Lee "Scratch" Perry's Upsetter's 14 Dub Blackboard Jungle 1973

 

Deep soundtrack to A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James searing and sprawling 2014 novel about Jamaica in the 1970s and violent crucible of gang cultures and colonial control and CIA guns and a Jamaican diaspora. 

Actually, the whole album, often called Blackboard Jungle Dub, and arguably the first dub album (1973), is a grower and a complex affair. Soundtrack music expansive and subtly orchestrated. Five drummers, three bass players (including "Family Man"), four guitar players, three organists, two pianists, melodica (Augustus Pablo), trombone, trumpet (New Orleans in the house), three more percussion guys (including Noel "Skully" Simms and Uziah "Sticky" Thompson), and Lee "Scratch" Perry and King Tubby engineering the sound system, mixing and matching uncannily simple and impossibly Island-time seductive "riddims" with echoey accents and dub reverb into this moody vanguard vortex of exquisite sufferers lamentations and ebullient keep-on-keeping-on Blackboard Jungle Dub groove power. I've picked up gossip somewhere that Perry gets too much credit for the production that should go to King Tubby. I don't know about any of that other than to note Perry is listed as a musician (percussion) and Tubby isn't. Always with the office politics, I'm afraid. Well, despite or because of the these frictions the record is grandiose and sentimental but humble and organic and catchy and undeniable and absolutely bravura in its indelible studio dub music soundtrack to Kingston, Jamaica in the 1970s. An homage to The Black Ark studio in Perry's backyard. And deep backdrop to James' epic story of Bob Marley's Jamaica. 

And if this 1970s Jamaica story interests you at all you gotta know Timothy White's epic biographical treatment of Marley, Catch a Fire, latest edition because it never stopped expanding until White's early death in 2002. 

Blackboard Jungle Dub. One of the great world pop sounds of the 20th century, which is one of the things the last century did have going for it. Lots of great popular music. 

    

"Lost in Music" and "Why Are People Grudgeful" The Fall (1993)

Smith in his disco homage phase. Both songs associated with The Infotainment Scam album, their highest charting album ever reaching a Top Ten 9th position, most embarrassingly obvious title and ugliest album cover (give me the scribbled montages or horror grotesque comics, any day), and equally obvious old guard post-punk Smith staking out a respected niche position in the EDM rave music takeover of 1990s British pop music. The music on TIS, however, is considerably punchier and offers more edgy rock contrast to Smith's deadpan than these live takes. But they'll do and I like the way this live version of The Fall leans into Disco's monotonously simple bass heavy melodic groovelines and still manages to give them their own stamp of post-punk rumble like old pros. I'd like to think Bryan Ferry would give this his nod. The lead track is a cover of the 1979 Sister Sledge disco masterpiece, "Lost in Music," Smith adding, cynically, ominously, chanted, "the roads of access lead to the palace of excess." His "I feel so alive" isn't entirely convincing either but his shrieks of "hideaway, hideaway, hideaway" are the only time we're sure he's being moved by the music. The B-side, and the actual single of the pair, "Why Are People Grudgeful?" merges reggae great Joe Gibb's "People Grudgeful" and some Lee 'Scratch' Perry. A sort of reggae world music post-punk lament for an illusions-free peaceful coexistence, as fanciful as that sounds today. Or difficult to swallow coming from such a crank as Smith. Post-punk noir disco. 

TGIDF