetings, and in the process naturally encountered the new Jamaican music sounds that were coalescing under the name of reggae. An integral part of Jamaican music at the time--and a key ancestor of American rap and hip-hop--was the improvised rhyming carried out by DJs over reggae dance rhythm tracks.

Johnson is believed to have coined the term "dub" to describe this kind of musical poetry, and soon he was making examples of it himself. His first album, Dread Beat an' Blood, was released in 1977; it consisted of spoken poems, several dealing with notorious examples of British police brutality, backed by a band led by Johnson's longtime collaborator, guitarist and keyboardist Dennis Bovell. Johnson was signed to the Mango label, and he released several more albums that became more and more steeped in reggae rhythms.

Incorporated Jamaican Dialect in Works

That evolution affected Johnson's efforts in the realm of spoken and printed poetry as well. Dread Beat an' Blood appeared in dual versions in which Johnson experimented with the relationship between text and music, and by the time of his collection Inglan Is a Bitch (1980), Johnson had forged a unique written poetic language based on Jamaican dialect. Inspired both by the efforts of the Barbadian "nation language" poet Kamau Brathwaite and by classic American black-dialect poets such as Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Johnson went beyond simply reproducing Jamaican speech to create a whole new set of poetic devices.

Neither poetic experimentation nor a measure of popular musical success dulled Johnson's radical impulses, however, and the 1981 outbreak of riots in several British cities, following egregious examples of police misconduct, only intensified them. Johnson turned down a multi-album deal with the successful reggae label Island Records, instead founding his own label, LKJ, in 1981. He hoped, he told the Guardian, to make "thinking man's reggae, instead of a pulse from a computer." When not on tour, Johnson worked as the arts editor of the periodical Race Today and produced a ten-part series on Jamaican music for the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Years Lapsed Between Recordings

The continuing sharp edge of his poetry showed in 1984's "Di Eagle an' Di Bear," which expressed an attitude of equanimity toward a looming U.S.-Russian nuclear war: "as a matter of fact/b'lieve it or not/plenty people don care wedder it imminent or not ... dem life already comin' like a nightmare." As the fervor of left-wing movements declined in the 1980s and 1990s and reggae's popularity was dented by hip-hop (for which he showed little enthusiasm), Johnson's productivity slackened. In 1984 Johnson released Making History. Johnson waited until 1998 to deliver his next album of new musical material, More Time. Several albums of spoken-word recordings, however, kept Johnson's name before CD buyers in Britain and in the United States, where he had a small but devoted cadre of fans.

Johnson's poetry of the 1990s mixed his trademark political subject matter with more personal reflections, occasioned by his 1994 divorce from his wife Barbara and subsequent relationship with his partner Sharmilla Beezmohun. By the early 2000s Johnson had emerged as a classic figure in both the poetic and musical realms. His rare live performances were eagerly devoured by concertgoers, some of whom hadn't even been born when Johnson penned such hard-edged pieces as "All Wi Doin Is Defendin" and "Di Great Insoreckshan." Johnson was often compared with another key precursor of rap music, the politically oriented U.S. spoken-word artist Gil Scott-Heron.

And, in 2002, the one-time alienated revolutionary was given an honor that signified the highest degree of British literary respectability: Mi Revalueshanary Fren, a volume of his collected poetry, was included in the Penguin Modern Classics series, a widely sold set of paperbacks that formed a central part of many school reading lists. Some traditionalists deplored the Penguin publishing company's move: a Times Literary Supplement writer quoted in the Guardian complained that some "may find the ushering of Linton Kwesi Johnson into the circles of the immortals a little premature." Many other critics, however, placed Johnson in a long line of outsider writers who had remade the English language, running from the Scottish poet Robert Burns to Irish novelist James Joyce and beyond. The revolutionary thinking of Linton Kwesi Johnson, it seemed, had become an honored part of the literary mainstream.

Awards

C. Day Lewis fellowship, 1977.

Works

Selected works

• Voices of the Living and the Dead, poetry, 1974.
• Dread, Beat, an' Blood, dub poetry, two versions, 1975, 1977.
• Forces of Victory, reggae recording, 1979.
• Bass Culture, reggae recording, 1980.
• Inglan Is a Bitch, poetry, 1980.
• Making History, reggae recording, 1984.
• Tings an' Times: Selected Poems, poetry, 1991.
• More Time, reggae recording, 1998.
• Independent Intavenshan: The Island Anthology, collected reggae recordings, 1998.
• Mi Revalueshanry Fren: Selected Poems, poetry, 2002.

