Can't Stop Won't Stop (7 page)

Dub had a compelling circularity. It exploded in the dancehall at the moment the tenement yards exploded in violence. Dub was the “B-side” to the soaring visions of the democratic socialist dreamers or the apocalyptic warnings of the Rasta prophets. As reggae historian Steve Barrow says, “The music of dub represents literally and figuratively ‘
the other side
.' There's an up and a down, there's an A-side and a B-side. It's a dialectical world.”

As the two sevens clashed, dub peaked with album sets from Perry (
Super Ape
), Keith Hudson (
Brand
), Niney the Observer (
Sledgehammer Dub
), the Mighty Two—Joe Gibbs and Errol Thompson (Prince Far I's
Under Heavy Manners
, Joe Gibbs'
State of Emergency, African Dub All-Mighty
series), Philip Smart (Tapper Zukie's
Tapper Zukie In Dub
), Harry Mudie (the
Dub Conference
series), and the most influential dubmaster of all, King Tubby.

Born Osborne Ruddock in 1941, Tubby had collaborated with Perry to demonstrate the possibilities of dub on the 1973 album,
Blackboard Jungle Dub
. With
King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown
, an album-length collection of sides with melodica player Augustus Pablo dating to the beginning of Manley's first term, musical innovation and political disintegration seemed to stoke each other.

On the title track, a version of Jacob Miller's “Baby I Love You So,” Tubby left Pablo's melodica, Carly Barrett's drums, and Chinna Smith's guitar in shards. Miller had sung, “Night and day, I pray that love will come my way.” But Tubby clipped his lines—”Baby I-I-I-I,” “night and day,” “that love,” “And I-I-I-I”—transforming Miller's longing into a prison. On the original, Miller had scatted loosely, then chuckled, perhaps at having missed an essential cue. Tubby added a ghostly echo, leaving the laugh to hang like a haunting, the smoke of Rhygin's trail. At the end, Miller's cry dissolved in a barrage of oscillations, a plunge through a trapdoor.

The last track, inexplicably left unannounced on the original album sleeve and label, was a dub of the Abyssinians' 1969 single, “Satta Massa Gana,” colloquially known as the Rastafarian national anthem. In mistranslated Amharic, its title meant to “give thanks and praise” to Haile Selassie, while its harmonies yearned for “a land far far away.”
¹⁸
Tubby gutted the song to a bass pulse and drum accent. The song's basic chords were twisted out of shape and pitch. Drums dropped like thunderclaps. Tubby's mirror world was the sound of the dreamland alliance of Rastas and democratic socialists disintegrating, its utopia looted by thugs and left to the whipping hurricane winds of global change.

It was music of the crossfire lifted out of the progression of time, politics, and meaning. Dub embraced contingency. Everything was up for grabs. Dub declaimed, distorted, or dropped out at the razor's edge of a moment. It gave a clipped, fragmented voice to horrors the nation could not yet adequately articulate.

One Love Peace Music

When 1978 arrived, another round of election-year violence seemed imminent. But then the unexpected happened. Somehow in early January, Bucky Marshall, a gunman from the PNP-backed Spanglers Posse, ended up in the same General Penitentiary cell as some JLP gangsters and they got to talking.

They spoke of the event that had ended 1977. Renegade soldiers from the Jamaican Defense Force had set up and ambushed an unarmed posse of JLP roughnecks, killing five. But five more got away, and they told the story of the extra-legal set-up to
The Gleaner
. The resulting scandal potentially incriminated both PNP and JLP politicians, and many felt that a coup or a civil war was imminent. Certainly, the rival gunmen in that jail-cell reasoned, no political affiliations could save anyone from the army if something that serious was afoot.

