Buju Banton

Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a 1995 album that changed the sound of dancehall while pointing the genre in a newly reflective direction.
“Strangest feeling I’m feeling/But Jah love we will always believe in/Though you may think my fate is in vain/’Til Shiloh, we chant Rastafari’s name.”

These two lines, delivered in a fervent acappella, comprise the entirety of the first track on Buju Banton’s 1995 album ’Til Shiloh. The legendary deejay’s raspy voice—until then typically heard booming from the towering 10,000-watt sound systems of open-air dancehall sessions—seemed instead to conjure the resonant wooden chancel of a church; the way it rose in tone, from hushed to beseeching, gave it the unmistakable contour of a prayer, an entreaty aimed at once inward and skyward. Taken on its own, it might easily be heard as a snatch of gospel music, yet the divine names Jah and Rastafari placed the song squarely outside the strictures of mainstream Christianity.

Banton was then Jamaica’s most prominent artist and reggae’s rawest voice—whether measured in the sheer volume of his thundering basso or the unfiltered sex and violence of his lyrics. But “Shiloh,” just 18 seconds long, signaled a shift. If this first track contained within its mesmerizing tranquility a half-formed question about what sort of album might follow, the second—“’Til I’m Laid to Rest”—offered a definitive answer. Opening with wordless vocalizations reminiscent of Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s traditional Zulu harmonies, it was anchored solely by Nyabinghi hand drums.

Atop this self-consciously traditional accompaniment, Buju unveiled a vocal declamation that was shockingly inventive in form, adapting his signature deejay style—a gruff baritone polyrhythm more closely associated with dance-friendly catchphrases—to a classic protest song: “Oh, I’m in bondage, living is a mess/I’ve got to rise up, alleviate the stress/No longer will I expose my weakness/He who seeks knowledge begins with humbleness.”

The effect was electrifying, combining the gritty emotional pull of a blues lament and the mystic aura of the best roots reggae with the rhythmic dexterity and extemporization of a soundclash champion. Producer Bobby Digital would later issue this rhythmic bed as a juggling riddim, featuring other vocalists over a filled-out arrangement with rhythm guitar and a harder kick and snare pattern, called the “Kette Drum” riddim, but when Buju wrapped his constantly modulating double-time around this slow, stripped-down version, most listeners had never heard anything like it.

At the time of ’Til Shiloh’s release, dancehall had been recognized as its own art form, something more than just a subset of reggae, for less than a decade. Buju, at the ripe old age of 22, was its undisputed king. He began deejaying seriously in the late ’80s, hanging around Kingston sound systems like Rambo Mango and Culture Love, waiting for a chance to hold the mic, then haunting studio gates, hoping to record. Although “The Ruler,” for producer Robert Ffrench, was the first Buju 45 pressed to vinyl, his 1991 breakout hit “Stamina Daddy,” for Winston Riley’s Techniques label, established his star persona: a lanky beanpole of a youth assuming the macho swagger of a bigger man, complete with a deep, gravelly voice that emulated his namesake, the older sound system star Burro Banton.

In 1991 and 1992 he followed “Stamina Daddy” with a seemingly endless string of hits including “Quick,” “Bogle,” “Battyrider,” “Love Me Browning,” “Love Black Woman,” and “Bonafide Love,” featuring Wayne Wonder. Mr. Mention, his 1992 debut for producer Donavan Germain’s Penthouse label, broke sales records, and the same year he also broke the standing chart record for No. 1 singles in Jamaica, previously held by Bob Marley & the Wailers.

He did so, seemingly, by carrying Jamaican music in the exact opposite direction from Marley’s visionary songwriting, specializing instead in rapidfire delivery, a sexual braggadocio beyond his years, and courting all manner of controversy. The central conceit of “Browning,” for instance, made a play on the similarity between the Browning semi-automatic pistol and the slang term for a light-skinned woman. Read as either promoting gun culture or stigmatizing dark skin, the song caused such a backlash that Buju quickly followed it up with “Love Black Woman” on the same rhythm track to make it clear where his true affections lay. Thus managing to have it both ways, he capitalized on the scandal and then quelled it with his own answer record.

