Happy 30th Anniversary to Jamiroquai’s debut album Emergency On Planet Earth, originally released June 14, 1993.
In 1978, British jazz-funkers Hi-Tension released their debut album and single, with the eponymous single reaching #13 in the British pop charts. It was enough to earn them a coveted slot on the world-famous Top Of The Pops as they became the vanguard of an underground movement that had been inspired by US stars like Donald Byrd and Lonnie Liston Smith.
Rubbing shoulders with Hi-Tension were groups like Central Line, Light of the World, Beggar & Co and Incognito, to name but a few. Some would continue to achieve success, but the movement would, as always, shift and twist into new forms, as jazz-funk was now embedded in British musical culture. Six years later, in 1984, Kiss FM began transmitting as a pirate radio station (Kiss 94) and DJ Norman Jay coined the phrase “rare groove” to describe the deep cuts from soul and funk artists that he spun in the early days of the station.
Amidst these twin movements, a young man named Jason Cheetham left his private school aged 15, moved to a squat and immersed himself in the rare groove culture that London offered. Without a job, petty crime came his way until the dawning realization struck him that music was his future. Demos began to be put together and sent to record companies in the hope that his life would turn around. Music was, after all, in his DNA—his mother was a cabaret singer and his (estranged) father was a Portuguese guitar player.
By the time 1991 came around, Cheetham had shortened his first name to Jay and taken his mother’s surname of Kay. It was under this new identity that he struck relative gold. In 1991, he signed to Gilles Peterson’s Acid Jazz label to release the single “When You Gonna Learn?” which, in turn, prompted Sony to sign him to a lucrative deal. But things weren’t actually that straightforward, as Jay Kay himself outlined on the 20th anniversary reissue of the debut album Emergency On Planet Earth.
Having written the song in a matter of minutes, he set about recording it to hawk around to record companies, much to the excitement of his manager. The man assigned to produce the song butchered it, taking out verses and wrapping it up in a sheen of production that made it sound like every other record in the top 40. Jay Kay was having none of it and insisted upon a live sound. As he put it so perfectly in the liner notes for the aforementioned reissue, “I was a funk kid. I wanted a proper live band with a proper live sound.”
That band ended up (after the odd bump in the road) as Toby Smith on keys, Nick Van Gelder on drums, Stuart Zender on bass and Wallis Buchanan on didgeridoo. Which might lead you to wonder what Jay Kay’s role was beyond singer and charismatic frontman. Again, the liner notes revealed a surprising fact about the creative process. Kay had very little musical ability (his words, not mine), but he would sing the parts as he wrote. Every single part. Strings, bass, guitar, horns, drums—the whole kit and caboodle. He is not alone in that way of working (funk goddess Betty Davis would work in the same way), but it still stands as testament to his vision and determination that he could work like that.
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The name the group adopted, Jamiroquai, came from a portmanteau of “jam” and the native indigenous Canadian tribe, “Iroquois.” Kay had been deep into learning about and appreciating the traditions and world view of indigenous tribes of North America and one of the famous quotes from the Cree people informed his songwriting too: “Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught, will we realize we cannot eat money.” It’s easily heard in that lead single, “When You Gonna Learn?,” when he sings, “Yeah, yeah, have you heard the news today? / Money’s on the menu in my favourite restaurant / Well don’t talk about quantity / Because there’s no fish left in the sea / greedy men been killing all the life there ever was.” And its undoubtedly there on what Kay labels the other “key track” on the album, the titular “Emergency On Planet Earth.”
But the themes of social injustice and the parlous state of the world crop up regularly throughout the album. There are times when love becomes the subject matter, but the alarm call-to-action is dominant. On “Revolution 1993,” he provides a depressingly familiar desire to fight the power. Depressing because the things he sings about are the same things that plagued the Western world in the ‘70s when his musical inspirations issued the same call and, again, in the ‘80s when Chuck D uttered the very same phrase. Same shit, different day.
The album was hugely successful in the UK, reaching #1 upon its release and staying there for three weeks. It was the fastest selling album since George Michael’s Faith in 1987 and led a new wave of Brit-funk that included the Brand New Heavies and Galliano, to name but two. As well as the subject matter which, guess what, is still depressingly relevant, the key to the album’s longevity and enduring legacy is Jay Kay’s insistence that organic instrumentation be used—the timeless themes demanded timeless musical accompaniment.
What happened over the next few years is another depressingly familiar tale to anyone who has lived in the UK. There is nothing more British than building someone up to knock them down when they get “too big for their boots.” As the decade proceeded, more success came Jamiroquai’s way with The Return Of The Space Cowboy (1994) and the monstrously successful Travelling Without Moving (1996). But as the flamboyant totem of the group, Jay Kay became tabloid fodder. Even some years after, in an interview with Esquire magazine in 2001, the same tired cliches found themselves in the copy: “For all the hats, eccentric dancing and disco party tunes … Jay Kay’s no fool. For sure he’s the didgeridoo loving, tree hugger who sang of saving the planet on debut single…”
The implications here being that if you write songs that exhort the world to sit up and take notice of environmental catastrophe or songs that people can dance to, or use instrumentation from alternative musical cultures, then that makes you a fool (unlucky Mr. Gaye, that’s you told). There is no doubting Jay Kay has contradictions (don’t we all?), but the insidious insistence that artists conform to some kind of straight-jacketed notion of artistry is the thin end of a wedge that ends up with the marginalized in society torn to pieces.
Though my dedication to Jamiroquai waned at some point in the 21st century, my love for this album grows with each passing year and I hope new generations see past the sneering attitude that the press sometimes exhibited towards the group and come to love the album (and group) too. Above all though, the message of the music remains as relevant as ever, if not more so. The emergency continues.
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