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Hugh Mundell: Africa Must Be Free By 1983 LP (1978, Message Records)
I’m not well-versed in reggae’s history, but I’ve been listening to a lot of it lately, a trend sparked by discovering this Hugh Mundell LP this summer.
I may have told this story before, but reggae first hit me when I was still in high school. Aside from the Bob Marley tunes you soak up just from being an American, the first experience with reggae I can remember is buying a compilation CD called Dub Chill Out from a big store called Planet Music in Virginia Beach, the same place where I bought my first Minor Threat and Black Flag CDs. I can’t remember how I figured out that dub reggae was something I should be interested in, nor can I remember why I bought that CD. My guess is that it was cheap… as a broke teenager, I was always trying to make my music dollar stretch a little further. While I had little money to spend on music, I had a pretty bumping sound system in my car. My first car was a tiny Dodge Ram pickup, and for my birthday one year, my dad outfitted it with a powerful amp and two huge speakers that sat behind the driver’s seat. It was super loud, especially in the truck’s tiny cabin, and my parents said they could always hear my stereo from half a mile away when I was driving home. Dub Chill Out, while having nothing on the surface to distinguish it, had a phenomenal track listing, and the mastering was huge and bass-y. From the moment I popped in the CD and cranked it in my car, I was in love. I still love bathing in loud bass frequencies (something I also appreciate about Sabbath and the handful of doom metal records I really love). I got a really great dose of that a few weeks ago when legendary dub producer Scientist played in Raleigh, the colossal PA at the Lincoln Theater submerging me in pulsating low end.
After Dub Chill Out, every couple of years I’d find another reggae record to fall in love with. There was Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Return of the Super Ape, King Tubby’s The Roots of Dub, Augustus Pablo’s East of the River Nile, U-Roy’s Dread in a Babylon, Culture’s Two Sevens Clash… but it has usually been one reggae record at a time for me, each of them happened upon in an unexpected, seemingly random way. Whenever I tried to explore the genre more systematically, I’d either encounter too much stuff I don’t really like, or I’d feel like I was experiencing diminishing returns, the new releases never offering the same buzz as whatever recent discovery ignited my interest. Maybe my brain only has space for one reggae record at a time, and I need to recharge my batteries and approach the sound with fresh ears every couple of years. I can’t think of another genre where I have a similar listening pattern.
Hugh Mundell entered my life in a similarly random way. One night I was thinking about how I love so much music from the late 70s, that there’s something about the production techniques and/or technologies that were in vogue at that time that just sends me to my happy place. While I know that certain eras of music interest me more than others, I typically explore music through the framework of artists or genre, researching artists’ discographies or checking out best of lists around a certain genre. I made a deliberate choice to explore records by year, thinking maybe I’d hear something from an unexpected genre that had that late 70s patina that I seem to like so much. I remember I was looking at a list of someone’s favorite records of 1978 (I can’t seem to find this list again), and Africa Must Be Free by 1983 stood out as something I was unfamiliar with but looked interesting. I dialed it up on streaming and it blew me away from the first track.
First, there’s that voice. Mundell’s vocals on Africa Must Be Free By 1983 are thin, reedy, almost pre-pubescent. He sounds so vulnerable here, the dry, reverb-less sound revealing every little crack in his voice. He sounds so young—he was 15 or 16 when he recorded this—that I tend to compare him to a young, Jackson 5-era Michael Jackson. Generally, it’s instruments rather than vocals that pull me into a record, but there’s something special about Mundell’s voice here. The second thing that struck me about this album was its production. While this is definitely roots reggae and not dub, the sound is spacious yet heavy on the low end, rich and powerful at the bottom, but with a ton of space in the higher frequencies for the many instrumental hooks on the record (note: Augustus Pablo contributes piano and organ). As I mentioned, I’d gone looking for something to listen to that had that late 70s patina I love so much, and the slightly lo-fi production values of Africa Must Be Free are pretty much exactly what was looking for. Finally, the lyrics on the album hit me pretty hard, too. While some of the song titles seem conventional, if not cliche (“Let’s All Unite,” “Jah Will Provide”), there’s a specificity to many of the lyrics that sets my mind racing. I love the track “My Mind,” which finds Mundell (by the way, I don’t know if he’s the lyricist or not) following the stream of consciousness from family, to love, to war in a way that reminds me so much of my teenage years, when I couldn’t seem to figure out how life’s big issues and small concerns related, if at all. And of course there’s the title track, which is fascinating. Why does this 1978 album posit a precise 5-year deadline for Africa’s liberation? The verses explain a prophecy that the biblical Judgment Day will happen in that year, but listening to the album 36 years later, it’s tragic that, despite Mundell’s pleading, Africa was barely different in 1984 than it was in 1983. There was no Judgment Day, and if there were material or political gains for its oppressed peoples during that time, they were marginal at best. Things probably have improved little in the decades since either. Mundell’s earnestness reminds me of the evangelical Christian kids I rode the bus with in school, who were similarly convinced, with all the clear-eyed certainty of youth, that the Judgment Day would arrive during their own lifetime.
Reading about the record, I learned Mundell was murdered on October 14, 1983, when he was only twenty-one years old. I’m kind of glad I didn’t learn about Mundell’s story until after I heard the album, though. That story is so intense that it must be hard to hear the music through it, especially an album that is so thoroughly laced with tragedy (but also, I must say, with hope). Certainly the fact that Mundell’s was murdered in the album’s titular year is an arresting coincidence. Though the Biblical Judgment Day didn’t happen, perhaps Mundell’s personal one did.
Of course, I started looking for a vinyl copy of Africa Must Be Free by 1983 by the time I finished with my first complete play through. As with most classic reggae records, it’s been repressed many times by many labels, which I imagine is a symptom of Jamaica’s dysfunctional and corrupt music industry. Grey-market reissues of reggae records abound, and they vary widely in quality. I added a bunch of different versions to my want list and started waiting for a copy that spoke to me. I also checked the reggae section of every record store I’ve set foot in since I heard the record, where I found a few of Mundell’s other records (which are good, but lack the magic of his debut). I saw one gratuitously overpriced older pressing of Africa Must Be Free at Mills Record Company in Kansas City, literally locked in the store’s fortress-like rare bins. (It’s a tangent I don’t want to get into here… but what a weird fucking place that was.) Then, a couple of weeks ago, Usman was ordering a record from Japan and asked if I wanted to get anything from the same seller to save on shipping. Lo-and-behold, they had an older Jamaican pressing in G+ condition for a very good price, and knowing that Japanese sellers typically grade conservatively, I took the risk. This copy isn’t pretty, and I suspect the pressing didn’t sound that great in the first place (a common issue with Jamaican vinyl), but it gets the job done and, despite its shortcomings, feels more appropriate to have in my collection than a squeaky clean reissue.
Thanks for reading! I hope some of y’all enjoy this record. Until next time…