Africa on the Moon: The Complexities of an Afrofuturist Reading of Dub
Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 7(2): 43–63
ISSN 1947-5403 ©2015 Dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net
http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.02.03
Africa on the Moon:
The Complexities of an Afrofuturist Reading of Dub
John Harries
Goldsmiths, University of London (UK)
Abstract
This article attempts a detailed and specific analysis of the music and the mythology of
Lee “Scratch” Perry and other key figures and works in dub, in relation to Afrofuturist
thought and the music, theory and philosophy of Sun Ra in particular. It discovers at
every turn multiple layers of complication, points of disjuncture as well as confluence,
but argues that we can identify complicity and hybridity between these forms and
their key protagonists without reducing their distinctiveness or specificity. By viewing
dub through an Afrofuturist lens, the article aims to illuminate aspects of dub that
would otherwise remain hidden, allowing that here, as in the development and
diversification of the musics themselves, the revelatory relationship may be reciprocal.
Keywords: Afrofuturism, dub, Sun Ra, Lee “Scratch” Perry, diaspora
John Harries is a Lecturer in Popular Music at Goldsmiths, University of London, with specialisms
including production, fringe aesthetics in popular music and performance technology. He is also a
producer and composer/performer, making electronic pop with Sleeps in Oysters, odd beats and
interactive installations as Lake Dysmal and improvised noise with Rutger Hauser. In 2015 he founded
record label and artist’s co-operative The Lumen Lake to support grassroots experimental music making
in South-East London. Information and contact details at .
Feature Article
http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.01.02
http://www.gold.ac.uk/music/staff/harries/
Dancecult 7(2)44
The Black Ark burns
If reggae is Africa in the New World, then dub must be Africa on the moon; it’s
the psychedelic music I expected to hear in the ‘60s and didn’t. The bass and drums
conjure up a dark, vast space, a musical portrait of outer space, with sounds suspended
like glowing planets or with fragments of instruments careening by, leaving trails like
comets and meteors (Ehrlich1982: 106).
I am an extraterrestrial, not from another planet but from heaven (Lee “Scratch” Perry
quoted in Mottram 2007).
And a sound that lived in the solder joints of labyrinthine patch bays, in the grain of the
dirt on grubby tape heads, in the walls themselves, etched with esoteric graffiti from which
particular letters have been meticulously scored out, is lost and can never be remade. A
ghost is born. The smoke trails blow into the past and into the future.
After the fire, in the narrative of the mainstream British music press at least, Lee “Scratch”
Perry is no longer eccentric, erratic, unpredictable. Now he’s plainly mad (Kelly 1984: 7).
But beneath that narrative, probably a little closer to the truth and infinitely sadder, is a
story of consuming racialised alienation. Reflecting on the decision to torch his own studio,
Scratch said “it was then that he realized he was ‘a white man’, because ‘The way black people
was treating me, how could I be one of them?’” (Bradley 2000: 499).
In this desolate acknowledgement of the potential for external social conditions to
devalue and strip away a positive sense of racialised identity, we might find a parallel with
Sun Ra’s determination not to identify as human, to “escape the parameters . . . of humanity”
(Womack 2013: 60). Kodwo Eshun observes that in Afrofuturist thought, “The human is a
pointless and treacherous category” (1998: 3), and it is that sense of treachery, of historically
established or otherwise inevitable betrayal that seems to connect Perry’s statement with
Ra’s assertion of Saturnian origin. There are distinctions as well as commonalities to be
observed here, though. Noting Ingrid LaFleur’s definition of Afrofuturism as “a way of
imagining possible futures through a black cultural lens” (2011), the bleakness of Perry’s
position might suggest a disconnect, since it seems to identify no possible future in the
black culture around him. Ra’s luminous response to the “treacherous category” (Eshun
1998: 3) of humanity is foundational to Afrofuturism as it is now understood. But where
Ra refused the delimited humanity that the white power structures of the Southern United
States belatedly offered—indelibly marked as it was by the alien abduction horror story
of slavery (Sinker 1992: 33)—and adopted instead a sci-fi post-reality of his own making,
Perry, in this moment, found no escape from the treachery. As his music drifted, bounced,
skipped off into space, he cast around for a different shade of human to identify with, and
ended up burning the primary site of his creative expression out of his own world.
