Sly & Robbie - When hip hop and reggae collide

If only all reggae artists looked this funky

Sly & Robbie - Boops

Ok, back to the mid eighties today with a less obscure but by no means lower quality track.
This song charted in 1987 but seems to have been lost in the wilderness since and it's about time it got resurrected.

Sly & Robbie are most famous for their influence on Reggae in the seventies/eighties. They started out in a band called The Revolutionaries playing drums and bass respectively before moving onto writing and producing hits for pretty much any major reggae artist you can name including Yellowman, Beenie Man, Horace Andy and Barrington Levy. They've since moved onto producing music for a much wider range of artists and i read somewhere that they've now produced over 20,000 songs.

This particular track is a somewhat different kettle of fish from their normal formula, mixing rap (from noted English/Jamaican rapper Shinehead), a seriously funky bassline, a soulful chorus and a cut up style of samples reminiscent of early Coldcut. All this thrown into the mix together equals a classic piece of eighties dance/hip hop music, in other words, perfect for a Friday. A warning though, the whistling is impossible to get out of your head for at least a day afterwards.

The track is taken from the album Rhythm Killers which also features Bootsy Collins and isn't a bad little album at all. You can purchase a copy HERE

Oh yeah, I'll be coming through with a lot of good funk from next week when i finally get more of my music uploaded onto the computer so stay tuned.......