Tuesday, February 28, 2017

DANCEHALL MUSIC HYSTERIA #8: THE SONG THAT ALMOST GOT AWAY


Dancehall artistes, y'all need to step up ya social media presence. "Artillery" finally hits the web after getting played on Waggy T's show for months. Thought I'd lost it forever when my Shazams was fruitless, and you know Googling the lyrics is out of the question for a cultural tourist like me. I went home and trawled through Waggy's Twitter playlist, searching every potential candidate on Youtube in the hope I'd identify it through a process of elimination. But you can't identify what isn't digitized. I was like, "Yo, does this song even exist or is this all some cosmic joke?" I saw myself as a crazed 70-year-old man broken by a song he hallucinated in 2017 and spent the rest of his life trying to find. "He said something about a gun from Sri Lanka," I'd say to the nurse, teary eyed as she changed my diaper.

Mad airhorns went off when I identified the pleasant song as Pappy V's "Artillery." Unfortunately, Pappy V is the kind of guy who hasn't updated his Twitter since 2012. It ain't real until it hits the internet! In the meantime, I tried to succor myself with alternate takes on the riddim, but nothing matched Pappy's intensity. This the One Click era, Pappy, get with the times. Give me instant gratification or give me death.

3 comments:

  1. What a find! Are Waggy T's shows archived somewhere, because soundcloud is mostly >1 year old or more roots oriented? Completely forgot about your twitter comment, but it was the first thing I did: https://soundcloud.com/waggytee/the-bashment-explosion-live-1 (have the feeling it's something more obvious..)

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