Mark Stewart & The Maffia
Learning To Cope With Cowardice
The joke around The Factual Opinion offices (alright, fine, it was Tucker’s joke) is that the title of Learning To Cope With Cowardice is actually a reference to British playwright and actor Noel Coward. What makes this especially funny (funny in an extremely geeky way) is that Cowardice—Mark Stewart’s debut album as a solo artist after the dissolution of the Pop Group—is essentially a dub album cobbled together from disparate elements of black music (reggae, hip-hop) and American culture (Woody Guthrie, Walt Whitman.) In other words, musically, Stewart moves about as far from the image of the iconic, dapper British gentleman as possible. Politically, too. It’s right there in the song titles: “High Ideals And Crazy Dreams,” “Don’t You Ever Lay Down Your Arms,” “The Paranoia Of Power.” With the help of super-producer and reggae legend Adrian Sherwood, who would keep Stewart at the forefront of his On-U label’s roster, what emerges is as subversive and forward-thinking as anything else that came out in 1983.
-Marty Brown, 2007
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