It's All Up To Scratch! As legendary reggae space cadet Lee Perry lands in London for a series of shows, his musical descendants Sean Paul and Wayne Wonder rocket up the U.S. charts. Jamaican music is back — again By MICHAEL BRUNTON - Time Magazine Europe In the steamy dancehalls of northwest Jamaica in the 1950s, Lee "Scratch" Perry was a teenager fresh from the sugarcane fields, scooping up prizes with his energetic renditions of dances like the Yank and the Mashed Potato to the hottest boogie-woogie and R&B tracks newly washed in from the nearby U.S. Half a century later, the tide has turned — as it did in the '60s and '70s — and it's the rhythms of the Jamaican dancehall that are now storming the U.S. (and European) charts. Leading the charge are young guns like Sean Paul and Wayne Wonder, who are bending America's native hip-hop with new sounds. And so Perry — at 67 still the inspired lunatic-producer of reggae — finds himself in possession of his first Grammy (for last year's album Jamaican E.T.), and encamped at London's plush Royal Festival Hall, where his three-week stint as curator of the 11-year-old Meltdown festival kicked off on Sunday. Each year, Meltdown invites a musical luminary — Laurie Anderson, Nick Cave, Elvis Costello, David Bowie — to devise a series of challenging concerts and musical collaborations. Now that it's Perry's turn, he gets to send party invites to old friends and other artists he's only heard on CD. ----------- A Peep Into Perry's Melting Pot No way could you assemble a list of Lee "Scratch" Perry's greatest hits — his chart successes have mostly carried other singers' names, while his dub albums are best swallowed whole. And there are plenty of failed experiments, indulgences and dodgy reissues that should be avoided. Each of the following selections, though, marks a turning point in Perry's musical career and mind — both of which have more twists than most Super Ape (1976) Arguably Perry's finest hour, this album carries dub over the line to a white prog-rock audience. Having earlier stripped reggae back to its basics, Perry piles on layers of vocals and effects Black Ark Experryments (1995) Perry raps mayhem and madness (Poop Song?) into the electro-dub mixing of London's Mad Professor, his touring partner and friend of the past few years Arkology (1997) A superb, three-CD review of Perry's Black Ark output in the '70's: A-grade classics, dub versions and outtakes of his own band the Upsetters, the Heptones, Junior Murvin, the Congoes, Max Romeo ? Jamaican E.T. (2002) Triple-tracked vocals from outer space and derided as "gibberish" by the few critics who bothered to review it, the album nonetheless won a Grammy as 2002's Best Reggae Album in February ------------ Of course he has recruited old reggae stalwarts such as Sly & Robbie and Susan Cadogan, but the far-flung artists who have answered Perry's call aren't locked into one sound; if they reflect anything, it is his pioneering studio techniques, which have seeped almost unnoticed into many areas of popular music: Macy Gray's stoned soul bumps up against Perry's scattershot sounds; British electro-DJ samplers Coldcut go head-to-head with him in an "audiovisual clash"; Chicago minimalists Tortoise let the man loose on their mixing desk; and Skin, late of Skunk Anansie, heads an all-star rendition of early songs that Bob Marley cut with Scratch — a bit of a surprise, since Perry claims to have turned his back on reggae music. But then even Perry's most fervent admirers suspect he rocketed out of our solar system some 20 years ago, fueled by a copious intake of rum, Tia Maria and marijuana. And, interviewing him, you can see what they mean: "It's come to my head that it's going to be a melting pot — melt down all evil spirits and evil souls," says Perry, before digressing into raps on the necessity for healthy living, the coming of Jah and how he plans to put an end to reggae music once and for all. Only the knowledge that he is a clean liver these days, has a home and a beautiful, rich wife in Switzerland and is still picking up big gigs around the world, suggests that he's more than a match for his demons. That and the gleeful giggle that accompanies his every phrase. "We'll have a good time, don't you worry," he promises. It was the same voices in Perry's head that sent him to Kingston to make music in 1961. Jamaica's capital was in ferment at the time, buoyed by imminent independence and bouncing to the sound of Ska, but increasingly mired in poverty and violence. Perry hustled, scouting records for sound systems, talent-spotting (Toots and the Maytals were a prize catch) and writing lyrics for others. Soon, at the mixing desk, he was helping make Studio One the island's hottest hit factory. In 1968, keen to make his own mark, Perry established the Upsetter label, and one evening heard the drum beat he wanted emanating from a Pocomania