Tweet
BOMB 86/Winter 2004 cover
Michael "Ibo" Cooper
by Kwame Dawes
BOMB 86/Winter 2004, MUSIC
(Interview)
Michael “Ibo” Cooper. Photo: Lee Abel. Courtesy of Lee Abel and reggaeportraits.com.
I had probably heard them on the radio. They were a popular band, after all. I know I had heard them perform in the huge cement-floored auditorium of my high school. I was impressed. Still, I had somehow relegated Third World to a position of pseudo-soul artists, that brand of musicians who were taken with America.
Years later, when a friend I was visiting in Kingston decided to introduce me to the music of Third World, which he thought was the hippest sound around, I was determined to dislike them. I was 16, it was 1978, Jamaica was being defined by ideology in the most profound way.
Michael Manley was defying America, Cubans were dancing on our theater stages and rockers music, with its militant Sly and Robbie bully rhythm section, was dominating the soundwaves. I was not going to enjoy soul reggae. But when my friend put on 96 Degrees in the Shade, I could not dislike the sound. These guys were roots. That was my real introduction to Third World. I would even come to admit that the words to “1865” are among the top 10 greatest reggae lyrics.
Born in Clarendon, a rural parish in Jamaica, Michael “Ibo” Cooper, a veteran of the influential reggae band Inner Circle, cofounded Third World in 1973 and was its keyboardist and a songwriter and vocalist until he left the band in 1997.
Contemporaries of Bob Marley and the Wailers, Third World followed the path set by the inimitable Marley and took reggae all over the world, producing some of the most dynamic and sophisticated reggae over several decades of recording and performing. After 25 years on the road, Cooper embarked on a new life as a teacher and an advocate for reggae and popular music in Kingston, where he now lives.
Kwame Dawes Let me start with the most obvious question: Ibo. Where did that name come from?
Ibo Cooper I got the nickname right as I started with Inner Circle, just after I left high school, because of the fighting in Nigeria. I was skinny, and the Biafran War had pictures of starving children, and you know how Jamaicans tease and rib about things. It became a name because of the Ibos in Nigeria.
KD
You are currently in Runaway Bay teaching at a residential conference for Caribbean musicians. This teaching has become a part of your new life—training artists, traveling around talking about the music business, passing your knowledge on to others. Teaching is a passion for you, isn’t it?
IC
I grew up in a family of teachers, and many of the people I admire were teachers. This business of passing things on to others is something I have developed a passion for. Most of the time I am asked to come in because I am one of the few musicians who bridged the gap between formal training—that is, western European music—and the oral tradition in Jamaica. I have never held any preference for one side or the other. I have always recognized the power of the informal music that became reggae.
KD
Would you prefer to be remembered as Ibo Cooper, Third World, or Ibo Cooper, teacher?
IC
The Third World thing is not going to go away anytime soon. And I wouldn’t want it to go away—that is a quarter century of my life in which I made a great impact on the world, as a vocalist and musician and, in a way, bandleader. But the youths whom I have come in contact with over the last four years have become family, like my children. And they have never seen me perform with the group, except on video.
So the interaction is quite different, but we remember the efforts to get good grades in order to get school fees and to get a gig here and a gig there, and we become connected. These are especially the music students at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts. I went there part-time at first and started a popular music ensemble, teaching how to play as a band. Then I came aboard full-time as head of the Caribbean, Latin American and jazz department, which is now called Popular Music Studies.
KD You came into reggae music at a time when the mandate was at once to entertain and to teach. The prophet was a standard persona in roots reggae music. Were you always comfortable with that role and with the pressures of being a teacher in that way?
IC
Inner Circle was very much a pop band playing Top 40. The stress was more on entertainment than on message. With Third World our dissatisfaction with the Top 40 run was the catalyst. We wanted to be innovative, and this manifested itself first in the form of songwriting, but not necessarily message songwriting. We did not start out to be a reggae band in the purest sense. We played a lot of soul, R&B and funk.
We thought it would be versatile of us to be able to do it all. Not out of a disregard for reggae, which was from our culture. The first time it ever hit me that bands specialized was when we went to England in 1975. A journalist, a white man, asked us when we were going to become a reggae band. That’s when it occurred to me that in those countries you were either this or that. I always thought that this was narrow thinking, and I always had a problem with people trying to narrow my intelligence.
