A wonderful, wonderful aunt gave me this for my (15th?) birthday, along with a Bob Marley cassette and a dub cassette. World-shatteringly weird to me at the time, this was like a book in a foreign language. I couldn't decode the specific anger, the blackness, the dubness, the Britishness (I thought they were British but they're Jamaican. No wonder I was confused), the percolating, throbbing electronic percussion, the deep ass-kicking drive of the Sly & Robbie rhythm section, Michael Rose's keening, moaning, snarling singing style. All of it was alien and offputting and ineffably addictive. I kept listening even though I didn't understand. It wasn't until sometime in the mid-90s that I was listening one day on headphones while walking a long way through a shitty part of town, and finally got it, somehow. (Nowadays I tend to think we never really get it. All music is someone else's prayer to a god known only to them- each of us is an occluded, inexpert eavesdropper and we bring what we need to hear to our shared experience. But sometimes you feel it even if you don't understand it, and, as they say, who feels it knows it.)
I bought this on vinyl the other day from a loft sale in a warehouse, and brought it home excited. Then I realized I already owned it. It's a measure of my love for the album that I don't really want to get rid of either copy. (Want one? Let me know and we'll talk snail-mail options... Duplicate records don't belong in tiny Brooklyn apartments).
http://www.mediafire.com/file/b806wkdxav3vnse/Black%20Uhuru-%20Sinsemilla.zip
