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The word over the riddim
Dub poetry put spoken verse in Jamaican language over a bass line and asked to be judged as literature. Britain in the late 1970s is where it did its hardest work.
Linton Kwesi Johnson
Poet
- Chapelton, Jamaica, then London
- 1970s onwards
Linton Kwesi Johnson came to London as a boy and started writing poetry that was built for the ear rather than the page, in Jamaican language, over rhythm. Set to Dennis Bovell’s arrangements, the records that resulted are one of the few genuinely new things to come out of British music.
The subject is Britain: policing, the National Front, the courts, the everyday texture of being black in a country that had invited his parents and then resented their children. It is angry writing, and it is also extremely controlled, which is what makes it land.
He is one of very few living poets published in the Penguin Modern Classics series.
Go and listen
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