Bret and Luciano at the Brickworks, Chico, March 2000
Luciano
A Man and His Religion
by Bret Lueder
On life’s journey many stops are made. Each individual has his or her own path. Yet at some point along this trip, all must face a common obstacle: the self. To know what is inside you; to know what your true purpose in life is; to faithfully follow your heart and live your life on that path, is a wisdom which we all seek.
Fear and false information usually block the way for those who wish to know. Few people achieve true self-awareness, but for those select few who do, enlightenment is their reward. Reggae roots singer Luciano is one such soul.
"I say, within my own search, I have unraveled and come upon certain things," describes the 34-year-old Davytown, Jamaica native. "I realized that our acquisition, our regaining of consciousness will not only come to reacquire what has been stolen from I and I but also to acknowledge our own power within our souls."
For Luciano, many of the answers to his questions of self were learned by the age of 11, with the death of his father.
"The impact that my father had on me has really taken me to where I am," tells Luciano. "I watched my father build a guitar with his own hands. At my tender age, I saw him setting the wood. The part it would bend around, he would soak in water, then lay it out in the sun with various weights hung on it to get different bends and curves. I was very impressed to see the advanced technology of my father’s carpentry."
These were vital times for the young Luciano. The impression of his father hand-crafting that guitar (which is now in the hands of his eldest brother), and the times that his father spent with him playing it, are emotions that have been with Luciano ever since.
"To me, even the sound of the guitar was something else," says Luciano. "My father used to play after work sometimes. He would sit in a chair and I would sit right before him and listen to him play some wonderful chords. He wouldn’t be doing anything augmented or top-of-the-line chords or anything, but he would play his basic chords and play them very well. It left a resonating sound in my mind. I am always trying to recapture that kind of vibe and feeling. That’s what has kept me going for so many years. Even unto today, I see myself as fulfilling my father’s dream."
With the guidance and love of his family—Luciano is the seventh of nine children—and a love of music instilled by his father, he grew to embrace the Rastafari religion and reggae music as a way to cope with the "downpression" of not only his family, but of all of the Black peoples of the world.
"The Bible tells I and I that our man-made mountains shall crumble," assures Luciano. "The whole system is not structured according to righteousness and it cannot last forever. The basic formula is good over evil. In the last days, systems and big empires shall collide and a great deluge will come over the Earth. People shall come to know themselves. It is written that with the dawning of the Christ-consciousness in man, Babylon will really crumble."
As I listen to Luciano cite different ancient cities that have been destroyed because they haven’t been "structured according to righteousness,"—biblical cities like Sodom, Ninevah and the greatest symbol of evil to the Rastafari, the city of Babylon—I begin to understand just how rooted the Rastafari religion is in The Bible. It has both Christian and Jewish heritage whose history goes back to the days of King David and ancient Upper Egypt, or Nubus as it was called. Today we call it Ethiopia, a country whose rich biblical history is well documented in both Christian and Jewish accounts, in both The Old and The New Testaments.
As much as Luciano has consistently tried to go back and recapture the vibe he had with his father when he was young, the Rastafarian movement’s main impetus is to go back to Africa—"Blacks Back To Africa!" was the de facto official slogan—to go back to their roots. And, what started in the 1920s as a Black Supremacy movement with a prophecy by Marcus Garvy—which stated that the Second Coming of Christ will be an Ethiopian king (Haille Sellassie ruled Ethiopia in the 1960s; in other words, the Second Coming already happened and most people missed it)—evolved into an all racially-encompassing theology by the late ‘50s with the coming of Sellassie (Ras Tafari was his birth name, hence the movement’s name). In the early ‘60s, this new way of thinking began to bind itself to another evolving and new idea about music, the reggae "riddim."
"It is written that the chief musicians of old were those who were willing to take the message to the people," says Luciano. "To sing and to remind them of the importance of righteous liberty, to incorporate a unity and oneness amongst humanity. The music is that divine force that God has given to us to bring the people to the gathering. And not just reggae music, but all music."
Is it just a coincidence that the evolving Rastafari religion would be at the right place at the right time just when the new reggae sound had just evolved itself out of ska, calypso and rock steady music? The timing was perfect and the bond between the music and the religion took place. To the enlightened, this is surely no coincidence.
"We realize that reggae music is the derivative of the struggles of I and I, Black people," articulates Luciano. "And this is what has really surfaced as a result of the struggles of all of our journeys through the four corners of the Earth. Reggae music is now the epitome of the I and I’s own journey. Through life and times, we are brought forward into our [the Black peoples of the world] consciousness. The melodies and the words let the world know how we feel toward certain things, how we’ve been treated, and at the same time we offer the alternative, that of righteousness, that of acknowledging that there is one God, one Father above all, who redeems us to bring about a better world."
