Steel Pulse Gets Political At KAABOO With Protest Cloaked in Irie Vibes

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RECAP: No other genre of music can set your mind at ease like reggae music. After Flo RIDA’s set, KAABOO patrons lingered to chill out and cool down for Steel Pulse, allowing enough time for everybody’s edibles to start kicking in. Raeggae super stars are timeless. Steel Pulse, with their regal dreads, looked like they came from another era, carved out of stone. But don’t let their aesthetics fool you. They sounded as brilliant as ever. They could be playing to 8 people chilling in a shitty dive bar or 80,000 apeshit acolytes in a Colombian soccer stadium. They’d make sense either way.

Even though the mood was set for “irie times”, before performing “Who Responsible” they prefaced the song with a heads up to the crowd that this is (always has been) a political song. A reminder that reggae is very much a political genre. Music of protest cloaked in irie vibes. Don’t ever let the wrapping obscure the content of the package. There’s a depth and urgency woven into the lyrics and the rhythm. Weed may be essentially legal now but that is far from solving our collective societal ills. So when they slide from the defiance of “King James Version” to a star spangled intro to the “Rally Round the Flag” there’s some anti-imperialist subtext there. Fo sho.

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CLICK HERE to check out the rest of our coverage of KAABOO 2016