SUMMER SONGS 08: LUC SANTE

Prince Mohammed: Bubbling Love
From 12" (Job Gibbs, 197?). Also on Bubbling.

Derek Holtsma, Robbie Shakespeare, Sly Dunbar: Reggae Strings
From 12" (B-side of the Congos "Jah Is the Sweetest") (Rasta Movement, 197?)

Junior Delgado: Fort Augustus
From 12" (Taxi, 1979)

Gregory Isaacs and U-Brown: The Border
From 12" (GGs, 197?). Also on My Number One.

Derrick Laro and Trinity: Don't Stop Until You Get Enough
From 12" (Joe Gibbs, 1980). Also on Hustle! Reggae Disco.

(Editor's Note: I first became acquainted with Luc Sante through his writings on New York, namely his remarkable history of early New York, Low Life as well as his remarkable, bittersweet essay on living in the Lower East Side in the '80s, "My Lost City", which also appears in a fantastic anthology of Sante's essays, Kill Your Darlings. As a novelist and modern "man of letters," Sante covers a range of topics in his writing but music is a central interest and love (he has a Grammy from 1997 for his liner notes for the Anthology of American Folk Music). For his Summer Songs post, Sante reflects on hot New York summers and the sound of reggae sides floating atop the fog of heat. --O.W.)

Written by Luc Sante:

I grew up in various suburbs and now I live in a town on the edge of the countryside, but when I close my eyes and think of summer, the image that appears is always of summer in the city, specifically New York City, where I spent nearly every summer between the ages of 18 and 40. Summer meant poorly ventilated tenement apartments with no air-conditioning and no swimming pool. It meant an intense, slablike heat caught between brick walls in the motionless air, turning the asphalt liquid and the sidewalk reflective, settling a yellow film over the world, making everybody stupefied or murderous or both at once. But if you lived in that heat you had no choice but to surrender to it, and if you truly gave yourself up you could find a strange kind of euphoria in it. If you became one with the heat, it gave you a gift; it was as if your physical processes altered fundamentally, became more fluid, tapped secret resources of energy to remain upright and moving.

I did a lot of walking in those days, because it was better than sitting at home and because I was restless anyway all year round, and in summer the walk became like something between swimming and dancing, a sort of gliding lope I could ride like a wave through air with the consistency of blood. Naturally I had to have a soundtrack, and before the boom box and the Walkman the soundtrack would have to be provided by an internal jukebox. In the summer I especially liked to feed mine with Jamaican twelves, which provided the exact rhythm and mood for my walking purposes--they were after all products of intense urban heat themselves. And they were my principal secret reserve of energy. Whatever stamina my body couldn’t provide on its own would be supplied by the bass lines that lived on in my head.

The bass was paramount. It was fuel. I walked all day--and often danced all night--with power supplied by Robbie Shakespeare and Aston Barrett and Lloyd Parks and Boris Gardiner and Fully Fullwood and Leroy Sibbles and Flabba Holt and Ranchie McLean. The bass located a dynamo in the lower torso, about midway between the navel and the groin, which governed hips and legs and knees and feet. To contain those bass lines was to put on seven-league boots. I don’t know how anybody ever managed to make it through summers in the city without them.