Meet Upsetter's

So this dude Adam really likes Reggae music. He knows lots bout it, and he told me about a guy named Lee "Scratch" Perry and loaned me this period retrospective set called "Arkology".
I'm pretty familiar with a lot of different styles of music, but somehow reggae never really interested me. I have one Bob Marley album "Catch A Fire". I like, but thats the limit of my knowledge of real reggae. As a style it seems like it has co-opted into something really lame. Lee Perry is freaking not lame.
He's famous for eating money, worshiping bananas, and referring to himself as "The King of Mess". Much of his most well known work was done with a group called The Upsetters. Also, especially, he was an important figure in the creation of "dub" music. I'd heard of dub, but didn't really know what it was. It's basically what we've come to know as remixing. Making small changes to the basic tracks of a recording and doing different things over these tracks. Perry was pretty successful with this style, and had lots of dub hits, not just in Jamaica but in the UK as well. "Arkology" seems to be set up as a sort of introduction to dub, which is an annoying framework for a "Lee Perry anthology". I.E., one of the most famous tracks here, Police & Thieves, is presented first in its original form and then followed by four (!) dub versions, all using the same backing track, barely, if at all, modified. One has some dude soloing on sax over it. This is a good way to illustrate what dub is, but it's not Lee Perry at his best. As far as I can tell, this is the format for the entire collection: one track in the form of its popular release followed by a dub version. This dude is the inspiration for rap singles where Side B contains two remixes of Side A. That's not a dismissal of Arkology though, cuz it has lots of really cool stuff on it; even the haters could admit that the best tracks on these discs are well produced and original sounding lofi recordings. All of them were recorded in his 4-Track backyard studio called Black Ark, which he claimed to've burnt to the ground. If you're interested in hearing Lee Perry, and you know me, drop a comment. I'm gonna try to acquire a few of his albums, because, as is usually the case, I'm betting you can learn more from the originals than from compilation.