With the awakening of the Black peoples of the world’s collective consciousness about their own true history, they began to realize that certain information had been purposely written out of The Bible.
"The Book of Enoch or the Books of Moses VI and VII for example," says Luciano. "A lot of history has been eroded with time and man has not even been able to follow what has actually transpired over a period of time. We don’t have all the data. Right now in England, in the Library, we know that many of our great historical records—books and data pertaining to the journeys of I and I and our own heritage—has been stolen and taken away. We know that the truth has been revealed in the past, so all we can do is do our own research through divine inspiration and principles and come up with whatever we can. I have done my own research in the studies of man and I have come to realize that the whole human race, white and black, are missing certain details about our everyday life: how we breath, how we eat, how we approach our people from day to day, how we worship ourselves or our deity."
Enter again the "riddim." It is believed that the beat or vibration of reggae music actually works to retune, or recalibrate our minds towards regaining this lost knowledge; the knowledge of the self.
"To a certain extent, the vibration that the rhythm itself has, it reaffirmates the consciousness of the mind. It affords you, gives you the opportunity to think and to extrapolate upon your thoughts. I have definitely come from the music in the marketplace [in Davytown]. When I became involved, I started just wanting to sing and I realized that the music itself is a university because wanting to sing is one thing, but you have to have what to sing?" Luciano asks rhetorically. "You have to have truth, you have to have knowledge and you have to have principles that you can pass on. And this is why we have so many different brothers coming out that sing about things that may not be fully knowledgeable. It’s easy for them to sing about girls or guns and different things, more than to search for truth and come and present some principles. This is why I respect my brother Burning Spear, because when I listen to him, he has so much knowledge and history in his music. And this is what I try to endeavor in my own little way; to add as much to the history of I and I, and not only I and I of the Black race, but I and I of human beings."
Another of the many untruths in humanity handed down through time, is the keeping of time itself.
"We know that, in terms of time schedule, 1000 days unto man is like one day of the Lord," explains Luciano. "So we know that, when it comes to time, we have been given a raw deal. In the West it is 1999, in Ethiopia it is 1991, so there is more than one calendar. This shows that we are many years ahead, like we are trying to rush ahead of the time that God has allotted for us. So, we now know that we use computers to do things as fast as we can, and when we observe carefully, you see that—instead of realizing that our version of Babylon is doomed to failure, change is inevitable—big corporations and people with money are running around making preparations to try to re-install or renovate the old computer system." [Talking about Y2K]
According to Rastafari, this is Babylon’s fatal mistake: We are trying to fix things externally, instead of fixing things where they are truly broken, within ourselves.
"The whole infrastructure of Babylon is on fallen time, really," insists Luciano. "Even electricty (and all other comforts of life that we take for granted) will be no more. Everybody is fighting to keep their way of life and to insure that their factories and industries go on. So we see, therefore, that in the last days, people are becoming like animals. They are rushing around to get as much as they can. It is like a real rat race. So these are the signs [of the end times], my brother."
Not only Rastafari, but the Chinese, the Mayans, the Hopi, most other mainstream religions and even psychics point towards these days as being some of the last in human history. This is why Luciano’s new CD, titled Sweep Over My Soul, is so vital. It is the latest extension of Luciano doing his small part to help "the history of I and I" through spreading His word, the word of God.
"This is my own little contribution to the human race," acknowledges Luciano. "As I look around, I see that I and I have been living wrongfully, and I can only speak of the I and I of the Black peoples. We have been taken to the four corners of the Earth, and by not living up to the principles as required by the spirit, we ended up being subject to manipulation and all forms of degradation handed down to man. If we have not found the true principles of God, the love of god, if we are not aspiring to live as true humans, with a heart and a soul and a mind, then we are just wasting time."
Luciano has released five full-length CDs on Xterminator Records, with the recent addition of the new Sweep Over My Soul, and is known for bucking the system and going outside the confines of the normal reggae production path. Songs like "Ulterior Motive" and "Final Call" are roots-laden dirges sure to satisfy the devote reggae connoisseur. But against-the-grain tunes like "Talkin ‘Bout," with reggae legend Morgan Heritage, or the almost disco "You Can," change up the vibe just enough to raise an ear.
"I used to watch this TV show back in the ‘80s called Fame," says Luciano. "The theme song really inspired me. Morgan Heritage joined me for one that was inspired by Donna Summer’s ‘Bad Girls.’"
According to Luciano, changing things up is what we really need to be doing.
"We really need to allow the music to be as free as the wind and the breaths that we take," advises Luciano. "People try to label this as dancehall, or rap, or R&B or country. But it is all music! We should all be able to, like turning the channels on a TV set, tune to whatever vibration we want. Whatever our mood, we could choose what vibration [music] suites us. This, to me, is the greatest thing that we can do.