I am pondering as I write. Recommend this or not? The songs range from brilliant to absolutely riveting. Both LKJ and the Dennis Bovell Dub Band are fully and creatively engaged. This is where eloquent, biting words meet dynamic, buoyant music. This is forceful reggae.

So what’s the problem? Well, I’ve listened maybe six or eight times, and I STILL can’t bear to hear the crowd cheering wildly as LKJ intones the words “people living in fear of impending nuclear warfare” and continuing to whistle as he conveys the sobering truth that, for many of the world’s peoples, the struggle to survive outweighs any concerns about world wars. The concert has just begun, of course, and folks are merely responding to the first bars of a favorite song. I’d likely have cheered too. But wow, the vast gulf between live happy cheering people and the sense of the words is mind-boggling.

Anyway, there’s the problem. It’s the Live Album Syndrome. Aside from the annoying fans, you also have the initial dumb, clichéd introduction (“Are you ready? … put your hands together…”), and later the band member intros that, no matter how well done, have nothing remotely to do with the art of making music.

Yet I can’t dismiss the album. For one thing, LKJ’s french accent is so bad that it makes mine sound good. Secondly, his output is unprolific in the extreme (but impeccable when something does emerge), so we dare not let this one go by. Thirdly, this collects some of the very best of his very strong oeuvre. And finally, a few of these performances have to be LKJ’s definitive versions of the songs: “Reggae Fi Radni”, for example, with its deceptively easy rhymes and beautifully lyrical arrangement; or the already powerful rhetorical devices of “Liesense Fi Kill” —about blacks dying at the hands of the police—made even more potent though an emotive violin solo and the barely submerged rage of the vocal.

My pondering has came to an end, as you will see from my rating above. I feel okay about it. When I want to hear “The Eagle and The Bear” without my brain being torn apart, I can retreat to LKJ’s Making History album. There’s no crowd there.