Just as this wave of success led to a major-label deal with Mercury, however, Buju’s seemingly magical ability to be outrageous without repercussions failed him with the unexpected release of “Boom Bye Bye.” An early lyric penned when he was 15, then re-recorded for Shabba Ranks’ manager Clifton “Specialist” Dillon, “Boom Bye Bye” was calculated for pure, sophomoric shock value, simultaneously playing up the taboo subject of gay sex and exhorting graphic violence against its practitioners. Jaw-droppingly offensive lyrics were par for the course in dancehall at the turn of the ’90s, a milieu of “slackness” in which Little Lenny compared STDs to a “Gun in a Baggy” (baggy = panties) and Admiral Bailey got himself banned from radio with “Two Year Old,” which seemingly sexualized toddlers.

If shock was the goal then “Boom Bye Bye”—released on Dillon’s Shang imprint just as Buju was reaching an international audience that would hear his words with very different ears—succeeded beyond his worst nightmares. The violent lyrics were reprinted in the New York Post and denounced by GLAAD. His international shows were met with protests, and Buju was summarily dropped from the bill of England’s WOMAD festival. Buju distanced himself from the song and issued a public apology—but then undercut it by suggesting in interviews that he was being censored and misunderstood by outsiders to dancehall and Jamaican culture.

Some critics and academics pushed back on the way Buju and other dancehall artists were portrayed in the international press. Professor Carolyn Cooper of the University of the West Indies has argued that a xenophobic double standard is applied to dancehall, writing: “Homophobia is one part of dancehall but… I don’t think it incites people to violence. I think people understand the power of metaphor.” Nonetheless, rights organizations like J-FLAG documented a frightening rise in all-too-real violence against LBGTQ Jamaicans during the same period that homophobic lyrics became a trend in dancehall.

Buju eventually signed on to the Reggae Compassionate Act, renouncing all violent and homophobic lyrics, and ultimately scrubbed “Boom Bye Bye” from his catalog altogether. In 1993, however, the unfolding firestorm of mutual mistrust undoubtedly hampered the reach of his major label debut, Voice of Jamaica, which attempted to marry a more mature melodic dancehall sound to rap and R&B (including a cameo from a newly solo Busta Rhymes). But if the easy violence of his youthful lyrics had come back to haunt him on the verge of international stardom, it seemed karma was not done with Buju yet. It was while touring behind the album in Japan that he learned of the murder of his friend and fellow deejay Pan Head, formerly a specialist in gunman tunes, under murky circumstances in the Maverley section of Kingston. He poured his anguish into the lyrics of the plaintive “Murderer,” which charged the wistful melody of reggae’s classic “Far East” riddim with new gravity: “Yes, you can hide from man but not your conscience/You eat the bread of sorrow, drink the wine of violence/Allow yourself to be conquered by the serpent/Why did you disobey the first commandment?”

“Murderer” captured the collective spirit of the times. It wasn’t just a massive hit in dancehall culture; it was a phenomenon, often credited with single-handedly changing the genre’s trajectory. Sherman Escoffery, a nephew of Winston Riley who had recognized Buju’s potential early (and along with his cousin Kirk Riley recorded and leaked “Stamina Daddy” before the elder Riley had a chance to say no) witnessed firsthand the effect Pan Head’s death had on Buju and his dancehall contemporaries Capleton and Beenie Man, each of whom recorded their own Pan Head tribute songs (“Cold Blooded Murderer” and “No Mama, No Cry,” respectively).

“When Pan Head died it was kinda like one of those moments of enlightenment,” Escoffery recalls in a new interview. “The violence is still there. Being a deejay, being a popular guy is not gonna protect you. But also they had gotten to a certain age where they weren’t children anymore. They were now grown men and they had to start taking responsibility for the things that they say, the things that they put out there. It was the same thing with ‘Boom Bye Bye.’ That was something that started off as a joke, but people are dying now, people are getting beaten up for being gay. Now your words have taken on flesh.”

In the same period, Buju publicly converted to Rastafari and started to grow his hair into dreadlocks. Released as a 45 single in ’93, “Murderer” was included as the third track on the CD version of ’Til Shiloh, followed by “Champion,” another established club anthem with a faster pace, more in line with conventional dancehall expectations. These two songs connected the album’s bold vision back to the voice that Buju fans already knew well and confirmed that he wasn’t going to let ’Til Shiloh’s neo-roots experimentation supplant the hits-packed model of Mr. Mention. In fact, of its 16 tracks, at least nine became certified dancehall classics that still play regularly on sound systems, including combinations with singers Garnett Silk (“Complaint”), who had also tragically passed away scarcely a year before the album’s release, and Wayne Wonder (“What Ya Gonna Do?”). Even the less anthemic cuts on ’Til Shiloh aren’t so much skips as sleepers. Repeated listens reveal how the lyrics of the quieter “Chuck It So,” for instance, build upon the album’s profound anti-violence theme.

