Desmond Dekker, fresh from his recording triumphs in Europe, performs at the National Arena in this 1969 Gleaner photo. - file

SOCIAL HARDSHIP usually inspires songs that reflect the times. The current financial crisis in the United States has triggered anxiety worldwide, and last week the Los Angeles Times compiled 15 classic songs that drove home the message of hunger pangs and foreclosures.

Two of the songs that made the cut were Desmond Dekker and the Aces' Israelites and Bob Marley and the Wailers' Them Belly Full.

The newspaper said this of Dekker's 1968 inner-city lament that made pop charts in Britain and the United States: "One of the first smash reggae hits, Dekker's soulful classic likens the plight of a poverty-stricken working man to that of an ancient Hebrew slave: Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir/So that every mouth can be fed/Poor me, the Israelite."

Soul-stirring songs

It summed up Marley's moving number from 1973's Natty Dread album: "Soul-stirring songs like this are the reason St Bob is revered as a kind of Third-World messiah. In Belly, he ponders the harsh realities he faced growing up in Jamaica's Trench Town slum: food shortages, pervasive dirt, the untenable high cost of living and poor people's cri de coeur - that a hungry mob is an angry mob."