Monkey Marc: Vital Sound | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- Monkey Marc is a phenomenon. As long as I’ve been a grass-roots music journo and a dingy community broadcaster (hint - a long time!), Monkey’s been on my radar; the quintessential alternative artist. I mean alternative in ways that are too often forgotten: from an early background in illegal raves in Sydney, he bloomed into an outback nomad, travelling the country as a political activist, blockading mines. Even on his dustry travels he was also a producer, making politically-charged beats in a solar-powered studio, crammed into the back of a vegetable-oil-powered combi-van. He has a long history of collaboration, from production workshops with indigenous communities, deep in the Northern Territory to just hooking up with all the like-minded individuals he could find on the doof and festival circuit. It may be no surprise then that collaboration is writ large on his latest project, Vital Sound. The long-time-coming LP is the fruit of his sojurn in the ancestral home of so many of today’s beats: Jamaica. It’s a remarkable meeting of creative forces from opposite sides of the planet, one where the context of production grabs your attention as much as all the star-studded dub-reggae and dancehall jams.

The formula is actually unexpectedly familiar, thanks to Mista Savona and his Melbourne Meets Kingston project. It turns out that the cure to the seemingly intractable naffness of white-boy reggae is to go to the people at the source and the combination of an Australian producer with top-flight Jamaican singers, deejays and toasters was a roaring success. I know Savona was involved with the creation of Vital Sound, but it appears Monkey Marc made his own local connections and the story he tells (detailed in a 2017 Happy Mag interview which I thoroughly recommend) is nothing short of crazy. Jamaica has never been wealthy, but even by its own standards the Caribbean nation has been doing it tough, lately. The local music industry,  where the concept of intellectual property never caught on, has been decimated, choked by poverty, a scene of skullduggery and desperation. Marc says of it, “You’ve got to have your wits about you, it’s a massive hustle. You know, because everyone’s very poor it’s very difficult to actually survive in Jamaica. So when somebody comes in to do stuff, you’ll have queues of people finding out where you live, knocking at your door trying to sing at you.” The upside of this is that, on the strength of a street-corner hookup Marc was able to meet and work with superstars like Capleton, Sizzla, Dre Island and heaps of hungry, up-and-coming-talent too.

So, how does it sound, has lightning struck twice? Is it another Savona-style success? Really, yes. The record teems with guest-stars, sometimes three or four to a track, but it never muddies the creative waters. The vocals pour out in a torrent that buoys you up rather than being overwhelming. Monkey Marc’s beats are up to the challenge, too. Serving up a versatile mix of reggae, dancehall, dub (and apparently there’s some trap in there which I didn’t hear, although there’s older school hip hop and think I noticed some soca banging up in the mix), he matches the intensity of the other talent without getting in the way and every now and then lays down a legit banger like the epic, No Surrender. I’ve often returned to it since it first blasted on to the airwaves back in 2017 and there’s more in here of that calibre.

It’s hard to think of someone more committed to cause than Monkey Marc: his entire life is beats and politics and political beats. That being said, I’ve really been wondering how he approached the making of this record. Jamaican artists have a sad history of being exploited by Western visitors. It’d be hard to do worse than the likes of Island Records, but how do you better? How do you even pay royalties in a nation where that infrastructure doesn’t exist? How do you approach the creative process? As Marc points out, he was “just some white dude” with the locals grabbing him and his beats and spitting what they liked across them - I was curious how that would turn out. Was there a bit of boundary-setting to avoid Shabba Ranks-style anti-batty-boy sentiments bubbling up in the mix? The result is pretty palatable to a progressive Western audience even as it presents an emotive record of the Jamaican experience: the horror of grinding poverty, the menace of gangsters and establishment brutality, preying upon the youth; just the latest chapter of the long suffering in Babylon, which only the strength of solidarity can outlast.

I had an odd disconnect, one which got me thinking about this whole meeting of Jamaica and the West. There are two videos for that big single No Surrender, a great one featuring local dancers busting moves is the original, but there’s a 2020 update composed exclusively of Black Lives Matter protest footage. The new one is powerful, undeniably so, but if you listen to the lyrics, this is a song about economic inequality and in an unmistakably Jamaican context. Economic justice is a part of BLM, but tangential to the central issue of police brutality. If your response to BLM is “bless up fi di poor” that might not go down so well. Honestly, it probably speaks more to how long Vital Sound (which was due out two years ago) has been in production than anything else and, finally, all quibbles aside, there is a unity in an oppression which spans the globe. As Dre Island sings “Same thing weh happen a yaad, it gwaan abraad” or Yeza on Rebel Code: “It doesn't matter where you are, oh black men”.

The connection between a creative powerhouse in a destitute nation and a socially conscious beatmaker paying homage to his creative roots has made a great record. For a very long time Jamaica has been a tiny Caribbean nation with an outsized cultural impact, even as the world that consumes its music ignores the privation visited on the Jamaican people by the global economy. Marc, though still thoroughly underground in Australia, has developed a sizeable following in Europe and, with his unwavering commitment to social justice, he’ll do his best to remind all those listeners of what the passion and energy in the music is really about. It’s strange, in Jamaica new music becomes stale within a week, as everyone tries to turn over the next tune that will keep them solvent. In Australia, Monkey Marc’s work is so niche as to be buried. It’s good to know that somewhere in the world people will listen to this record in large numbers and that musically and politically it really is Vital Sound.

- Chris Cobcroft. <iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 120px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=517927859/size=large/bgcol=ff…; seamless><a href="https://monkeymarc.bandcamp.com/album/vital-sound">Vital Sound by Monkey Marc</a></iframe><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/J317kET6Zxc" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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