Lee "Scratch" Perry

Where to begin? Where to end? Not necessarily in that order. Empire is all about knowing where you begin and end. Euro-Christian notions of progress, of historical development: Alpha to Omega. Yet so few of us live this way. We stumble from pillar to post, from post- to pre- without plan or premonition. Sometimes the means justifies the means. So Lee “Scratch” Perry – the Upsetter – brings the horns back again. He sets the hum that wasn’t supposed to be there against the skanking upbeat that was, justifying nothing but having done it. Mean means. Means mean.

Every form is a philosophy. European music insists on rational permutations of an initial theme; on compositional complexity and resolution. Such music lords over its listeners and its musical others, driven by its need to express superiority. It recognizes that superiority is a fiction like any other and exerts it in form: political form, cultural form, legal form, economic form.

In Kingston, in the late-1960s, Lee Perry and King Tubby and a handful of others began to strip the vocal tracks from popular reggae records, pumping up the rhythms and taking liberties with delay effects. They called these new mixes “versions.” The style that emerged – treating the fundaments of a song as a tabula rasa – became known as “dub.” (For a definitive account, see Michael Veal’s Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae.) The blank canvas became, not a space for adding new materials, but a space of subtraction. What is already there is the material and carving it away reveals eddies and ripples hidden beneath the vocal melodies or the organ chords. Something altogether new is discovered in the tangles of the strands of canvas, in the muck of the gesso. Such music has no need for any notion of superiority. It is but a version, a derivative of another thing, equally strong, equally meaningful, equal.

In the ruptures and corruptions of the smooth surface of the steady rhythm new things grow and glow like lichens in a sun-deprived crevasse. One accepts as rule of law that nothing rises to perfection, but that flaws are points of departure, new possibilities hiding in the folds of the canvas. As one pearl of Kingston wisdom puts it: “Every spoil a style.”

No one understood this better than Lee Perry. In his hands, a bad electrical line buzz could become the basis of a new song. When he felt burnt out, he burned his studio – the Black Ark – to the ground – presumably to find something new in the absence he was creating. He produced many of Jamaican music’s most important sessions, including early recordings of Bob Marley and the Wailers and sent those recordings – without the band’s knowledge or consent to Chris Blackwell at Island Records in London, thereby launching Reggae’s biggest star. He also produced the Congos’ great Heart of the Congos, possibly the highpoint of Rastafarian-influenced vocal group reggae – a record of recurrent epiphanies and lasting effects. Perry’s music launched a thousand ships. His use of the studio as a musical instrument in its own right, not merely a capturer, but a creator of sounds, is now taken for granted. But it wasn’t when he started fucking around and fucking shit up.

One of my favorite Lee “Scratch” Perry tracks is “Corn Fish Dub,” as it appears on the album Super Ape. The song seems to emerge out of a fog that is half-physical, half-mental. A distant guitar echoes into itself like a dream that can’t decide to get started. Against that, vocals drift in absentmindedly. Then a muted bell is struck, its attack truncated. Sometimes, it rings out on the one, resonating and echoing: raindrops on the trembling surface of a pond. Other times, the bell swallows itself at its inception and disappears into the space it has engineered for its own pulse. A recurring descending chromatic guitar line gives the song the faintest of shapes. But mostly it is an atmosphere, the bell a firing-synapse across the expanse of mental space and time. Into that flexing envelope everything is swallowed and from it everything is regurgitated, both beginning and end. All revealed as equally origin, equally destination, equally contingent, equal.

Perry’s brand of magic realism was heavy on the magic and light on the realism. His own music lives on a surreal plane with spaghetti westerns and Japanese b-monster flicks: worlds in which the mundane bends around Morricone twang and warbling theremins. These worlds are unheimlich – unhomely, uncanny – doubles of our world with a few of the screws removed, ropeless pulleys, unkiltered pistons chafing against time, yardarms fallen to the dust amid sheltering puffs. Everything could be true. But no more true than what we – on a daily basis – take to be true. The rules of music and manners are not much use here. And Scratch ignored them both with equal insouciance. He was a mischief-maker extraordinaire; a true trickster. The kind who realizes that only the trick is true. We rarely honor our debt to the trickster, the holy fool. He’s dismissable. We can take what we need from him, but leave him safely behind, obscured by madness, smoke, magic. Scratch won’t go away that easily. His music is his remains and in it multitudes.