Super Ape - The Upsetters (1976)
Ideated from: a Black History Month reminder that black artists largely built the modern world of music
There are about a dozen tangents I could go down here, about producer Lee “Scratch” Perry and his band The Upsetters, about raggae and dub, about dub as the starting point of a lot of modern electronic music. I’ll try to be brief.
Perry was an early innovator who helped turn Jamaican ska music into the more dancable, more commercial style called reggae. He set up shop with his own label and eventually his own studio, and produced a lot of top records.
Even before Perry, it was common for the b-side of a Jamaican single to feature a “dub” version: one without vocals, that the engineer or producer had re-run through the studio board to add a bunch of sound treatments to enhance the bass, add reverb, and make it more other-worldly. Perry started doing this even with his principal records, adding an echoing bass-heavy element to what his band was doing.
Most of the basic tracks here are dub versions of singles he had produced and released on his label. It’s all highly rhythmic, bass-heavy, and gloomy. And yet, in the tradition of a lot of reggae, the vocal still sounds glorious and hopeful, even when it’s also mournful.