Church — a Revivalist Christian sect with West African roots. The resulting single, People Funny, Boy, "shook up the entire Jamaican music scene and gave birth to the form known as reggae," says David Katz, Lee Perry's biographer and author of Solid Foundation: An Oral History of Reggae (Bloomsbury). At Studio One Perry had helped break the Wailers, a Ska-beat vocal trio led by the young Bob Marley, promoting the band's breakthrough single of 1964, Simmer Down. And in 1969 Marley came through Upsetter's doors to record classic cuts such as Small Axe and Duppy Conqueror. Although Marley was to become reggae's greatest export, back then the Wailers weren't Jamaica's only stars. "They weren't even the principle ones," says Steve Barrow, reggae historian and A&R director of the British reissue label Blood & Fire. "They were the ones who lucked out and met Lee Perry, who shaped them and pushed them in another direction." Marley went global when he signed to the progressive rock label Island (taking Perry's rhythm section with him), but for classic songs of consciousness like Jah Live and Blackman Redemption he would often return to Perry. With Marley, a door to the world opened for reggae in the '70s and Perry was pushing from behind as Max Romeo, Junior Murvin, the Heptones and others surged through. Soon, though, Perry was distracted by experiments with the funda-mental elements of reggae. At his Black Ark studio in Kingston, using only a four-channel mixing desk with a single VU-meter, he was stripping the vocals off his old sessions, and using overdubs, multitracking, echo, delay and assorted noises that took his fancy to cook up a musical stew called dub. Dub's influence can be heard in the music that has become the staple diet of dance clubs around the world for the past decade: house, techno, trance, drum and bass. But back in Kingston, the departure of the major labels in the '80s and the arrival of rap and hip-hop from the U.S. pushed dancehall music along a different evolutionary path — a loop that's feeding straight back into the heart of America's own pop culture. "American rappers never want to acknowledge that the style they used in hip-hop has its origins in Jamaica, but it's undeniable," says Katz. In one sense, it's a process that's been underway ever since 1970, when a Jamaican DJ named Kool Herc set up a sound system in the Bronx and started rapping over disco. In his wake, Jamaican-born artists like Shaggy, Shinehead and Beenie Man have shone through the '80s and '90s from within U.S. hip-hop. But the breakthrough success in recent months of Sean Paul and Wayne Wonder is now carrying the patois of the dancehall and the sonic chemistry of the Kingston studios onto the U.S. and European charts. Even the major labels are getting interested again. Paul and Wonder — already veterans of the Kingston dancehall s cene — are signed to the island's leading label, VP Records, which last October inked a deal with Atlantic, giving them the mTV exposure their music needed. "Hip-hop is in need right now of an edge and they're turning to dancehall, which is to me the next heavy type of urban music out there," says 30-year-old Paul, whose album, Dutty Rock, has just become a two-million seller in the U.S. and whose single, Get Busy, was stuck at No. 1 there for most of May. Exposure may be one factor in reggae's latest revival, but check out Dutty Rock's fine print and you'll find the names of Sly & Robbie and Steely & Cleevie, Kingston-based musicians and producers who have been riding the music's ever-shifting moods since the '80s. "Jamaican expression has changed so much that it had be called different names at different times," says Paul. "Ska, the rocksteady, reggae or dancehall is just what we are talking about and what we are doing in our country at any moment in time. " Wayne Wonder's hit ballad, No Letting Go, rides — like Paul's Get Busy — on the Diwali rhythm, a bhangra-inflected, hand-clapping beat and has been hovering on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for 23 weeks. Diwali, a digital composition by Jamaican DJ Stephen "Lenky" Marsden, has proved so popular on U.S. dancefloors that an entire album featuring no fewer than 20 versions of it by Beenie Man, Bounty Killer, Elephant Man, and other Jamaican stars has been released — a recycling technique pioneered by Perry. Despite their debt to him, none of these new stars got an invite to Perry's Meltdown. Though he allows that "Sean Paul is doin' 'is job in the dancehall," Lee Perry has no time for today's reggae. Paul, by contrast, has just bought a boxed-set of Bob Marley's Perry-produced tunes. "Lee Perry is definitely an inspiration for me at this point," he says. And as for Perry, should he feel like getting back to his roots and dancing the Mashed Potato at the Royal Festival Hall, he might notice the one thing Meltdown's missing: a dancefloor.