The Jolly Boys Perform Mento Version of the Doors’ “Riders on the Storm”

 Posted by at 2:30 pm  1 Response »
Mar 012011
 

It’s mento, people, not Mentos. A Jamaican musical genre that predated ska and reggae, mento has not received the same attention that its more popular offsprings have, but The Jolly Boys have been performing this acoustic-based music for the last six decades. A while back we heard them cover Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab.” Now they return with something a little more vintage.

Check out the video below for the latest in mento: The Jolly Boys covering The Doors‘ classic “Riders on the Storm.” The song lends itself to the easy beat they lay down, but there’s something strange about a band with ‘Jolly’ in their name playing island music but singing about a twisted, dangerous drifter. Continue reading »

Song of the Day: The Jolly Boys, “Rehab” (Amy Winehouse cover)

 Posted by at 9:00 am  3 Responses »
Oct 182010
 

Song of the Day posts one cool cover every morning. Catch up on past installments here.

For most of the world, “Jamaican music” means one thing: reggae. Now, this isn’t totally off base. But reggae didn’t come about until the late 1960s. Surely something came before. Of course it did. That something (or one of those somethings) was “mento.”

You could be forgiven for confusing the two. Both emphasize the backbeats, lazily meandering along. Mento, though, comes from African folk traditions and features a more acoustic sound. Mentomusic.com offers loads of insights, including a fascinating piece on mento’s influence on Bob Marley. Whether you’ve heard of the genre or not, you almost certainly know one example: “Day-O (The Banana Boat),” a mento song sold as calypso because Americans didn’t know the difference. Continue reading »

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