Rasta Obliterator

Genre: criminal reggae

Era: 1970s

Country of origin: Jamaica

In 1972 a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn’t commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. The man who actually committed the crime, however, was far more fortunate, using the confusion that surrounded the wrongful arrest and subsequent escape to flee to his native Jamaica, where he used the proceeds from the robbery to build a recording studio and set up the group Rasta Obliterator.

Levi Ratchet initially started Rasta Obliterator as a front for his various criminal activities – what he referred to as "arm robry", "peddlin ganja" and the delightfully vague "a lickle runnin an shootin" – but as time went on he realised that making music was safer and more lucrative than crime, and so he floated his crime empire on the Jamaican stock market (RudeBoyCrimeCorp: RBC) and turned his full attention to Rasta Obliterator.

Of course, it should be noted that Rasta Obliterator was not the only group to emerge from the reggae crime subculture – Prince Ruffian & The Homiciders, Papa Shank and Natty Paedo all contributed to both Jamaica’s music charts and its crime rate – but it was one of the most successful. Albums such as Jah Machine Gun and Wanted, Dread Or Alive dominated the Jamaican charts in the mid-70s, and even reached charts as far away as Europe (though Polish-Jamaican artist Barrington Kraszewski had already laid the groundwork in the Eastern Bloc with his 1974 album Stasi Hotsteppin’).

Ultimately, Levi Ratchet was unable to escape the legacy of his chequered past, and in 1978 he was murdered by a hitman who put cyanide in his cannabis – a process known in Jamaica as a Kingston Cough – an event immortalised by The Kneecappers in their 1979 hit Bad Ganja Mek You Sick. Then, to add insult to injury/death, in a grim twist of irony the board of RudeBoyCrimeCorp plc merged the company with Global Pharmabiotics, changed its name to CrimePharm, then TechnoBioCom, then ZeneBioLogica, and became a major manufacturer of medicinal cannabis substitutes.

On Levi Ratchet’s grave the following words appear: "Life is reggae, reggae is life. Steal any flowers an rude boy come mess you up an ting". They seem somehow appropriate.

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