LEE "SCRATCH" PERRY AND THE SPIRITUAL

It’s the future. The children dem were created for my music. They are the energy. No - not energy: INergy ... because the world EN is the end, but the word IN is the beginning.

It’s the future. The children dem were created for my music. They are the energy. No - not energy: INergy ... because the world EN is the end, but the word IN is the beginning.

These are the words of Jamaican Reggae and Dub legend Lee “Scratch” Perry. At 80 years old, Perry is still performing his spiritual music internationally. It seems out of some divine afflatus that the producer, poet, musician, singer and artist manifests his other-worldly inspiration. Lee’s eccentricity of character and arcane mystery of speech have alienated some who term him ‘madman’ and enticed others to give him the appellation of ‘genius’. I am of the latter school of thought and went to see him at the Fiddler’s Bristol, as an ancient traveller may seek an oracle – to hear truth through the channel of this seer.

In many ways the venue, located on Willway Street, metamorphosed into a sanctuary of deep, dreamy dub meditation. On the stage sits what seems to be a shrine; three bananas pierced with incense sticks sit in front of a suitcase adorned with an exuberance of emblems and images. Lee himself looks somewhat like an intergalactic Poseidon, wearing leggings that resemble the milky-way and adorned with patches, beads and crystals. His beard and hair are dyed fuchsia and there are mirrors on his hat.

Perry’s band plays his most iconic tracks: Disco Devil, Zion’s Blood and People Funny Boy. These provide a musical backdrop for a rhyming overflow of his stream of consciousness – surrealist spoken word poetry if you will. Political statements of anti-monarchy: “Burn down Buckingham Palace / burn down the challis” blended with the more comic “take off your cap / and start to hop” [to which he precedes to hop about on one leg] and denouncements of the obstacles to healthy spiritual enlightenment: “no cocaine / no coke/ no coke / no joke”.

Lee, with childlike spontaneity, swings and ambles about the stage “you needed me and I needed you” he chants – and indeed after the conflagration of his studio in Jamaica, the Black Ark, Lee moved to London where his musical career was reinvigorated by British musicians (such as The Clash and Paul McCartney) and a British fan base. Scratch is fixated by the purifying power of the elements. It was he, in fact, that burned down his studio to purify it of bad intention from pseudo-Rastafari and evil spirits. He invited me backstage, and to the question “what do you believe in?” I was given the answer “I believe in rocks, and ice, and water”. Handling his crystal neckwear Perry tells me “these are made from ice”. In the 2008 documentary movie “The Upsetter” Lee says that heard music in rocks and boulders; he was working as a builder and through the clashing and clanging of these raw materials Dub and Reggae were conceived in the mind.

The silent but omnipotent energy of the natural is the essential core of Perry’s spirituality– and he is the mouthpiece of this hidden knowledge.

TRADITIONAL DANCE AND SPIRITUAL TRANCE

I made this video to share the phenomena of religious trances. The superhuman abilities exhibited during a trance demonstrate the amazing capabilities of the human mind. I learned that the men don't remember what happened or what they did in the grips of the trance and it reminded me of studies of Dissociative Identity Disorder: the subject has different memories, abilities and preoccupations in their alternate state. People reacting to the myriad layers and textures of music so sensitively through dance was like being tuned in to a state of higher consciousness in which sounds and movement are perceived with supreme clarity and the fear instinct that prevents us from engaging with harmful activities (like peeling a coconut with our teeth) is almost completely dissolved. The prism that most of us understand ourselves and our abilities and human boundaries through is one that has been dictated to us. Our friend John, the man interviewed, told us that the men never suffer from any health problems after consuming lit coal or eating a raw chicken which seems contrary to the laws of biology. Perhaps our almost arrogant fidelity to the sciences has been a ballast to understanding that physical and psychological human condition more thoroughly.

PRINCESS NOKIA IN BRISTOL

Afro-Nuyorican feminist musician Destiny Frasqueri, who performs under the stage name “Princess Nokia” has a sound that is firmly placed in the digital age. However, her multifaceted character and variety of style transcend the restrictions of time or place. Developing “Princess Nokia” on informal internet platforms such as Tumblr, Soundcloud and Instagram has allowed her to have complete artistic autonomy and be free of the shackles of record companies. This girl doesn’t just rap and sing about being an independent female- she’s the real shit. 

I was first struck by Nokia in the Youtube video of her 2014 track “Dragons” that blended upbeat electro hip-hop with sensitive, dreamy vocals. These were spread on a romantic and sentimental video that will make you nostalgic for Saturday morning cartoons and Nintendo video games.

Destiny’s fluidity and range is perhaps her most striking attribute. Her style refuses to be pinned down. At times she’s the sloppy and androgynous New York comic book nerd, at others the gentle and supremely feminine “patron of the earth”, and at others the metallic cyber princess. She perhaps embodies all that it means to be a female in the modern age: rigorous exploration into all the avenues of the self and subsequent uncompromised, unapologetic expression of this adventure.

My first encounter with Destiny was a complete surprise in the toilets of the venue. She was commenting with endearment on another girls ‘fat belly’ and confessed “I saw your belly and was like ‘I have that! I’ve had it ever since I was a child’”. Her track Tomboy from the album 1992 is a dedicated to her “small titties and fat belly”; this is a reclaiming of personal sexuality and disregard for the mainstream media’s idea of what constitutes as sexy and what doesn’t. She makes eczema cool. During this intimate exchange in the toilets she told us “I’m just trying to be the next Kathleen Hanna” (the front woman of American 90s punk band Bikini Kill). On stage she adopted the methods of Hanna instructing the girls to come to the front and the boys to stay back.

 

She starts her set in a way that has become characteristic of her- rude, raw and raucous. Destiny shouts at the sound engineers to turn her microphone up, spits, and dabs herself with napkins – it’s awe-inspiring.

She begins with ‘Bart Simpson’, an ode to her deviant youth. Her set passes through the entire spectrum of her musical conquests as Princess Nokia, including a Spanish rap honouring  her Taíno, Yoruba and Afro-Latino heritage. Her music is undeniably imbued in feminist activist politics. The track ‘mine’ empowers black women who wear wigs, weaves and extensions particularly resonant in the line “see how I stunt / in my lace front” and schools those who ask if their hair is real with: “please do not ask me or any black or brown woman if our hair is real or not…don’t fuckin’ ask. It’s very rude…we bought it, it’s ours”. Nokia’s feminism encompasses ‘Womanism’; this term is defined as a social theory pertaining to the oppression and struggle of women of colour. In other words ‘black feminism’.

She speaks to the mostly female audience:

“I know there’s a lot of girls at Uni out there, I know here’s a lot of girls, like eighteen-nineteen, coming up, finding themselves in the world. Trust me, I don’t want to be eighteen or nineteen ever again. The beauty of being a woman is growing. The beauty of being a woman is evolution. So if you’re not happy with yourselves or if you don’t feel great at the moment honestly, honey, the evolution is coming.”

Destiny is essential to modern hip-hop and occupies a space, musically, that was previously uninhabited. Rude yet benevolent, aggressive yet gentle, she expresses the myriad dimensions of the modern female and does so unapologetically.

Princess Nokia’s new album 1992 is available for free download here: http://princessnokia.org/