It is as good an illustration as any of the complexities of an Afrofuturist reading of dub, a
form as irreducible as any in the history of popular music. Indeed, through a longer historical
lens the picture complicates still further, as we might observe that Perry did eventually find
Harries | Africa on the Moon 45
an escape, and a way to re-shape his creative identity as an international producer in self-
imposed exile from Jamaica. Perhaps this identity, shaped in exile, suggests a further point
of affinity with Ra the Saturnian?
My research for this article started from the perspective that dub seemed to be dealt with
in a relatively cursory fashion in a lot of writing on Afrofuturism. I had the impression that
commentators would take time to work towards an evolved understanding of key African-
American figures—Ra, Rammellzee, George Clinton—and then skate elegantly over Afro-
Caribbean artists like Lee “Scratch” Perry, Scientist, or worse still, dub as a homogenized
concept-lump, in a few brief pages. Working back through the defining music-focused
texts of contemporary Afrofuturist thinking, I’ve found that this perception wasn’t wholly
accurate. Whilst some core publications, such as Eshun (1998) and Womack (2013),
certainly do devote fewer pages specifically to Lee “Scratch” Perry than to comparable
American figures, there are significant documents from as early as the mid-90’s (e.g. Penman
1995; Corbett 1994; John Akomfrah’s 1996 documentary The Last Angel of History) and
plenty of more recent discourse that stress the significance of dub to any understanding of
Afrofuturism (such as Fisher 2013).
At this point some definitions are needed. In respect of Afrofuturism, to expand upon
LaFleur’s definition cited above, Ytasha L. Womack offers the following:
Both an artistic aesthetic and a framework for critical theory, Afrofuturism combines
elements of science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity,
and magic realism with non-Western beliefs. In some cases, it’s a total revisioning of
the past and speculation about the future rife with cultural critiques (2013: 9).
The sense that Womack conveys here of Afrofuturism as essentially multiple rather than
singular, as a meta-concept encompassing or engaging in dialogue with a sprawling range
of ideas, might run counter to an initial understanding of dub as a highly specific musical
form. Dub can be understood as a particular language of sound (and later in this article
I will mount something of a defense of that position, or at least give some thought to its
value), closely tied to a specific time and place. However, recent discourse around dub
(Partridge 2010; Sullivan 2014) has offered a broader reading of the form as concept as
much as content or context, more expansive and rhizomatic in character than a singular
sonic or socio-cultural reading could permit. Sullivan couches this in poetic terms:
Ethereal, mystical, conceptual, fluid, avant-garde, raw, unstable, provocative,
transparent, postmodern, disruptive, heavyweight, political, enigmatic . . . dub is way
more than ‘a riddim and a bassline’, even if it is that too. Dub is a genre and a process,
a ‘virus’ and a ‘vortex’ (2014: 7).
Indeed, as compared to earlier Jamaican musics, dub can be thought of as primarily defined
by “linguistic, formal, and symbolic indeterminacy” (Veal 2007: 35). The significance of this
perspective is that it allows the possibility of dub as Afrodiasporic, rather than reinforcing a
limiting sense of rootedness in time and place. In this conception, dub and Afrofuturism are
Dancecult 7(2)46
brought inexorably together, and not only as parallel diasporic forms with distinct lineages.
