The deal, which gave Deca Dance the go-ahead to include one of Rudy’s hit singles on a mammoth compilation album titled, ‘Dynamite Reggae Classics’, was tied up in London some five to six weeks ago by ‘Big-Brother’, Eddie.

The song for which the younger Grant is to be handsomely rewarded is Stevie Wonder’s ‘Lately’, which made the London charts somewhere around the early 1980s.

Among other celebrity Caribbean artistes with whom Rudy rubs shoulders are Bob Marley, whose ‘Sun is Shining’ and lesser known ‘Rainbow Country’ are among the 35 ‘classics’ being featured on the album; Boris Gardner (I Want to Wake Up With You); Toots and the Maytals (54-46 That’s My Number); Jimmy Cliff (Wonderful World; Beautiful People); Dennis Brown (Money In My Pocket); Shabba Ranks (Telephone Love); and Arrow (Hot!Hot!Hot!).

An ecstatic Grant told the Sunday Chronicle last week that all of the songs on the album have, at one time or the other, been very popular on the British pop charts.

“The companies that decide to put together a CD package such as this,” he explained, “would basically look for songs that have been hit songs on the national charts first of all, and songs that have made the reggae charts that were very popular but didn’t cross over.”

By cross-over, he meant those songs which, though they were popular in the Black communities, never “got across” or had the same appeal to kids in the White or Minority communities, largely because Capitol Radio and Radio One, the two major British radio stations, did not give them the air time they deserved.

Significantly, he said that reggae music is not as popular in England these days as it was back in the 70s and 80s, when there were at least three to four records among the top 50 every week.

What’s responsible for this decline in popularity, he cannot say.

“One day you just woke up and found that people like John Holt, and Ken Boothe and Desmond Decker were not accepted any more,” he said. “That was the downfall of reggae music in England.”

And, even though Dancehall is the in-thing these days, he said, “it’s not like the commercial-type music that was being made before; it is more the roots type of music that is now being put out,” which is not what the mainstream radio is after at all.

“So, reggae really don’t have a place now in England,” he said, and even less in the USA. “You hardly find a reggae record on the American charts because it has to cross many barriers before it can reach the top 100.

Guyanese culture
Grant said besides earning him “a certain amount of money,” initially, not only he, but Stevie Wonder also, as the songwriter, stand to make quite a deal more if the album goes on to sell 50,000 or more copies around the world.

Which brings us to the whole question of copyright. As he’s explained time and again, “unless the creative people of Guyana get moving, we aren’t going anywhere with our culture.”

Noting that one may well ask what exactly is Guyanese culture, Grant said: “Guyanese culture will be whatever Guyanese people want it to be.” He clarified this by saying that “as the creative people create and the audience reacts, then you will find our culture will evolve.”

He said people like Britney Spears and Back Street Boys made it to the top of the American charts because of the American public, with a little help from the radio stations.

“It is the people of the country (who) create the culture,” he said, adding that “until the Guyanese artistes create music that the Guyanese public will go out and buy, we won’t have a culture.”

Asked how it is that Guyanese can improve on the standard of music they put out, Grant said one way of doing it is by impressing upon the government the urgency of enforcing copyright laws, as a means of deterring piracy.

The way copyright works in deterring piracy, he said, “is that first of all, the radio station will have to pay for every song that they play… and for as many times as they are played.” This means that the person who creates the song “will be adequately looked after.”

Recalling a statement made by Jamaican reggae artiste, Shaggy, during his visit here that it was because of piracy that he is as popular as he is today, Grant said: “He can say that because at one time, he wasn’t happening. When you’re ‘out like south’, anything that gets you back you’ll be happy with. But, it’s not the right way to go.”