Picture this...
The year is 2036.
You (if you're lucky enough to still be alive) or your children, or your children's children are at a local music venue that has been around for a long long time.
It has history. It's been refurbed a thousand times, but essentially it's still the place you threw yourself on and off the stage during concerts when you were in your teens, twenties, and possibly thirties.
The venue is packed and the crowd are warmed up.
A four piece band take to the stage and start playing classic G-funk era hip-hop songs, such as 'Let Me Ride', 'Ain't Nuthin' but a G Thang' and 'What's My Name' and then suddenly a 79-year-old Dr Dre comes out and starts chatting shit over the top of the tracks.
Possibly wearing a 17 high stack of Raiders baseball caps, and 50 pairs of headphones (Beats of course) around his fat but flabby aged neck.
The crowd love it. They go as mental as the guy standing in front of them, who kind of sounds like he's reciting actual lyrics, but mostly sounds like he's making it up as he goes along, but it somehow works and everybody gets in to it and dances/bops/sways along.
Well, basically, that's pretty much what seeing Lee 'Scratch' Perry is like. The only other comparison I can think of would be a Public Enemy live band with only Flava Flav as the front man.
LSP is a living legend, the man who pioneered dub reggae and produced some of the most memorable and important reggae songs, albums and artists of all time. Not much of a singer, or artist in a traditional sense. I mean, not in the same way Bob Marley was an artist.
But LSP created so many reggae superstars and gave them his trademark sound, and so has every right to stand on a stage with a band recreating those classic tracks that he crafted over the years, and basically do and say whatever he wants over them.
Literally.
He's that much of a legend, the guy could read from the back of a packet of peanuts and make it engaging, amazing and brand new.
An eccentric character, unique, one of a kind, and somebody that will never be replaced when his time finally comes to head up to Jah on a big cloud of ganja smoke. True legends are thin on the ground these days, no thanks to 2016's hunger for stealing greatness away from us mere mortals, and I'm so glad I got to see LSP in a more intimate venue before, god forbid, anything happened to him...
Read more about LSP here: Lee 'Scratch' Perry Wiki
#Reggae #Dub #LeeScratchPerry #Legend
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