Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright by Hank Bordowitz

get me stoned.
    Later we went with Wooly on a ride through Kingston. It reminded me of a drab melding of California and Detroit, with slums so bad they made the latter’s look like the Sheraton. Wooly takes us to the studio of Lee “Scratch” Perry, one of the most prolific Jamaican producers. True to form, Perry is not home. The man from Time, who had stayed up all night when he got here finishing his last story and is on a tight schedule, is visibly hassled, and in the car Mr. Swank begins to complain about the fact that everybody is waiting around for Marley to be ready to be interviewed. This writer had apparently been promised an audience with Bob yesterday, and is annoyed to learn that he will not be getting one today either.
    Wooly patiently explains that no one can get a really good story on Jamaica without getting into the tempo of Jamaican life, and that everybody will take back from Jamaica whatever they bring there. Wooly is, obviously, very much taken with the tempo and lifestyle himself, even if he is staying in the Sheraton.
    We go shopping at Aquarius Records, where I first experience the peculiar Jamaican syndrome of walking into one record store after another and asking for top hit singles or albums like Best of the Maytals, and being told again and again that they don’t have them. I had a long list of records I wanted to buy, and was only able to obtain a few during my stay on the island. I discovered eventually that this was because the music business here (cf. The Harder They Come) was almost totally controlled by the producers, most of whom had their own record stores, where you pretty much had to go to obtain the records they had produced. And the records are not cheap, either—most albums are $6.00, one dub album was quoted at ten bucks to Wooly by a guy in Aquarius, and singles are a dollar. I wondered how a country as poor as Jamaica could support the highest per capita singles issue (thirty released a week) in the world, and was told that Jamaicans almost never bought albums—apparently pressed mainly for export and reggae-loving American tourists—but would at times actually go hungry to have money for a single they wanted.
    I was also impressed to learn that Jamaica is the only place I’ve been where people actually like to play music louder than I do. When you go in the record shops it blares at a volume perilously close to the pain threshold, as the clerk plays deejay, switching off between two turntables and two speakers, one in the shop and one on the street. So your head gets rattled back and forth like a pinball between two raucous tracks and one speaker in the distance and another right on top of you. It’s jarring, and emphasizes the violence underlying the laid-back “gentle” character of reggae. Many of these records may be little more than a rhythm with a guitar chopping out two or three chords, no solos except a guy hollering things you can barely understand over the whole thing; but that rhythm is rock steady, the guitars chop to kill, and the singer is, often as not, describing class oppression or street war. There is also a sense of listener-as-artist that is one of the most beautifully developed I have ever encountered. In the first place, all the singles have an instrumental version of the hit on the B side, so the deejays can flip them over and improvise their own spaced-out harangues over the rhythm tracks. Since Jamaican radio plays so little reggae, most of these deejays come off the streets, where until recently you could find, periodically, roots discos set up. Out of these emerged deejay-stars like Big Youth and I Roy, and along with producers like Lee Perry and Augustus “King Tubby” Pablo they have pioneered a fascinating form of technologized folk art called dub. An album by I Roy can thank six different producers on the back “for the use of their rhythms.” Don’t ask me where the publishing rights go. Don’t ask anybody, in fact. And don’t ask how