It Mek (sometimes appearing as "A It Mek" or German language "It Miek") was a 1969

hit Hit means to strike someone or something. Hit or HIT may also refer to: Arts, entertainment and media Fictional entities * Hit, a fictional character from ''Dragon Ball Super'' * Homicide International Trust, or HIT, a fictional organization in ...

song by the Jamaican musicians

Desmond Dekker & the Aces Desmond Dekker (16 July 1941 – 25 May 2006) was a Jamaican ska, rocksteady and reggae singer-songwriter and musician. Together with his backing group The Aces (consisting of Wilson James and Easton Barrington Howard), he had one of the earlie ...

. After being re-released in June 1969, the single reached number 7 in the

UK Singles Chart The UK Singles Chart (currently titled Official Singles Chart, with the upper section more commonly known as the Official UK Top 40) is compiled by the Official Charts Company (OCC), on behalf of the British record industry, listing the top-s ...

. The track was

written Writing is a medium of human communication which involves the representation of a language through a system of physically inscribed, mechanically transferred, or digitally represented symbols. Writing systems do not themselves constitute h ...

by Dekker (under his real name of Desmond Dacres) and his record producer,

Leslie Kong Leslie Kong (20 December 1933 – 9 August 1971) was an influential Chinese-Jamaican reggae producer. Career Leslie and his two older brothers Cecil and Lloyd ran a restaurant, ice cream parlour and record shop called Beverley's in Orange Stre ...

, and was recorded in Jamaica with the

brass Brass is an alloy of copper (Cu) and zinc (Zn), in proportions which can be varied to achieve different mechanical, electrical, and chemical properties. It is a substitutional alloy: atoms of the two constituents may replace each other with ...

accompaniment added in the UK. It spent eleven weeks in the UK

chart A chart (sometimes known as a graph) is a graphical representation for data visualization, in which "the data is represented by symbols, such as bars in a bar chart, lines in a line chart, or slices in a pie chart". A chart can represent tabu ...

, and by September 1970 had sold over a million copies worldwide. A

gold record Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au (from la, aurum) and atomic number 79. This makes it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally. It is a bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile meta ...

was presented by Ember Records, the distributors of Dekker's

recordings A record, recording or records may refer to: An item or collection of data Computing * Record (computer science), a data structure ** Record, or row (database), a set of fields in a database related to one entity ** Boot sector or boot record, r ...

. The song's title is

Jamaican patois Jamaican Patois (; locally rendered Patwah and called Jamaican Creole by linguists) is an English-based creole language with West African influences, spoken primarily in Jamaica and among the Jamaican diaspora. A majority of the non-English wo ...

meaning "that's why" or "that's the reason."Cassidy, F.G. and R.B. Le Page, 2002. ''A Dictionary of Jamaican English.'' University of the West Indies Press. . According to the liner notes for the Dekker compilation album ''Rockin' Steady – The Best of Desmond Dekker'' the phrase was also used as a schoolyard taunt roughly meaning "that's what you get." This was the sense used in the song's lyrics, which metaphorically tell of the problems that happens when someone (such as a lover) goes too far.

Charts

Weekly charts

Year-end charts

References

External links

* Allmusic.com song review {{authority control 1968 songs 1969 singles Reggae songs Songs written by Leslie Kong Songs written by Desmond Dekker Song recordings produced by Leslie Kong Desmond Dekker songs