The Mouse And The Man

iTunes Review

Perhaps as a response to the lovelorn celebration of Skidip, Eek-A-Mouse redoubled the intensity of his political rhetoric with 1983’s The Mouse and the Man. Kingston’s endless cycle of oppression, rebellion, and violence is captured in “Terrorists in the City”: “John Brown him dead and gone/Jah know that him history still a go on/As him dead more John Brown born/Police full him up a corn/And him friend them run and gone.” Eek uses the name John Brown to invoke both the legacy of the American abolitionist/insurrectionist and to refer to nameless black youths who die daily in violence in Jamaica. This intense yet open-ended historical impression is exactly the sort of thing in which Eek specializes. While “Sexy Girl” and “Maybe Lady” are examples of Eek’s flirtatious nature, The Mouse and the Man is best remembered for “Hitler,” a song that relives the darkest facts of the Holocaust with unwavering clarity: “All day all night me say him really provoke/Him use some of them skin and turn to soap/This is history and remember this ain’t no joke/This ain’t no joke.”