When Marshall stepped out of jail, he went to meet with Claudie Massop, Seaga's man in Tivoli Gardens, who had come up through The Phoenix and was now the area don. The next morning, at a spot straddling the border of JLP and PNP territories in central Kingston, they announced a peace treaty. Marshall and Massop took photos together, and spoke to the press. “This is not political,” said Marshall. “This is from we who have felt the pangs of jail.”
¹⁹
Massop added, “The youths have been fighting among themselves for too long and is only them get dead. Everybody I grow up with is dead.”
²⁰
Amidst the spreading truce, elated youths left their yards and began to gather in parks and dances that had formerly been in enemy territory.

With the help of the Rasta sect, the Twelve Tribes of Israel, Marshall, Massop, and the ranking PNP don from Concrete Jungle, “Red Tony” Welch, went to London to see the man who had first brought them together, Bob Marley. Welch and Massop had been frequent guests when Marley was holding court on Hope Road. Now they asked him to return to Jamaica and headline a “One Love Peace Concert.” The benefit would raise money for the most suffering PNP and JLP ghettos, to be distributed by the newly formed Central Peace Council, but more importantly, it could curtail the possibility of civil war or a military coup. Marley agreed, and flew home. In the days leading to the concert, Marley toured through the yards to talk up the peace treaty. At the Black Ark, he and Perry recorded “Blackman Redemption” and “Rastaman Live Up” as Massop and Marshall vibed together in the listening room.
²¹

On April 22, thousands packed Kingston's National Stadium to hear the island's top musicians, including Dennis Brown, Culture, the Mighty Diamonds, Big Youth, Beres Hammond, Ras Michael and the Sons of Negus, Dillinger and Jacob Miller, who, with his band Inner Circle, had the most popular tune in the country in “Peace Treaty Special,” a rockers-style tribute to Marshall, Massop and the tribes set to a version of the American Civil War–era song, “When
Johnny Comes Marching Home Again.”
²²
“Man can walk the street again, hurrah-ah-e-ah hurrah,” Miller sang joyously. “From Tivoli to Jungle, Lizard Town to Rema—hurrah!” Peter Tosh played a scorching set, laced with withering criticisms of the politicians in attendance. Then Marley took the stage, and the crowd swelled to a roar.

As the Wailers gave an inspired performance of “Jamming,” Marley called the political leaders onstage. His long dreads cut arcs through the night air, and he danced as if possessed, singing, “Show the people that you love ‘em right, show the people you gonna unite.” Manley stood to the left of Marley, Seaga to the right, and they tentatively gave each other a handshake. Marley clasped their hands, put them in a power grip and lifted them over his head, holding them high for all to see. The crowd was stunned. “Love, prosperity be with us all,” Marley said. “Jah Rastafari. Selassie I.”

Through music, Marley had brought together a trinity of power, and restored unity to the young nation. Culture, it seemed, had transcended politics.

But there were other signs as well. Five days before the concert, army soldiers fired on a peaceful ghetto march for better sanitation, killing three demonstrators. The leader of the Central Peace Council, who had called for an end to police corruption, fled the island in fear for his life. Police stopped and searched a taxi Claudie Massop was riding in, then coldly executed him in a hail of fifty bullets.
²³
The peace treaty was over. So was Manley's democratic socialist experiment. In 1980, Seaga and the JLP would be overwhelmingly victorious at the polls, stepping up just in time to be courted by the new Reagan administration in Washington. Almost nine hundred people would die in election-year violence.

The reggae industry, too, felt the pressure drop. During the heady independence years of the sixties, Coxsone Dodd's Studio One and Duke Reid's Treasure Isle had been built from local sound system profits. But the Black Ark studio had been financed by the globalization of the reggae industry. Perry's dubs had been partly an answer to the growing international demand for reggae. Reggae music was not only a socially stabilizing force, it had become an important commodity.

The pressures fell disproportionately on the slender shoulders of musicians.
Uptown, Bob Marley's Hope Road residence had become a magnet for Twelve Tribes Rastas, a sect that openly and controversially courted the wealthy, whites and browns. But many more displaced sufferers also frequented the Hope Road yard. Marley archivist Roger Steffens believes that by the late ‘70s, Marley was directly responsible for the economic fortunes of six thousand people. By 1979, the Marley camp had also become aware of CIA operatives tailing them. And yet, despite being diagnosed with cancer, Marley maintained a hectic touring schedule through the end of 1980, perhaps because of such obligations. “It took its toll,” Steffens says. “He really wanted out.” On May 11, 1981, he was dead.

