Blog July 8, 2015
New From Eek-A-Mouse: "Trading Guns For Weed"
Eek-A-Mouse and Dennis Brown are two absolute legends of Jamaican music, which makes the the idea of the two artists sharing a track immediately exciting. Even more exciting is that the track is called “Trading Guns For Weed” and features excellent spaghetti Western-style cover art. Dennis Brown passed away over a decade ago, so his appearance on a new release might seem mysterious at first, but the track actually reuses the “Mr. Bassie” riddim and vocals from an earlier Brown song called “The Spirit.” That song had a spiritual tinge to it, while the Eek-A-Mouse version is all about stopping the violence, and Eek has a pretty brilliant idea about how to do it. (See also Shaggy's recent comments on ISIS.)
Eek-A-Mouse has transposed his eccentric singjay inflections on top of Brown’s soulful vocals (“the spirit is moving in me, all over my body”). That means plenty of “bam bam bim bim bim”s, which is always good news, as far as we’re concerned. Eek’s voice sounds much gruffer now than in his falsetto crooning early days, but that only imbues a deeper authority in lines like “Death is watching you, watching you while you sleep. Trade in guns for weed.” Listen to the Mouse. The track will be officially released July 23. You can preorder from iTunes or stream it now below:
