by Rigorous Intuition » Wed Jun 14, 2006 11:20 am
<!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.techgnosis.com/dub.html">Dub, Scratch, and the Black Star</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em><br>Lee Perry on the Mix</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--><br>by Erik Davis<br><br>Having abandoned the Jamaican tropics for the snowy peaks of Switzerland, the legendary reggae producer Lee Perry—aka Scratch, the Upsetter, the Super-Ape, Pipecock Jackson, Inspector Gadget, the Firmament Computer, and a cornucopia of other monikers and aliases—now makes his home in one of the quietest corners of Europe. It's an odd but somehow fitting environment for Perry—not because precision clocks and banks have much to do with the intense, spooky, and profoundly playful records he's known for, but because Lee Perry had always been something of a stranger in a strange land.<br><br>Though still capable of turning out brilliant tunes like "I Am a Madman" and "Secret Laboratory (Scientific Dancehall)," Perry's current output pales next to the pivotal music he made in the 1960s and 70s, especially the Rastafarian psychedelia he cooked up at his Black Ark studios in the mid 1970s. During that incredibly prolific period (he produced over 1000 sides in ten years), Perry fused his eccentric spiritual vision with powerful protest music, made some of the most surreal experiments with dub reggae, and sculpted the first (and arguably greatest) records by Bob Marley and the Wailers. Utilizing low-tech studio equipment with a brilliance and panache that continues to astound record producers and music fans today, Perry earned a place alongside Phil Spector and Brian Wilson as a visionary studio wizard who transformed pop music production into an art form all its own.<br><br>These days, it's Perry himself who is the work of art. He appears in public festooned with pendants, parts of machines, bits of tape, patches, buttons, and reflective mirrors. Everywhere he goes, it seems, he leaves a collage of scribbled notes, cryptic graffiti, scrap-metal idols, paintings of lions and food. Responding to interviewers with a flurry of rhymes, riffs, and puns, Perry turns innocent questions into a cosmological launching pad, revealing what John Corbett describes as "a world of hidden connections and secret pacts:"[1] multinational conspiracy theories, Old Testament prophecies, scatological rants, Rastafarian poetry, incantations of the Jamaican folk witchcraft known as obeah.<br><br>All this takes Perry to the edge of madness—at once his apparent mental instability and his intensely performative, almost shamanic, relationship with the chaos of creation. As Corbett points out, New World black culture has long linked the rhetoric of madness with excellence and innovation—musicians especially are praised for being "out of control," "crazy," "wild." While Perry's hermetic language games and comic-book metaphysics certainly owe something to his daily intake of what one observer described as an "inordinate amount of high quality herb," his mischievous irony also shows all the signs of the trickster incarnate. Even his "madness" may be a trick. Some colleagues report that when it's time to talk business, Perry drops the loopy patois and cuts to the chase; the head of Heartbeat Records says that he "plays fool to catch wise."<br><br>Perry is also a kind of Caribbean techgnostic, deploying his almost supernatural imagination within the technological context of the modern recording studio. With its soundboards, mics, effects processors, and multiple-track tape manipulations, the studio is clearly a kind of musical machine. However passionate and spontaneous pop songs may sound on the radio, the music itself is as much a product of engineering as of performance. Despite their crude equipment, reggae producers like Perry, King Tubby, and Bunny Lee became artists in their own right—especially when it came to dub, the instrumental offshoot of reggae concocted entirely in the studio. <br><br>...<br><br>So at the root of the reggae we have a little Lee Perry madness, a tale of catching vibrations and tuning into spiritual trance. But Perry played a far more direct role in developing the religious dimension of reggae when he began writing and recording songs with Bob Marley and the Wailers. The Wailers were a talented Studio One group known for sweet vocals, American soul covers, and a rebel stance. As residents of Trenchtown, Kingston's most notorious slum, the Wailers were associated with Jamaica's "rude boys"—tough, poor and restless urban kids who flaunted authority (and sometimes the law). By the late 1960s, Marley and the Wailers were also turning toward Rastafari, a rebellious and extraordinary religious counter-culture that wove together Black Pride, an "Ethiopian" reworking of Biblical tenets, and a prophetic opposition to "Babylon"—the Rastafarian archetype of the modern nation-state, with its police, economic injustice, and corrosive lifestyles. Perry collaborated with the future superstar on some of his earliest and most powerful songs, tunes that mixed sharp social commentary ("a hungry mob is an angry mob") with an ardent yearning for Jah.<br><br>...<br><br> As with Elijah Mohammed's Black Muslims, the early Rastafarians also racialized their theology. As the religious scholar Leonard Barrett explains, "the White's god is actually the devil, the instigator of all evils that have come upon the world, the god of hate, blood, oppression, and war; the Black god is the god of 'Peace and Love.'"