The Mouse & The Man

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Perhaps as a response to the lovelorn celebration of <i>Skidip</i>, Eek-A-Mouse redoubled the intensity of his political rhetoric with 1983’s <i>The Mouse and the Man</i>. Kingston’s endless cycle of oppression, rebellion, and violence is captured in “Terrorists in the City”: “John Brown him dead and gone/Jah know that him history still a go on/As him dead more John Brown born/Police full him up a corn/And him friend them run and gone.” Eek uses the name John Brown to invoke both the legacy of the American abolitionist/insurrectionist and to refer to nameless black youths who die daily in violence in Jamaica. This intense yet open-ended historical impression is exactly the sort of thing in which Eek specializes. While “Sexy Girl” and “Maybe Lady” are examples of Eek’s flirtatious nature, <i>The Mouse and the Man</i> is best remembered for “Hitler,” a song that relives the darkest facts of the Holocaust with unwavering clarity: “All day all night me say him really provoke/Him use some of them skin and turn to soap/This is history and remember this ain’t no joke/This ain’t no joke.”

via Apple Music