At the beginning of 1978, Perry's Black Ark had become a center for the Boboshanti, an orthodox Rasta sect led by Prince Emmanuel Edwards that adhered to the ideal of Black Supremacy. Perry biographer David Katz notes that the Bobos hoped Perry and his Ark could help disseminate their message, much the same way Marley did for the Twelve Tribes, and that hundreds of people materially depended upon Perry's riddim factory. By the end of the year, Perry had ejected the Bobos, shaved his budding dreads, and turned away Rasta groups and visitors. He began dismantling the studio. He covered the Ark with brown paint and graffiti tags, crossing out words and pictures with Xs. In the summer of 1983, the Black Ark burned to the ground. Perry said he did it himself.

Years later, Perry dictated an extraordinary statement to Katz, a peripatetic freestyle. He began, “The First World and the Second World live, but the Third World is finished because I, Lee ‘Scratch' Perry, knows the head of the IMF—the IMF big boss, the Bank of England big boss, the Midland big boss, the International Giro Bank big boss . . .

“The Third World drawn in,” he continued. “The game blocked; the road block, the lane block, and the street block, so who can't see good better see them eye specialist and take a good look upon the road. The road blocked; all the roads are blocked . . .

“Reggae music is a curse, the ultimate destruction”, he said. “Logical Fox, solid-state logic.”
²⁴

Fevered dreams of progress had brought fires to the Bronx and Kingston. The hip-hop generation, it might be said, was born in these fires.

On the block in the South Bronx with the Ghetto Brothers and the Roman Kings.
Benjy Melendez (center), Victor Melendez (right, on drums).
Photo © Librado Romero/New York Times Agency

 

 

Ay, cuando llegará la justicia Justicia para los boricuas y los Blacks?

When will justice come Justice for Puerto Ricans and niches?

—Eddie Palmieri

We are tired of praying and marching and thinking and learning Brothers want to start cutting and shooting and stealing and burning

—Gil Scott-Heron

At summer's twilight, the Bronx begins to shimmer.

Parents gather in chairs outside the multilingual bodega, sipping on beer and juice, bathing in fluorescent conversation on wide sidewalks. Teens carom around the corner, tall on gleaming bikes. Boys in squeaky new sneakers pound a basketball down the glassine asphalt. Salsa, dancehall and hip-hop pour into the air like the cool water out of an old, leaning corner hydrant.

The girl sitting there wipes her brow. Light sparkles off her curly brown ringlets. It glints off the cyclone fencing encircling the vacant lot, the discarded Snapple bottles and chip bags, the polished mirror of the NYPD car parked where a three-story-high staircase descends to a subway stop. Night is coming aglow in the urban canyons.

Halfway up the other hill, in this neighborhood that the maps call Morris Heights, the residents call the East Bronx, and the rest of the world calls the South Bronx—”everything south of Fordham Road,” as the saying goes—stands a junior high school, PS 117.

“I live near here but I never come around,” says Michael “Lucky Strike” Corral, as he walks into the unlit playground. Once a member of the Savage Skulls gang, he is now a Zulu King and a member of the Zulu Nation's World Council. He walks through these streets with respect, keeping an eager, wide-eyed pit bull pup pulling ahead of him on a short leash. Two days earlier, he had saved the pup from young Bloods who were about to pump a couple of slugs into it for fun.

A high concrete wall rises in the corner of the schoolyard, separating the handball court from the rest of the yard, only one way in and one way out. The court sits in the dark cast by the five-story school building. Behind it, two stories above, the sidewalks along the intersection of 176th Street and Morris Avenue offer a prime seat for the gladiator activities below—whether handball contests or gang initiations.