Actually, an African American who later managed Third World was surprised when he saw me playing in a jazz band. And last week at a concert, after I did an up-tempo blues bit one of the teachers said they did not know that I played jazz so well. I notice that the English and Americans do not have a problem with their people being versatile. Sting plays jazz, reggae, anything he wants to play. Yet when we came from the Caribbean they wanted us to be narrow.
My education was quite broad. We were playing everything from Beethoven and Brahms to Bob, Sparrow, Latin. We were reading Shakespeare, we were reading the Jamaican poet and impresario Miss Lou. But even then the fact that we had received an education seemed to work against us, because there was always the stereotype of a Jamaican from the ghetto who was a bad man struggling to make it, and this music was just his or her way out of poverty.
The unfortunate thing was that people started to think we were uneducated, and I am not even talking about formal education. I had a friend who was a jazz dj who was respectful in general, but one day I was making a quip and I misspelled a word as part of a wordplay, and she honestly thought I was illiterate, missing the witticism. Third World was a case of us trying to do a lot because we were exposed to a lot.
There was a consciousness about the movement taking place in Jamaica, and the message came closer as we grew. The international exposure brought it home to us.
KD
Third World, as you know, was often labeled an uptown band, a band of middle-class renegades who jumped into a field normally dominated in ideology and in economic reality by the working class. The truth appears to be something else. You are a country yout’, and as far as I could work out only Steven “Cat” Coore and Willie Stewart from the original band could be said to have genuinely middle-class backgrounds. So how did the label stick? Surely tracks like “Uptown Rebel” did not help. Was that an issue for the band’s reception or even for the band members when the band got started?
IC
Richie [Daley], even though his father was a captain in the JDF [Jamaica Defense Force], originally lived in Trenchtown, as did Carrot [Irvin Jarrett]. You see, when Bob Marley sings about Trenchtown, at that time it was not a ghetto in the way we understand the term now. Kingston 12 was not Dungle or Back O’Wall. Brentford Road was the home of some famous Jamaicans. It wasn’t exactly the rich area, but it was not the home of deprived people. Bunny Rugs [William Clarke] was from Foster Lane. Willie did not come from Jamaica at all. He was born in England and he had the roughest time racially of all of us. England was a place that victimized black boys, and he fought his way home from school for most of his childhood. He came to Jamaica with all of that. He did come and live in Liguanea and went to Providence Prep.
The thing is, we all benefited from secondary school. The fact that we went to Wolmer’s and JC [Jamaica College] probably leads to an automatic assumption that we were from uptown. But even in those schools there was a difference between the scholarship boys and the rich boys. The problem was really aggravated by the fact that Cat was the son of David Coore, the deputy prime minister of Jamaica.
It was hard for Cat to bear. In many of the early interviews, with Jamaica going through the changes in the whole Third World movement, Cat was often not appraised for his guitar playing but for being his father’s son. How did we deal with it?
For us it was rags to riches, but as we can see in the Caribbean, the rags to riches story is not necessarily a success story, because one of the common stories is of people who have made it to riches and become some of the most oppressive people.
Third World to me was a statement of what you should do if you have money. Until recently we did not talk about what artists do when they make money. In the Caribbean, when our entrepreneurs die they do not leave a Ford Foundation, a Rockefeller Foundation. They don’t even leave money in Swiss banks. They leave money for their girlfriends. The Third World statement is that material things should not get in the way of your consciousness.
The typical rags to riches script is the poor boy who made it or the field slave who gets to live in the big house. Where has that left us today? The black elite has become more oppressive than the white oppressor. So people say that we are uptown Rasta. Why not?
A journalist, Ian Boyne, said something rude once: he asked me in an interview, “Now that you have achieved education and live uptown and drive, why don’t you cut your locks?” My answer was that we live in a very hypocritical society where the image is not appreciated even after you have proved yourself in terms of their status symbols, part of which is to have the right color wife, the right friends, the right image.
I personally think that even though many Jamaicans revere Bob’s success, many are grieved that it is a Rasta man who got the recognition. Think of Salieri and Mozart. Salieri could not get how he had taken a vow of poverty and chastity and this happy-go-lucky Mozart had what Salieri wanted. Jah moves in mysterious ways. (laughter) The Almighty gave it to Bob. That consciousness is who we are, and what we take in our heritage is not going in the garbage really soon.
