EDDY GRANT "LIVING ON THE FRONTLINE"
; "EDDY GRANT \"LIVING ON THE FRONTLINE\"")
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Description
There’s something deceptively brilliant embedded within the strange & uncomfortable mixture of pop music & critical, socially conscious lyricism. This exercise in camouflaged critical theory has been wielded by the most influential of pop artists, often times for the benefit of reputation & cultural appeasement, a means by which artists demarcate their separation from complete subservience to the dominant order---both recording labels & the broader social totality. Eddy Grant, master of Disco-Reggae fusion & icon of militant cultural resistance stands in stark contrast to those revolutionary farces, concerned solely with the image of the invested social activist, playing the role of the divergent & dissident advocate for their own selfish benefit. His life-long commitment to the critical & engaged deconstruction, partially spurred by his upbringing as a poor Jamaican immigrant in London’s Kentish Town district, developed into a one-man mission to infuse the new dance aesthetic with a rigidly conscious perception of modern conditions of material & existential despair, operating from his unique status as the sole owner of Ice Records and dissemination his cross-cultural, heterogeneous mastery of soulful rhythmic ingenuity, eventually gaining world-wide popularity for his rabid & uncompromising assault on the hypocrisy of the developed world, despite enjoying stardom status across the board. Popularity was never a priority for Grant, and yet, despite his success in the underground dance music scene of NYC & beyond, gaining indisputable prestige for such works as “Walking On Sunshine” & “Time Warp” (the instrumental version of “Nobody’s Got Time," featured in this 12’ compilation), Grant managed to ride the delicate & fragile line of popularity & refusal in delivering his sound to the most recuperated & utterly subservient of cultural channels while maintaining a starch integrity & political wit that always showed through his most ingenious of pop-music sensibilities---the perfect vehicle to disseminate his critical drollness throughout the developed world. "They got me living on top of my existence, oh appreciating my resistance.”