Further Reading

Books

• Contemporary Poets, St. James, 2001.

Periodicals

• Billboard, August 1, 1998, p. 38.
• The Bookseller, March 8, 2002, p. 29.
• Entertainment Weekly, October 30, 1998, p. 64.
• The Guardian (London, England), May 4, 2002, p. 6.
• Los Angeles Times, March 6, 1990, p. F6.
• Washington Post, September 17, 2002, p. C3.

On-line

• All Music Guide, http://allmusic.com.
• Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2002; reproduced in Biography Resource Center, Gale, 2002 (http://www.galenet.com/servlet/BioRC).

— James M. Manheim

See Linton Kwesi Johnson Lyrics

• Active: '70s, '80s, '90s, 2000s
• Genres: Reggae
• Instrument: Vocals
• Representative Albums: "Independant Intavenshan: The Island Anthology," "Dread Beat an' Blood," "Making History"
• Representative Songs: "Di Great Insohreckshan," "Bass Culture," "It Noh Funny"

Biography

Although he has only released one album of new material in the last ten years, and has virtually retired from the live stage after his 1985 tour, Linton Kwesi Johnson remains a towering figure in reggae music. Born in Kingston, Jamaica and raised in the Brixton section of London, Johnson invented dub poetry, a type of toasting descended from the DJ stylings of U-Roy and I-Roy. But whereas toasting tended to be hyperkinetic and given to fits of braggadocio, Johnson's poetry (which is what it was -- he was a published poet and journalist before he performed with a band) was more scripted and delivered in a more languid, slangy, streetwise style. Johnson's grim realism and tales of racism in an England governed by Tories was scathingly critical. The Afro-Brits in Johnson's poems are neglected by the government and persecuted by the police. Johnson was also instrumental (with his friend Darcus Howe) in the publication of a socialist-oriented London-based newspaper, Race Today, that offered him and other like-minded Britons both black and white an outlet to discuss the racial issues that, under Margaret Thatcher's reign, seemed to be tearing the country apart. For one so outspoken in his politics, Johnson's recorded work, while politically explicit, is not simply a series of slogans or tuneful/danceable jeremiads. In fact, is was his second release, Forces of Victory, where his mix of politics and music united to stunning effect. Dennis Bovell and the Dub Band could swing (as in jazzy) more than many reggae bands, and guitarist John Kpiaye, the group's secret weapon, offered deftly played, dazzlingly melodic solos. But it was Johnson's moving poetry, galvanizing moments such as "Sonny's Lettah" and "Fite Dem Back" that made it obvious that this was a major talent.

Although he never intended to, Johnson became a star, in England anyway; in America he had a small yet devoted group of fans. But political activism was as important, perhaps more important, than churning out records and touring, and after the release of his third album, Bass Culture, in 1980, Johnson took time off from the music scene, turning his back on a lucrative contract from Island. He continued to perform, but it was poetry readings at universities, at festivals in the Caribbean, and for trade union workers in Trinidad. His organizing activities included the setting up the First International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books, and greater involvement with the political organizations with which he had been long identified, namely the Race Today Collective and the Alliance of the Black Parents Movement. In 1982, the BBC commissioned Johnson to create a series of radio programs on Jamaican popular music, a subject he'd been researching for years. The programs, entitled From Mento to Lovers Rock, were more than just musical history; Johnson contextualized Jamaican music socially and politically and offered a more nuanced and thorough examination of the popular music of his native and adopted countries.

Johnson returned to the pop music scene in 1984 with perhaps his best record, Making History. Again working with Dennis Bovell, Johnson's seething political anger suffuses this recording, but it is never undone by simple vituperation. Johnson is, if anything, a thoughtful radical, more analytical than simplistic, and that adds to the power of these seven songs. Unfortunately, this would be the last new music from Johnson until 1991's Tings an' Times, which proved yet again that regardless of how much time he takes off from music, when LKJ returns it's as if he's never missed a beat. His most recent period of recording silence has been broken by the release of a music-less poetry album. ~ John Dougan, All Music Guide

Independant Intavenshan: The Island Anthology Buy this CD	Live in Paris Buy this CD	Live in Paris with the Dennis Bovell Dub Band [DVD] Buy this CD	In Dub, Vol. 2 [WEA] Buy this CD	Straight to Inglan's Head Buy this CD
More Time Buy this CD	Dread Beat an' Blood [Caroline] Buy this CD	LKJ A Cappella Live Buy this CD	Tings An' Times Buy this CD	In Concert with the Dub Band Buy this CD

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