Another RIP blog entry

This isn't good--one of my last entries of the fall/winter was regarding the murder of South African reggae artist Lucky Dube (see the archive for the post + a video). This week I'm sad to report not only the death of US actor Heath Ledger (perhaps most known from Brokeback Mountain and most recently in the Todd Haines Dylan antibiopic I'm Not There), but also Belizean singer and world music star Andy Palacio.

Palacio is the lesser known of the two, but well worth a listen. This past weekend I picked up the most recent issue of Songlines magazine, which pegged his album Watina as #2 in their "Best Albums 2007" survey (you can hear samples of his work at www.myspace.com/andypalacio). His body of work, recording and otherwise, recently garnered him the honor of being named UNESCO's 40th Artist for Peace. He was only 47.



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Lucky Dube, RIP

I just found out this morning that Lucky Dube, a giant in world reggae, was killed in front of his children in an apparent carjacking this past Thursday. He came out of South Africa, but his impact was truly global. What a waste--what a loss.

When I was doing work for WFHB in Bloomington, I got a chance to review his last album, called THE OTHER SIDE. The title track to that is brilliant--seek it out if you have a chance. Not finding that on the global jukebox that is YouTube, I offer another clip to get a sense of who he was and what he was on about.