[4] Though contemporary Rastafarians speak of "One God" more than a black god, it's important to note the loosely "gnostic" elements here. Along with the Manichaean tension between the two gods, we have the old gnostic vision of a dark tyrant god who rules over souls in exile. According to Barrett, the early Rastafarians believed that slavery was initially a punishment for their sins, but that "they have long since been pardoned and should have returned to Ethiopia long ago."[5] Only the evil trickery of the slavemaster prevents them from returning to the heavenly home where their living King awaits.<br><br>Both the separatist practices and the emotional core of Rastafarian life can be traced to this deeply felt sense that the Rastaman is in Babylon, but not of it. As Silja Joanna Aller Talvi writes, "From the Rasta's perspective, the whole world is full of Babylon, and Babylon systems are constantly seeking to oppress (or 'downpress') and exploit the African."[6] Rejecting the authorities of this world, Rastafarians attempt to create a separate "God-like culture," in part by embracing the organic world of nature as a kind of anti-modern alternative to Babylon. Most Rastafarians are vegetarian, eat only "ital" (fresh and healthy) food, and reject commercial products and medicines; many also grow their hair in dreadlocks—the "natural" shape of long kinky hair that's washed but neither combed, cut or treated. Though Rastafari was spawned in the slums, many "locksmen" abandoned the urban hustle for lives as fisherman or simple farmers; those who remained were shunned by most respectable Jamaicans as "Blackhearts" or boogiemen.<br><br>...<br><br>One of the brightest guiding lights of Rastafari is the flame of the "chalice," stuffed with sticky marijuana buds that crackle during inhalation. Addressing the sacramental use of marijuana among Rastafarians, Barrett argues that "the real center of the movement's religiosity is the revelatory dimensions brought about by the impact of the 'holy herb.'" Long a Jamaican folk medicine, marijuana was probably introduced to the island by indentured East Indian Hindus, who gave the plant its popular name "ganja" and may have inspired its religious use (many of India's wandering mendicant "sadhus" also wear dreadlocks, eat vegetarian food and smoke hashish in a religious context). For all their glassy, bloodshot stares, it's wrong to think of Rastafarians as "stoners"; hardcore adherents consume ganja as a sacrament and rarely use other drugs or alcohol. One Rasta explained the role of ganja in strongly gnostic terms, though it is a gnosticism shot through with Rastafari's powerful social consciousness:<br><br>"Man basically is God but this insight can come to man only with the use of the herb. When you use the herb, you experience yourself as God. With the use of the herb you can exist in this dismal state of reality that now exists in Jamaica...When you are a God you deal or relate to people like a God. In this way you let your light shine, and when each of us lets his light shine we are creating a God-like culture.[8]"<br><br>Barrett explains that to the Rastafarian, "the average Jamaican is so brainwashed by colonialism that his entire system is programmed in the wrong way...To rid his mind of these psychic forces his head must be 'loosened up,' something done only through the use of the herb."[9] As one Montego Bay "dread" described the plant ally, "It gives I a good meditation; it is a door inside."<br><br>...<br><br>Even the name of Perry's studio was archetypal, resonating with any number of prophetic crafts: the Ark of the Covenant, Noah's craft, Garvey's Black Star Line—all messianic revisions to those vessels that abducted Africans into slavery. But the Black Star that Perry followed lied in the depths of space. In an interview with David Toop, Scratch discussed Black Ark in such extraterrestrial terms:<br><br>"It was like a space craft. You could hear space in the tracks. Something there was like a holy vibration and a godly sensation. Modern studios, they have a different set-up. They set up a business and a money-making concern. I set up like an ark....You have to be the Ark to save the animals and nature and music.[17]" <br><br>Perry's unique fusion of premodern myth and postmodern machines not only shapes his lyrics (in one of his weirdest songs, Perry warns "scavengers," "vampires" and "sons of Lucifer" that "Jah Jah set a super trap / to capture you bionic rats"), but infuses his technological practice. Exploiting equipment that was archaic even for its day, Perry became a dub alchemist, weaving magnetic, tape, wires and circuit boards into the playful web of his magical thinking.<br><br>...<br><br>This loosely "gnostic" strain of Afrodiasporic science-fiction emerges from the improvised confrontation between modern technology and the prophetic imagination, a confrontation rooted in the alienated conditions of black life in the New World. According to Greg Tate, who sees science fiction as continuing a vein of philosophical inquiry and technological speculation that begins with Egyptian theories of the afterlife, "black people live the estrangement that science fiction writers imagine."[21] As Perry's own scathing protest music proves, the prophetic art that arises from this condition of perpetual exile does not simply "escape" from the pragmatic demands of politics. But neither does it deny the ark of the imagination that lies on the other side of the inner door, a tricky craft capable of navigating through the shadowed valleys of this world, guided by a black star whose very invisibility renders its virtual possibilities infinite.<br><br><!--EZCODE IMAGE START--><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v226/JeffWells/subalbum1/lee_scratch_perry_samet.jpg" style="border:0;"/><!--EZCODE IMAGE END--><br><br> <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=rigorousintuition>Rigorous Intuition</A> at: 6/14/06 9:24 am<br></i>
