Reggae has just lost its guru and the whole music world is in mourning. “Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry died this morning while in Noel Holmes Hospital. He was 85 years old, ”Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness announced on Sunday.
“Sorcerer of reggae”, “Salvador Dali of dub”, “The Upsetter” (“The pain in the ass”): nicknames abound for this elusive figure. Mystical and eccentric, he is the producer who took reggae to conquer the world by guiding Bob Marley. Born in 1936 in Kendal, Jamaica, Rainford Hugh “Lee” Perry left school at age 15 before moving to Kingston in the 1960s.
“Africa in Jamaican music”
So he’s the one who pushed Marley into the studio. “Without him, Bob Marley might have remained an orphan arrow in his bow,” wrote Francis Dordor in the Inrockuptible. Perry “reintroduced Africa into Jamaican music. Not only the rhythmic plurality but also the cultural and philosophical resonance ”.
But it should not be reduced to this fact of glory. This frail figure, blowing ganja on his microphone to chase away evil spirits before his performances, instilled a number of musical motifs. “It is the sound of Perry and that of Jamaican” toasters “(DJ who takes the microphone) that inspired us at the beginning of hip-hop” admitted Afrika Bambaataa, pioneer of US rap. And some of Perry’s hypnotic loops of mixing consoles, elevated to instruments in their own right, are heard in techno.
The Clash, Beastie Boys, Moby …
The man will not harbor any resentment about it. “If I hit my enemies, they live on. Because I strike them with love ”, he had said in a cryptic formula he had the secret, launched at the Time, Swiss newspaper, country where he ended up settling in the late 1990s. Other artists have collaborated in broad daylight with the legend, from The Clash to the Beastie Boys through Moby.
You also had to see the phenomenon talking to a cow in the vicinity of Einsiedeln, its Swiss base, in the documentary Lee Scratch Perry’s vision of paradise signed Volker Schaner. In it, we admire his different headdresses: seaweed or caps overloaded with charms. His shoes feature on one side a portrait of the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, considered by Rastafarians to be a messiah, and contain a sketch of the Queen of England in one sole. A whole universe, born from his labyrinthine spirit. A decorum-jumble that ended up in his legendary studio in Kingston, the Black Ark.
Thousand lives
What led him behind desks to shape sounds? The legend lends him a thousand lives: bulldozer driver, professional dancer, domino player … before he becomes a small hand in recording studios in the Jamaican capital then founded his label Upsetter. A studio which will end up in flames at the beginning of the 1980s. Fortunately for the world of music, he had had the time five years earlier to produce the legendary album there. War ina babylon by Max Romeo. It’s up to reggae now to help us digest the announcement of his death by sending us back as soon as possible. Positive vibrations.