Still, these minor concerns disappear with the opening bars of Land of Promise, a track that is both the album's standout moment and, in its own way, a lesson in reggae history. If nothing else, someone should certainly have told him that, no matter how much you might want it to, "Earth, Wind " will never rhyme with "Gershwin". While Marley's part is considered, polished, sensitively rendered, Nas's contributions feel tacked on at best, at worst like unwelcome interruptions. Unfortunately, it is also one of the few moments where the collaborative aspect of Distant Relatives falls flat. Unlike the original, though, this is a globalised, 21st-century take on the form, one in which Marley's contemplative vocals give way to militant hip-hop flows by Nas and the Somali-born guest rapper K'naan.Ĭount Your Blessings appears to be an attempt at light relief, Marley's blend of optimistic vocals and summery acoustic guitar strumming providing a direct reference to his father's musical legacy. Mirroring Little Roy's version, Marley's lyrics address the futility of conflict, whether street against street or nation against nation. Tribes At War, meanwhile, is more explicitly Jamaican, lifting a ghostly vocal refrain from the reggae singer Little Roy's roots standard Tribal War, then adding African percussion, a soaring string section and woozy synthesiser lines. Given the album's main themes, this is a wonderfully apt interpolation, one that links hip-hop's collaging of dusty jazz and soul breaks with roots reggae's spiritual connection to the East African nation. While Marley and Nas's lyrical interplay is a pleasure in itself, the most striking thing about this song is its instrumentation, which incorporates a large sample of the Ethiopian jazz maestro Mulatu Astatke's 1971 track Yegelle Tezeta. The opening As We Enter is a gloriously uptempo reggae skanker - with a difference. Happily, Marley and Nas defuse such cynicism rapidly, expertly commingling musical styles and approaching serious issues with vibrant, incisive and above all joyful wordplay. For many people - this reviewer included - finding out that a record falls into either of these categories is just cause for trepidation. So, at its most basic levels, this is both an exercise in global fusion and a charity fundraising venture. Proceeds from the album will be used to fund development projects in Africa, including the construction of a new school in the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo. Hip-hop's heritage of grassroots activism is also reflected in Distant Relatives' backstory. While Afrocentric ideology and the remembrance of colonial misdeeds are integral to reggae's Rastafarian credo, such concerns also form a core strand of hip-hop's DNA, from the Native Tongues collective to the DJ and producer Afrika Bambaataa's community-action group, the Zulu Nation. The title refers to its authors' shared membership of the African diaspora and the commonalities of the styles with which each is synonymous. As an album, it sets out its conceptual stall early. By way of evidence, for every fresh and vibrant blend, there exist countless lukewarm guest appearances and lacklustre collaborations in which Jamaican artists are drafted in to add a dash of jerk-spiced exoticism to the tried and tested formulae of US hip-hop and R&B.ĭistant Relatives, the latest in a long line of reggae/hip-hop hybrid projects, teams two titans of each style: Bob Marley's youngest son, Damian, and one of the most critically acclaimed rappers of all time, Nasir "Nas" Jones. There is even a plausible case for suggesting that, were it not for the importation of Caribbean dancehall culture to the United States, which brought with it mobile soundsystems and deejays (MCs), the very foundations of hip-hop would, to this day, remain unlaid.īoth genres have long been uneasy bedfellows, each willing to take inspiration from the other but only occasionally achieving the kind of fusions they, by rights, should be eminently capable of making. However, the reality is that the world's first block parties happened in Kingston and the earliest rappers were, in fact, Jamaican. Now a monolithic, global presence, rap music's history is almost universally accepted as falling into a conveniently and uniquely American narrative of hardscrabble multiculturalism and pioneering creative drive. Ever since its birth on the gritty, late-1970s streets of New York's South Bronx, hip-hop has enjoyed a tangled and complex relationship with reggae.