Got to Be Tough is a studio album by Jamaican reggae band Toots and the Maytals. It was released through Trojan Jamaica/BMG on 28 August 2020[2] and financed by Trojan Jamaica owner Zak Starkey, who also played guitar for the recording.[3] The album is the first studio release from Toots and the Maytals in more than a decade[4] and the first after an accident wherein bandleader Toots Hibbert was hit in the head with a glass bottle, leading to his hiatus from performing.[5] The lyrical content of the album is political, featuring pleas for unity among people.[6]
Got to Be Tough was met with generally positive reviews. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from professional critics, the album received an average score of 74, based on 10 reviews.[10] Reviewing in his Substack-published "Consumer Guide" column, Robert Christgau said, "What I like about these [songs], and Starkey must have too, is how conscious they are. Having long favored danceable love songs, [Hibbert] spends most [of] these 36 minutes looking time tough in its ugly face. 'Just Brutal,' 'Warning Warning,' and 'Got to Be Tough'; bus fares, low wages, invisible pensions, and picking yourself up off the ground. But he's also proud to stand accused for feeding his enemies."[3] Tom Dibb from Gigwise wrote that the album "calls the world to task, and has them dancing all the while", describing it as "politically minded, brutally honest but maintaining the heartfelt and soulful nature of rocksteady and ska".[6]Variety magazine's Steve Bloom also applauded Hibbert's messages of optimism on songs that "alternate between reggae and R&B".[19]
