Michael Smith

Dub poetry traces its invention to Linton Kwesi Johnson, still its single most influential exponent, yet Michael Smith ranked among the form’s other gifted and politically ferocious voices, one whose brief life permitted the release of only a solitary record. Raised in a hard-edged Kingston district, Smith absorbed the local reggae milieu: the toasting riddims of I-Roy and U-Roy, the weighty dub creations of Lee Perry and King Tubby, and Bob Marley’s pointed social commentary. Beginning, like Johnson, as a poet, Smith inveighed against Jamaica’s political apparatus—whether left- or right-leaning—for its persistent neglect of the populace, while also grappling with racism’s reach across the Caribbean and among West Indian emigrants. His work drew the attention of Linton Kwesi Johnson, who, aided by Dennis Bovell, arranged for Smith to travel to England and record a dub-poetry album supported by accomplished players from Bovell’s Dub Band and the noted Afro-Brit reggae ensemble Aswad. Bovell and LKJ produced the resulting debut, Mi Cyaan Believe It, a striking release that signaled, together with Johnson and Mutabaruka, an especially fertile phase for the genre. Smith went back to Jamaica in 1982 and was fatally shot under suspicious conditions by members of the Jamaican Labour Party; although it was claimed he had first attacked them, the nation’s charged political history rendered that account implausible, and the politically motivated killing deprived reggae of one of its most eloquent protest voices.