For Mutabaruka, Music Is Not the Only Message

For Mutabaruka, reggae is a means to merge two distinct artistic callings--one as a militantly political poet appealing to the intellect, the other as a charismatic bandleader intent on moving the body.

Midway through his show Monday night at the Palace in Hollywood, as the 35-year-old Jamaican chanted his anger at assorted injustices in a poem-song called “Everytime A ‘Ear De Soun,’ ” one fan was sufficiently transported to suggest that Mutabaruka might fit the bill for a third calling--this one spiritual.

“Preach! Preach!” yelled the listener. And with his incantational, rhyming couplets carrying unmasked contempt for worldly powers he sees as oppressors, it wasn’t hard to imagine Mutabaruka holding forth from a pulpit, a Jeremiah in dreadlocks, or at least a Jamaican Jesse Jackson.

As he sat in his dressing room after the show, the long smock of many colors that he had worn on stage exchanged for basic-black street clothes, Mutabaruka’s deep, full-bodied speaking voice rose in amused incredulity at the notion that he might be a preacher as well as a poet.

“Me--Jimmy Swaggart!” he burst out. Someone in his entourage suggested that “prophet” would be a better description than “preacher.” But Mutabaruka--who performs tonight at the Coach House with his six-man Sounds of Resistance Band--wasn’t about to claim a divine connection as the source of his verse. The lines spill out, he said, because “I love to talk.”

Mutabaruka’s flow of words began when he was a Kingston schoolboy going under his given name of Allen Hope. He turned to the Rastafarian faith in the early ‘70s and began calling himself Mutabaruka--an African name he says means “a soldier who is always victorious.”

He first gained notice as a poet whose ideas were influenced by such ‘60s black militant writers as Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver. A good deal of Mutabaruka’s Jamaican dialect poetry is aimed at keeping their revolutionary radicalism alive with a strong sense of outrage.

He indicts white America for oppressing blacks and Indians, assails the United States and the Soviets alike for tampering in the Third World, and decries South African apartheid, advocating that regime’s overthrow by--as he puts it in the title of one song--”Any Means Necessary.”

After publishing several books of poetry in the ‘70s, Mutabaruka began working with reggae musicians who fleshed out instrumental accompaniments for his dramatic recitations.

“We never really tried to turn poems into songs” by giving them a sung melody line, Mutabaruka said. “We find music to fit with the poem, to make it more acceptable to people who don’t like to hear just words.”

He said the music also is a device to gain a fair hearing from audiences--especially whites--who might turn their backs if confronted only with radical words. “People don’t want to feel that you’re attacking them personally. The music is breaking the fall. When you hear the music, then the words don’t seem so personal.”

At the Palace, Mutabaruka breathed humanity and a measure of ironic humor into his critiques of the world order, making them far more than soapbox polemics.

“The Leaders Speak,” a fantasy in which political potentates fumble to justify themselves to a god who has unexpectedly demanded an accounting of their actions, received a play-acting treatment that oozed sarcasm. Rather than doing the obvious--thundering to vilify the powerful as malevolent enemies--Mutabaruka’s patronizing tone cast them as pathetic moral tots, children who know no better than to grasp for toys and throw tantrums.

“Ode to Johnny Drughead” pointed Mutabaruka’s irony at a cocaine-addicted musician, but his anguished grimaces made it clear that the story was meant as a human tragedy, and not just a coldly didactic device to warn against hard drugs.

Mutabaruka’s show was about dancing as well as discourse. He swayed, shook his flapping locks, ran an invisible treadmill, conducted his sharp, flexible band with displays of body English and generally gave new meaning to the expression “poetry in motion.”

The audience responded to the political messages, but, judging from the number of whoops and yells, took the most pleasure in Mutabaruka’s least-politicized song, “Dub Poem,” a celebration of music as sheer enjoyment.

While one of his poems, “Revolutionary Words,” decried artists and audiences who use socially conscious themes as entertainment fodder without caring to provoke change, Mutabaruka didn’t come off as a purist. His object was to spark thought, but he wasn’t about to drive away those who came just to move their bodies.

Prefacing an encore of unaccompanied poetry readings, Mutabaruka claimed the poet’s prerogative of bringing words to the fore, and jokingly tweaked those in the audience who like to groove to the rhythm while remaining oblivious to the content.

While those who fit that description left or adjourned to the bar, he read lines about the value of speaking out, of being--as the concluding one-line poem of his most recent album, “The Mystery Unfolds,” puts it--”a voice.”

At one point, Mutabaruka asked rhetorically whether he should soften his stance and write about less-threatening subjects, such as romance and natural beauty.

“Do you think I would be a better writer if my poems were lighter?” Several people in the audience shouted “no, no”--and they were right. A good deal of Mutabaruka’s thought--including his theory of the Ethiopian famine as a superpower conspiracy and his advocacy of bloodshed as a South African solution--is open to argument.

But there is no quarreling with the idea that a voice as trenchant, humanistic and outspoken as his is something worth listening to.

Mutabaruka performs at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano, tonight at 8. Tickets: $16.50. Information: (714) 496-8927.

DAYTIME IS THE RIGHT TIME: Local rock will be a daytime sport Sunday in an “Afternoon Fest” at Goodies, 1641 Placentia Ave., Fullerton. The lineup, starting at 2 p.m., features National People’s Gang, Scarecrows, Graveyard Shift, Black Daphne and Go Ask Alice.