Michael "Ibo" Cooper
by Kwame Dawes
BOMB 86/Winter 2004, MUSIC
(Interview)
Michael “Ibo” Cooper. Photo: Lee Abel. Courtesy of Lee Abel and reggaeportraits.com.
I had probably heard them on the radio. They were a popular band, after all. I know I had heard them perform in the huge cement-floored auditorium of my high school. I was impressed. Still, I had somehow relegated Third World to a position of pseudo-soul artists, that brand of musicians who were taken with America.
Years later, when a friend I was visiting in Kingston decided to introduce me to the music of Third World, which he thought was the hippest sound around, I was determined to dislike them. I was 16, it was 1978, Jamaica was being defined by ideology in the most profound way.
Michael Manley was defying America, Cubans were dancing on our theater stages and rockers music, with its militant Sly and Robbie bully rhythm section, was dominating the soundwaves. I was not going to enjoy soul reggae. But when my friend put on 96 Degrees in the Shade, I could not dislike the sound. These guys were roots. That was my real introduction to Third World. I would even come to admit that the words to “1865” are among the top 10 greatest reggae lyrics.
Born in Clarendon, a rural parish in Jamaica, Michael “Ibo” Cooper, a veteran of the influential reggae band Inner Circle, cofounded Third World in 1973 and was its keyboardist and a songwriter and vocalist until he left the band in 1997.
Contemporaries of Bob Marley and the Wailers, Third World followed the path set by the inimitable Marley and took reggae all over the world, producing some of the most dynamic and sophisticated reggae over several decades of recording and performing. After 25 years on the road, Cooper embarked on a new life as a teacher and an advocate for reggae and popular music in Kingston, where he now lives.
Kwame Dawes Let me start with the most obvious question: Ibo. Where did that name come from?
Ibo Cooper I got the nickname right as I started with Inner Circle, just after I left high school, because of the fighting in Nigeria. I was skinny, and the Biafran War had pictures of starving children, and you know how Jamaicans tease and rib about things. It became a name because of the Ibos in Nigeria.
KD
You are currently in Runaway Bay teaching at a residential conference for Caribbean musicians. This teaching has become a part of your new life—training artists, traveling around talking about the music business, passing your knowledge on to others. Teaching is a passion for you, isn’t it?
IC
I grew up in a family of teachers, and many of the people I admire were teachers. This business of passing things on to others is something I have developed a passion for. Most of the time I am asked to come in because I am one of the few musicians who bridged the gap between formal training—that is, western European music—and the oral tradition in Jamaica. I have never held any preference for one side or the other. I have always recognized the power of the informal music that became reggae.
KD
Would you prefer to be remembered as Ibo Cooper, Third World, or Ibo Cooper, teacher?
IC
The Third World thing is not going to go away anytime soon. And I wouldn’t want it to go away—that is a quarter century of my life in which I made a great impact on the world, as a vocalist and musician and, in a way, bandleader. But the youths whom I have come in contact with over the last four years have become family, like my children. And they have never seen me perform with the group, except on video.
So the interaction is quite different, but we remember the efforts to get good grades in order to get school fees and to get a gig here and a gig there, and we become connected. These are especially the music students at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts. I went there part-time at first and started a popular music ensemble, teaching how to play as a band. Then I came aboard full-time as head of the Caribbean, Latin American and jazz department, which is now called Popular Music Studies.
KD You came into reggae music at a time when the mandate was at once to entertain and to teach. The prophet was a standard persona in roots reggae music. Were you always comfortable with that role and with the pressures of being a teacher in that way?
IC
Inner Circle was very much a pop band playing Top 40. The stress was more on entertainment than on message. With Third World our dissatisfaction with the Top 40 run was the catalyst. We wanted to be innovative, and this manifested itself first in the form of songwriting, but not necessarily message songwriting. We did not start out to be a reggae band in the purest sense. We played a lot of soul, R&B and funk.
We thought it would be versatile of us to be able to do it all. Not out of a disregard for reggae, which was from our culture. The first time it ever hit me that bands specialized was when we went to England in 1975. A journalist, a white man, asked us when we were going to become a reggae band. That’s when it occurred to me that in those countries you were either this or that. I always thought that this was narrow thinking, and I always had a problem with people trying to narrow my intelligence.
