Zungguzungguguzungguzeng!

Yellowman’s rise to fame in the early ’80s mirrored a broader shift in Jamaican music: Instead of soulful roots reggae, the skeletal pulse of early dancehall; instead of dread consciousness and visions of Babylon, sex cracks and nursery rhymes. In the absence of spiritual imagination was a sense of humor and street wisdom that, while not always enlightening (or enlightened), was reassuring, and, maybe more importantly, entertaining. Released about a year after 1982’s Mister Yellowman (and about a year before the equally classic Nobody Move Nobody Get Hurt), Zungguzungguguzungguzeng!—produced, again, by Junjo Lawes with the Roots Radics band—fixed Yellowman’s reputation as one of the more uncut voices in the landscape, a foul-mouthed, self-consciously self-important dope who calls his BMW a “bad man wagon” (“Who Can Make the Dance Ram?”) and thinks that King Solomon was pretty smart but didn’t pull down enough women (“Yellowman Wise”). Some of the views remain repugnant—“Rub a Dub a Play,” one of a number of tunes with Fathead, contains a particularly grisly lyric—but in general, the mood is light, uplifting, and as cathartically nonsensical as the string of syllables that make up the title track, a peak not only for Yellowman but for the era in general.