The wealth of singles charts an evolution in Buju’s voice and sound, leaning toward more ecstatic themes and a jubilant, double-time steppers tempo best heard on “How Could You,” “Wanna Be Loved,” and “Hush Baby Hush.” In that sense it is a uniquely satisfying dancehall album, a document of what was actually happening on dancefloors and sound systems; an unprecedented rejection of violence, experienced and expressed collectively in real time through music.

Yet it is also more than that, as the songs already known to Buju’s fanbase are exponentially heightened by their placement within the frame of ’Til Shiloh’s original material. “Untold Stories” is another example of Buju’s newly unveiled vocal approach, this time setting that inimitable rising and falling flow to an unadorned acoustic guitar groove that recalls Marley’s “Redemption Song” or perhaps even a Tracy Chapman ballad. Here, Buju outdoes himself lyrically once again, delivering a searing testimonial on behalf of those trapped by the structural violence of Kingston’s garrison geography: “Who can afford to run will run but what about those who can’t? They will have to stay/Opportunity a scarce-scarce commodity in these times I say/When Mama spend her last and send you go class/Never you ever play.”

Applying the intricate rhythmic improvisations of the deejay’s art to such emotionally raw subject matter, Buju arrived at a vocal form with the immediacy of personal testimony, pouring forth in a stream of consciousness that could also, paradoxically, hypnotize with the chanting quality of a prayer. Though also released on 45, “Untold Stories” could hardly be called a typical dancehall single: It touched on something more intimate and sacred, if no less communal.

Along with “Til I’m Laid to Rest,” “Untold Stories” is the keystone statement of ’Til Shiloh, effectively bringing the artistic arc documented on the previously released singles to a crescendo. It demonstrated that the wiser, more compassionate side Buju revealed on “Murderer” was not simply an in-the-moment reaction to tragedy but a lasting change in his artistic voice, bringing to bear the same skill he had previously applied to gun talk or the latest dance step on themes of eternity, redemption, and purpose.

Neither the depth nor the artistic evolution were lost on critics and fans. In their 1998 book Reggae Routes, music historians Kevin O’Brien Chang and Wayne Chen summed up the critical consensus this way: “Artists like… Buju Banton and Luciano give hope for the future. Indeed, many critics saw Buju’s 1995 album ’Til Shiloh as the genre’s first masterpiece….” “Masterpiece” was not too strong a word. A quarter of a century on, ’Til Shiloh stands as one of those rare albums wherein the intensely personal expression of an artist at the height of their powers aligned perfectly with a larger cultural shift. A wave of neo-roots followed in its wake: digital reimaginings of reggae’s golden era that paired drum machines with strumming acoustic guitar lines, crafted by producers like Buju collaborator Bobby Digital and Philip “Fatis” Burrell. Buju’s long-player also changed dancehall’s relationship with the album form, which prior to ’Til Shiloh was often just a compilation of an artist’s latest 45s. If Sizzla, Luciano, and Capleton each forged their own equally original versions of neo-roots, their debt to ’Til Shiloh is most evident in the expansive, longform visions they reached for on Black Woman & Child (1997), Sweep Over My Soul (1999), and More Fire (2000), respectively.

Just as tellingly, with the possible exception of Super Cat, none of the reigning badmen who had ruled dancehall before Buju’s rise (Shabba, Ninjaman, Cutty Ranks) scored a solid hit after ’Til Shiloh. Its impact can even be traced outside the realm of reggae. If ’Til Shiloh’s sonic palette had something of an antecedent in the Fugees’ 1993 debut Blunted on Reality (especially the original album version of “Vocab,” which set breakneck raps to a drumless acoustic guitar riff) it was almost certainly a precedent for Lauryn Hill as she mapped out her solo reinvention on 1998’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, most audibly on “To Zion,” which unfolds like a swelling neo-roots hymn in all but accent.

Most of all, however, it was the moment that the artist who could credibly call himself the Voice of Jamaica fully grew into his own voice. In Escoffery’s view this growth represented not so much learning to avoid controversy or ignore criticism as it did a hard-earned perspective on which reactions mattered. “If you’re offending the politicians for the sake of the people, the people are always going to be on your side,” he observes. “You will get some backlash for calling out the powerful… but that’s good backlash. You’re offending the right people.” ’Til Shiloh still resonates not just for its musical innovations and virtuosic command of craft, but also as a portrait of an artist coming into full knowledge of their own creative power—to harm or to heal.