Max Romeo, the celebrated roots reggae vocalist whose political anthems soundtracked a period of upheaval in his native Jamaica, died on Friday, April 11, of complications relating to a heart condition, The Guardian reports, citing his lawyer, Errol Michael Henry. He was 80 years old.
Born Maxwell Livingston Smith in the northern Jamaican town of Alexandria, Max Romeo moved to Kingston as a child and got his break in the mid-1960s, fronting harmony trio the Emotions. His first international hit was “Wet Dream,” released in 1968. Produced by Bunny Lee, the single was banned by the BBC for its raunchy lyrics but hit the UK Top 10 anyway, prompting Romeo to record his debut album, A Dream, in London with backing band the Rudies.
Like many of his contemporaries, Romeo found his true calling in the 1970s, when a radical new wave of producers harnessed Kingston’s network of small studios and record labels to foment the roots reggae explosion, as Lloyd Bradley documents in Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King. Throughout the decade, Romeo’s songs grew avowedly political, taking the form of rebel music and leftist anthems like “Press Along Joshua” and “Let the Power Fall on I”—early tributes to the postcolonial Jamaican leader Michael Manley—as well as protest songs like “Fire Fi the Vatican,” which admonished Pope Pius XI for supporting Mussolini’s fascist invasion of Ethiopia in 1935.
His revolutionary streak is best represented on the classic 1976 album War Ina Babylon, backed by the Upsetters as part of Romeo’s ongoing partnership with Lee “Scratch” Perry. The title track playfully jabbed at political corruption and factional violence in mid-1970s Jamaica, balancing fire and wry humor to become a landmark protest anthem. Another of his calling cards was “Chase the Devil,” later sampled by Kanye West—for Jay-Z’s Black Album track “Lucifer”—and the Prodigy, who liberally borrowed from the song to make their 1992 super-hit “Out of Space.”
With his status as a national icon secured, Romeo moved to New York in 1978, where he co-wrote and starred in the musical Reggae and sang backup on the Rolling Stones’ 1980 song “Dance.” After returning to Jamaica, he continued to record and tour the world in his final years, releasing his last album of originals, Words From the Brave, in 2019, before embarking on his final live dates, a mammoth tour of Europe, in 2023.
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