Taking on board Paul Gilroy’s stress in The Black Atlantic on “roots and routes . . . flows,
exchanges and in-between elements that call the very desire to be centred into question”
(1993: 190), it is possible to identify key figures of dub and of Afrofuturism as nodes in
the same network, without reducing the specificity and distinctiveness of the former. That,
ultimately, is my argument here: that dub can be understood as distinct and specific, whilst
existing within an Afrofuturist network—a complex, simultaneously dialogical web of
connections, spanning music, history and religion. In discussing dub and Afrofuturism
together, we might hope to “project the plural richness of black cultures in different parts of
the world in counterpoint to their common sensibilities” (Gilroy 1993: 81). Some strands
of that discussion, often concerning points of difference rather than confluence between
relevant musical lineages but not precluding hybridity and complicity between them, will
be discussed here in a series of dialogical case studies, with special attention to the work of
Jamaican dub producer Lee “Scratch” Perry.
The Mighty Upsetter
The example of Perry makes the inappropriateness of a binary or antithetical approach,
which might look to oppose dub and Afrofuturism, particularly apparent. Granted, the
framework of futurist concepts and imagery that US-based jazz auteur Sun Ra erected
around his music and life seem clearly defined and intellectually purposeful in retrospect,
whereas a figure like Perry remains a knotty thread, too complex and contradictory to be
easily unraveled. But, if we’re tempted to identify a simple point of difference even in the
irreducible complexity of Perry’s oeuvre and any message we might attempt to tease out of
it, we might usefully refer to Ian Penman (1995: 38):
This Other tradition has always (sometimes bitterly) been suffused with an inherent
(sometimes crippling) sense of doubt: doubt that any ‘public’ pronouncement of
oppositionality . . . had any real point; and that you rather had to reclaim a language
of your own – encoded, murky, stellar – from out of the shy or earth where you
found yourself, from out of the myriad “discredited” pasts or futures. In the ‘60s and
‘70s, Sci-fi shamen like Miles, Sly Stone and George Clinton (taking some of their
cues from writers like Samuel Delaney and Ishmael Reed) chose this option. If you
were anyway going to be consigned to society’s margins, then why not speak (in) a
marginal tongue?
Penman’s alignment of dub in general with the troubled, muddled worlds of George Clinton’s
Funkadelic project, as well as Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew (1970) and Sly Stone’s There’s A
Riot Goin’ On (1971) serves as a reminder that the focused and clearly articulated futurist
programme of Ra is necessarily no more central to a nuanced modeling of Afrofuturism
than any other node in the network. All of these musics, and Perry’s too, must speak to our
understanding of Afrofuturism, exist within it as well as in dialogue with it.
Harries | Africa on the Moon 47
The Machinebrain and the Living Man
Amongst the many contradictions in Perry’s self-made mythology, we might note that as
well as a white man, he self-identified as “a machine being” (quoted in Martin 1995: 32), not
so much wired into the desk as indistinguishable from it, controlling the mix at a molecular
level. Scratch as cyborg, then. But, starting at a generalised conception of the sound of his
classic 1970s dubs, it is hard not to feel that the blood vessels and nerve endings of the man
are invading the circuitry of the Black Ark’s systems—warping and mutating it from the
pure order envisaged by its fastidious designer, King Tubby—and not the other way around.
In an interview with David Toop for Ocean Of Sound, Scratch himself seemed in part to
frame it that way:
Then I put my mind into the machine by sending it through the controls and the
knobs or into the jack panel. The jack panel is the brain itself, so you’ve got to patch
up the brain and make the brain a living man (Perry, quoted in Toop 1995: 113).
Certainly, there are crucial distinctions between this image and motifs presented by some
American Afrofuturist musicians which we can identify as related. Something in the messy,
endlessly detailed environment of the Black Ark control room suggests a parallel with the
similarly densely layered world of Rammellzee—but for all their machinic appearance,
Rammellzee’s iconic armoured suits do not represent cyborgs. Rather, they are “gods called
the Ramm Ell Zee” (Rammellzee quoted in Tate 2004: 35), metaphoric representations
of the philosophy of Gothic Futurism. A closer parallel is probably the sleek, Metropolis
and Blade Runner-inspired glamour of Janelle Monáe’s android other (van Veen 2013: 13;
McConville 2014). But the image here, in Monáe’s own description and as derived from
Fritz Lang, is specifically of a wholly artificial android as distinct from a partly organic
cyborg. By literal definition, then, Lee “Scratch” Perry’s machine being is innately more
organic and less metallic than these counterpoints in African American musical futurism.
