Toots and the Maytals: Reggae Got Soul : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The news that Toots Hibbert had become a Rastafarian didn't fill my heart with joy. I like Rastafarian music, but it is a spiritual form and I couldn't reconcile the Maytals' earthy celebration of joy now with the Rasta conviction of a righteous revolution tomorrow. Toots may have always lacked Bob Marley's intensity but he's also lacked Marley's edge of despair. Maytals' music (on The Harder They Come soundtrack, for example) is stunning precisely for its unconfined warmth and happiness.

I needn't have worried. Toots's new belief comes out as "Reggae's got soul!" and he has incorporated the religious fervor of the Rastas into his style with the same ease that American secular musicians once transformed gospel into their soul music. Nothing, of course, could hide the coarse pleasure of Toots's voice, but he's also retained his anarchic approach to arrangements, and though the sound is fuller than before (a full horn section) and the songs are slower and more considered, the message remains the same: if that basic reggae beat is there, then anything goes!

Toots and the Maytals always remind me of New Orleans rhythm & blues, one of the crucial roots of reggae. There's the same freedom, won with an incredibly tight use of rhythm, there's the same feeling of musicians as friends, blowing up a good time together, there's the same pleased discovery of new sounds and techniques (here the use of the trumpets throughout, the harmonica on "Reggae Got Soul" and "Everybody Needs Lovin' "). It's music to dance to, but it's also the music of people who believe that dancing is a wonderful human activity. And at the moment that matters. Disco music has become a form which denies the human spirit—mechanical beats, mechanical steps. The Maytals affirm that spirit. If his faith has given Toots a new awareness of the sorrows of this world, his music is still one of its joys.