POP MUSIC REVIEW : World Beat’s Polar Extremes

Jamaica’s Jimmy Cliff and Nigeria’s Fela Kuti stand as progenitors of the current world-music consciousness. But paired on the “World Beat ‘90” tour, which came to the Greek Theatre on Sunday, they proved to represent polar extremes of the movement.

Cliff--stating flatly, “I am not a politician, I am a musician with a mission”--espoused a one-world-peace-and-harmony philosophy and declared that the way to change the world is to “keep hitting . . . with positive sounds.” Cliff’s loping, spirited and tuneful reggae fits the bill.

Cliff classics (“The Harder They Come” and the soul hymn “Many Rivers to Cross”) and newer material (“Reggae Down Babylon”) all carried a sense of hopeful yet patient righteousness, pushed to the fore by the singer’s giddy dance-mugging (described by one observer as “a cross between M. C. Hammer and Bill Cosby”).

In sharp contrast, Fela left no doubt that he is a politician. A forceful and articulate 10-minute speech was almost as prominently featured Sunday as the two half-hour musical pieces that made up his and his massive ensemble’s headlining set. Where Cliff is one-world, Fela is emphatically Third World--he even made a point of rejecting the world-beat tag as a manifestation of Western cultural imperialism, saying, “We don’t play world-beat music, we play African music.”