Toots & the Maytals "Funky Kingston" [1973]

This collection of post-ska, early reggae singles from the late 60s makes it difficult to understand why the phenomenon of the genre took hold anywhere in the world they may have thought Haile Selassie was some sort of cough medicine, but somehow "Funky Kingston" -- an obvious reference to how bad that town smelled of decay and B.O. back when locals were busy killing the tourism industry, sending everyone to Montego Bay instead -- managed to retain some sort of relevance. You could probably blame that big white Brit goon Chris Blackwell, or perhaps Chinese Jamaican Leslie Kong, who lived his entire life without realizing VU meters in the red equal distortion. As such, we have slop, stoned recordings from an island not exactly known for its precision (I, for one, would never buy a watch made in Jamaica unless I wanted to be late for everything -- including the down-beat). Toots Hibbert, the near-unintelligible near-Rastafarian leader of this singing group, would spend the next 5 decades trying to establish relevance in the states it took Bob Marley about a year and a half to accomplish, but ultimately he's only partly blame for this ill-advised string of forgettable "one-and" up-strum guitar ditties: this style was only ever intended to rip off rich Americans already jaded on Acapulco; don't blame yourself if you don't get what all the laconic excitement was about.