Mixtapes for Hookers

Here to kick off my Top 10 of 2000:

10. Bob Marley and Lauryn Hill, Turn Your Lights Down Low

People should not sing duets with dead people.  Back when I was ten or so, I was really into Unforgettable, Natalie Cole’s duet with her dead father.  I thought the video was very moving, too.  But I was ten, and wrong.  Duets with dead people are an affront to dead people.  And to living people.  And to the circle of life, if you’re into that sort of thing.

I’ve never really liked Bob Marley.  I mean, I appreciate his existence, in the way that I appreciate Merle Haggard and Afrika Bambaataa and Puccini’s existences.  I understand that these are very talented people with a very significant influence on the world as I know it today.  But that doesn’t mean I ever want to listen to them, or find the experience of listening to them pleasurable. Bob Marley makes music that might have been politically significant in its day, but people in 2009 listen to Bob Marley because they’re stoned and in high school and possibly wearing cargo shorts with flip flops in the middle of winter. When this song came out, in 2000, they were probably also wearing fisherman’s hats and pukka shell necklaces. Maybe they still are.

Give me dancehall any day, violent and misogynist and homophobic though it may be; that’s the reggae I want to hear, if I want to hear reggae. Angry, fun, enthusiastic. Music you can dance to, rather than hold hands around a fire to.

That said, this song’s not actually that bad; it was pretty much the last decent Lauryn Hill single until she resurfaced many years later with that catchy Lily Allen-ish song from the surfing penguins movie.  I don’t know the original Turn Your Lights Down Low, but I like the way Hill’s rap doesn’t really alter the song’s slow, romantic energy the way that so many intrusive guest-raps do. All in all, a solid B+, even if I still say that no one should ever, ever sing a duet with a dead person.