A bi-monthly series in wlvch we offer a user'sgude to the r e c o r h g s of some of our favourite musicians. Tlxs month, David Katz enters the labyrinthine Black Arluves of Lee Perry. Illustration: Savage Pencil
Lee 'Scratch' Perry is a one of music's few truly visionary figures. The music he has producedover the last four decades is an integral part of Jamaica's rich culture, but it emerges from an agenda so personal, so singular {hat it refuses to lend itself to reductive analysis. As Perry himself once said, in answer to a question regarding his unique approach to sound production: "I hear sounds inside my head. I don't know where they come from; Iwould not ask But Iwill put them to tape as far as I hear them."
On one level, Lee Perry seems to present a mass of contradictions. A producer, singer and songwriter who extracts the hidden contours of sound by convening with a genie and delving into a 'bag of breeze', he is also a devout Rastafarian who believes in extraterrestrials and likens himself to ET. A longtime advocate of black supremacy, he awaits the installation of a theocratic world government, and insists that God and Jesus are black Yet he has fathered two children with the wealthy white Swiss woman he married eight years ago in a Hare Krishnatemple. If these conflicting signals paint a picture of Perry as an unstable, idiosyncratic character, the body of recorded work he has amassed since the early 60s is a remarkably l consistent testimony to his creative spirit When Rainford Hugh Perry was born on 2 0 March 1936 in the inhospitableterrain of rural Hanover, colonial Jamaica was in the grip of economic depression. Dropping out of school when he was 14, Perry came up with ever more inventive ways to stay out of the sugar cane plantationswhere most unskilledschool leavers ended up. He entered lucrative dance contests run by Kingston were cutting d i xs with local talent, Perry who effectively pioneered the concept of the studio the island'sWestern parishes, masteringa violent, jerking heeded the call and moved to the capital circa 1961 to mixing desk as the ultimate instrument dance step called The Yank He became a dominoes begin a recordingcareer that is still active. The belated interest in Perry's master works has champion, claimingthat he won games by penetrating Although he has occasionally scored some resulted in a high volume of reissues and CD his opponents' minds. In the 1950s he found work internationalhits, Lee Perry has 'enjoyed' cult status for retrospectives,a good many of them haphazardly driving a tractor and dynamiting rocks in Negril, which much of that career. But in recent yean, the advent of compiled or shoddily manufacturedbootlegs.Worse, was then being developed as a resort area for tourists. more sophisticated recordingtechnology has meant much of what has been newly attributed to Perry isn't But music was always his greatest source of inspiration. that an increasingnumber of producers from diverse by him at all. Negotiating his ever proliferatingand ever He started writing songs as a teenager, nursingsecret ambitions to become a singer. When he heard that a few entrepreneun and sound system operaton in areas have been drawing on the techniques pioneered more muddled discography can be a treacherous by Perry and other dub scientists during the early 7 0 s business. What follows is a chronological route map to reminding us that it was Perry and his contemporaries its genuine landmarks.
42 The Wire
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