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The Good: Sweet To The Belly, Blasé, Row Like A Boat, We Waah Why You Doing It, Sake A Dat Gal, Sadda Dem, Erica, Nah Climb, Stop Hitch, Chiney Ting, Red Red, Pride
The Bad: Head NoGood, To The Right, Fat Infinite
The Ugly: Too much Kartel and Ele, no Sizzla or any singers |
In the annual battle between Greensleeves Records’ Biggest Ragga Dancehall Anthems and VP’s Strictly The Best series (See our Review of Strictly The Best 31), 2003 goes to Greensleeves. Usually a two-disc vs. two-disc war of competing year-end compilations, VP skimped on a disc and focussed more on potential crossover hits than the tunes that actually ran the dance red in 2k3.
Increasing competition between the labels for exclusive contracts with Dancehall artists means that you really have to buy both compilations these days, because neither one accurately reflects the year’s best music anymore. Greensleeves waves their exclusive contract with Vybz Kartel in VP’s face, including no less than eight Kartel songs among the album’s 40 tracks. Kartel had a good year, but it wasn’t that damn good. They’re also eight Elephant Man joints, which were in Greensleeves’ archives before Ele jumped ship to VP. If you’re not an Ele or Kartel fan, you’re not going to like a full 40% of this album. On the flip side, Anthems has no Sizzla or Sean Paul, both of whom sang major Dancehall smashes last year.
That being said, a whole heap of bonafide bashment tunes are included on Anthems. Beenie’s hat-trick of big hits – “Row Like A Boat,” “Hand Up Deh,” and “Red Red” – are here. You also can’t fault the three selections on Vendetta’s scorching “Good To Go” rhythm, especially Bounty’s “Sadda Dem” and Elephant’s “Stop Hitch.” In fact, if you take the eight Ele tracks from Anthems, you probably have a better collection of songs than those on Elephant’s recently released VP album.
Anthems also includes hot tracks from T.O.K, Predator and Spragga Benz (Spragga’s collabo with T.O.K, “We Waah,” is great, but his “To The Right” is terrible). The songs from relatively unknown artists – especially Kid Kurrupt and Taz & Chico – are boom tunes that definitely deserve the spotlight and their place on Anthems.
THE VERDICT: If a lot of this album sounds the same to you, it’s because there are really only about 11 artists scattered among Anthems’ 40 tracks. A little variety could definitely have helped this project, but Anthems is still a good way to catch most of 2003’s big tunes.
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