Actually, an African American who later managed Third World was surprised when he saw me playing in a jazz band. And last week at a concert, after I did an up-tempo blues bit one of the teachers said they did not know that I played jazz so well. I notice that the English and Americans do not have a problem with their people being versatile. Sting plays jazz, reggae, anything he wants to play. Yet when we came from the Caribbean they wanted us to be narrow.
My education was quite broad. We were playing everything from Beethoven and Brahms to Bob, Sparrow, Latin. We were reading Shakespeare, we were reading the Jamaican poet and impresario Miss Lou. But even then the fact that we had received an education seemed to work against us, because there was always the stereotype of a Jamaican from the ghetto who was a bad man struggling to make it, and this music was just his or her way out of poverty.
The unfortunate thing was that people started to think we were uneducated, and I am not even talking about formal education. I had a friend who was a jazz dj who was respectful in general, but one day I was making a quip and I misspelled a word as part of a wordplay, and she honestly thought I was illiterate, missing the witticism. Third World was a case of us trying to do a lot because we were exposed to a lot.
There was a consciousness about the movement taking place in Jamaica, and the message came closer as we grew. The international exposure brought it home to us.
KD
Third World, as you know, was often labeled an uptown band, a band of middle-class renegades who jumped into a field normally dominated in ideology and in economic reality by the working class. The truth appears to be something else. You are a country yout’, and as far as I could work out only Steven “Cat” Coore and Willie Stewart from the original band could be said to have genuinely middle-class backgrounds. So how did the label stick? Surely tracks like “Uptown Rebel” did not help. Was that an issue for the band’s reception or even for the band members when the band got started?
IC
Richie [Daley], even though his father was a captain in the JDF [Jamaica Defense Force], originally lived in Trenchtown, as did Carrot [Irvin Jarrett]. You see, when Bob Marley sings about Trenchtown, at that time it was not a ghetto in the way we understand the term now. Kingston 12 was not Dungle or Back O’Wall. Brentford Road was the home of some famous Jamaicans. It wasn’t exactly the rich area, but it was not the home of deprived people. Bunny Rugs [William Clarke] was from Foster Lane. Willie did not come from Jamaica at all. He was born in England and he had the roughest time racially of all of us. England was a place that victimized black boys, and he fought his way home from school for most of his childhood. He came to Jamaica with all of that. He did come and live in Liguanea and went to Providence Prep.
The thing is, we all benefited from secondary school. The fact that we went to Wolmer’s and JC [Jamaica College] probably leads to an automatic assumption that we were from uptown. But even in those schools there was a difference between the scholarship boys and the rich boys. The problem was really aggravated by the fact that Cat was the son of David Coore, the deputy prime minister of Jamaica.
It was hard for Cat to bear. In many of the early interviews, with Jamaica going through the changes in the whole Third World movement, Cat was often not appraised for his guitar playing but for being his father’s son. How did we deal with it?
For us it was rags to riches, but as we can see in the Caribbean, the rags to riches story is not necessarily a success story, because one of the common stories is of people who have made it to riches and become some of the most oppressive people.
Third World to me was a statement of what you should do if you have money. Until recently we did not talk about what artists do when they make money. In the Caribbean, when our entrepreneurs die they do not leave a Ford Foundation, a Rockefeller Foundation. They don’t even leave money in Swiss banks. They leave money for their girlfriends. The Third World statement is that material things should not get in the way of your consciousness.
The typical rags to riches script is the poor boy who made it or the field slave who gets to live in the big house. Where has that left us today? The black elite has become more oppressive than the white oppressor. So people say that we are uptown Rasta. Why not?
A journalist, Ian Boyne, said something rude once: he asked me in an interview, “Now that you have achieved education and live uptown and drive, why don’t you cut your locks?” My answer was that we live in a very hypocritical society where the image is not appreciated even after you have proved yourself in terms of their status symbols, part of which is to have the right color wife, the right friends, the right image.
I personally think that even though many Jamaicans revere Bob’s success, many are grieved that it is a Rasta man who got the recognition. Think of Salieri and Mozart. Salieri could not get how he had taken a vow of poverty and chastity and this happy-go-lucky Mozart had what Salieri wanted. Jah moves in mysterious ways. (laughter) The Almighty gave it to Bob. That consciousness is who we are, and what we take in our heritage is not going in the garbage really soon.
. There are several additional things that I think I might post at a later date. 
Comment