The drum sets an ominous marching pace, the organ sends out a series of telegraphic beeps, the bass kicks in with the thickest of notes, and Eddy Grant cries out, "Boy!" to begin the strut down "Electric Avenue," the grittiest dance track since "The Message." Although the song addresses itself to the problems of the black London ghetto of Brixton, which has been torn apart by riots in recent years, it really captures the nervous energy, and the commotion, of all big cities. Grant gets across the festering frustration of the urban poor in simple language: "Working so hard like a soldier/Can't afford the things on TV/Deep in my heart I abhor you/Can't get food for the kid." Then he angrily hollers, "Good God!" and gets back into the song's propulsive groove, where the bass is fattened by overdubs of Grant's lowest voice. Bob Marley may have sung "forget your troubles and dance," but Grant makes the worry and anger the reason to dance.

"Electric Avenue" is surely Killer on the Rampage's showpiece, but Grant's third album for an American label has a fistful of fine songs. The simple reggae swing of "I Don't Wanna Dance" has already made it a hit in the U.K., and "It's All in You," with drumming that sounds like handclaps, shows that he can – almost – desert his tropical funk for rock. Like Marley, Grant proves himself adept at both love songs and political tracts; in fact, the same gentleness that warms the lilting reggae of "Too Young to Fall" softens "Another Revolutionary." In that ballad, Grant sings in his sweetest nasal tenor, "Another revolutionary/God they watch him put his ship to sea/But he can't paddle waves with his hands/The Armada's got to make a stand."

A lucid lyricist, Grant also wrote all of the music, played all of the instruments and produced this album, recorded at his home studio in Barbados. He's something of a local hero there, having led a fight to keep the island's beaches open to the native vendors by cowriting a local soul-calypso hit in 1981 called "Jack (Dah Beach Is Mine)" for the Mighty Gabby. The Guyanese-born Grant is pretty well known in England, too, where he played in a group called the Equals through the Sixties and had his song "Police on My Back" covered by the Clash on Sandinista! In America, though, Eddy Grant has been an obscure figure, thought maybe not to rank with reggae's best. His address on "Electric Avenue" ought to change all that.

Even so, the Marley camp is not giving up ground. Marley left behind a musical community that is flourishing: his wife, Rita, will release her second album soon; his children have a twelve-inch single out; and Judy Mowatt and Marcia Griffiths, Rita's cohorts from Bob's backup singers the I-Threes, have new records.

Mowatt's Black Woman is a beautifully sung collection of slow, graceful songs, most of them written by Mowatt herself. The instrumentation is unassuming, even for reggae, with a few moody keyboard touches. Lyrically, she's no Alice Walker, but her "Black Woman," "Sisters' Chant" (a hymnlike call for Jah's help in fighting "temptation, frustration, desolation") and "Joseph" (a song dedicated to Bob Marley) show her to be speaking clearly and earnestly about her beliefs. But I prefer the Aretha-like "Slave Queen," with its Sixties-soul horn charts, to the more prayerful material on the album. Sort of a humorless type, Mowatt never lets fly with any real joy – you begin to want to goose her – and she remains an unobtrusive backup-style singer, blending in neatly and a little sleepily.

The other I-Three, Marcia Griffiths, has recorded a bubbly single, "Electric Boogie," written and produced for her by former Marley cohort Bunny Wailer. The song boasts a silly lyric–"I've got to move, I'm going on a party ride/I've got to groove, and from this music, I just can't hide"–and a chorus of "boogie woogie woogie." But thankfully, it's fun to hear–full of percussive noises that sound like the squeaking of a rubber mouse and the clatter of windup toys–and it went to Number One in Jamaica, which ought to recommend any reggae single.

But most promising is "What a Plot" by the Melody Makers, a group made up of some of the Marleys' kids – two girls and two boys, aged from eight to seventeen. Lead singer Ziggy Marley, sounding remarkably like his father, displays much more talent than you'd expect from a rock star's kid. It's hard not to cock an ear to the song they picked for their first single: the sinister sound of the guitars and the lyric–"What a plot ... against I and I, but they ain't going to catch I"–is playfully at odds with the happy young voices. The Melody Makers may rightly take up where their father left off–rather than where their fellow adolescents in reggae, Musical Youth, came in.

Musical Youth's kid vocals on "Pass the Dutchie" were the cheeriest bit of preteen pop to make it into the Top Twenty here in years. But even without their success, the way would have been paved for New Edition, yet another group led by a kid who is hardly into his teens. Sure, it's a brazen rip-off, but "Candy Girl," the Boston-based New Edition's first single, is a real delight, capturing exactly the vocal sound and ecstatic spirit of the Jackson Five's early hits. New Edition benefits from better recording techniques, though; the rhythms are punchier, the whole sound fuller. (The single was recorded and pressed by Street Wise Records, the label that produced Rockers Revenge's dance-hit version of Eddy Grant's "Walking on Sunshine" last year.) Fed by a rubber-band bass, the song finds fourteen-year-old lead singer Ralph Tresvant even mimicking the way Michael Jackson would stop and talk – "Sit down, girl, I think I love you!"–in the middle of a song. "Hey, fellas, look who just dropped in," yelps Tresvant, forgetting his candy girl for a moment. "It's our producers, Maurice Starr and Michael Jonzun!" It's a shameless moment, but so's the single, and they're only to be congratulated for bringing back the sound of the best of black bubblegum. (RS 395)

DEBBY MILLER