This sense of the organic undiminished, despite a deeply felt connection to machinery,
can be partly understood in relation to core precepts of dub. In Bass Culture, Lloyd Bradley
relates the rebalancing of a mix to “ancient African medicine that splits the body up into
seven centres or ‘selves’ – sexual, digestive, heart, brain, etc. . . . [And] would, as practitioners
always describe it, ‘bring forward or push back’ different centres” (2000: 309). This seems
to suggest a shamanistic element in the cyborgian construct that Lee Perry built around
himself. Beyond this, dub must also be understood as fundamentally bodily in relation
to its initial inception as a source of new recorded material for sound systems, and the
centrality of the physical, visceral, immersively sonic experience of those systems.
However, noting this facet of dub’s origins, it is instructive to consider Julian Henriques’
description of the form as born to “the most powerful music machines in the world
vibrating every organ of the body” (2011: 53). The observation that a sound system employs
technology to act physically upon a “corporeal medium of sounding” (2011: 23) indicates a
reciprocal relationship between technology and the human body. In this we might identify
Dancecult 7(2)48
a starting point for Scratch’s line of thinking, and the compelling suggestion that human
and machine were intertwined in dub right from its beginnings. So, if we overstate the
organic in Perry’s cyborgian conception of himself we are in danger of overlooking the
reciprocity between man and machine which is central to the image in the first place. As
much as Perry the man is infiltrating the machine, he also tells us that the “jack panel is the
brain itself ” which needs to be made into “a living man” (Perry, quoted in Toop 1995: 113).
The sense is that both man and machine are incomplete until they are jacked together. The
combination of the two in this light becomes an expression of Perry’s creative potential as
well as a political statement, just as the identity of the Archandroid is for Monáe.
Different Arks
As the cyborg is a trope common to Lee “Scratch” Perry and to US-based Afrofuturist
musicians, so too is the Ark. Specifically as a common point of departure for Perry and for
Sun Ra, the concept of the Ark warrants consideration as a second brief case in point here.
Considering the Black Ark and the Arkestra as the chosen musical vehicles for Perry and
Ra’s imaginative flights, we might initially identify the Ark in both instances as a spacecraft
leaving earth for other worlds.
However, we should also observe that the Black Ark, for all its sci-fi knobs, switches and
cabling, is often a more explicitly Biblical signifier. Sometimes, for Perry, it was unequivocally
the Ark of the Covenant:
When you see a rainbow in the sky I tell you that is truly the sign of the ark of the
Covenant. I bring the Ark out of Egypt, down to 5 Cardiff Crescent, Washington
Gardens. No-one in Kingston, Jamaica, noticed it was out of Egypt, so I give them
reggae music, the treasure of King Tut (Perry quoted in Mottram 2007).
And then elsewhere, the Black Ark also represents that other Biblical Ark, and its sound
needs to be understood in relation to water and to animal life. Paul Sullivan identifies an
“aquatic” (2014: 43) dimension to Perry’s sound, and also reproduces this analogy drawn
from a David Toop interview with the man himself:
Something there was like a holy vibration and a godly sensation. Modern studios,
they have a different set-up. They set up a business and a money-making concern. I
set up like an ark . . . You have to be the Ark to save the animals and nature and music
(1995: 129).
The degree of Biblical specificity here might be expected to show up distinctions between
Perry and Ra, particularly considering the depth and detail of the latter’s own interrogative
engagement with Christian scripture (Corbett 2006: 6). But Ra’s own poetry asserts “I have
known a heaven all my own” (Geerken and Wolf 2005: 64), and reminds us frequently that
his sci-fi mythology can’t be reduced to a simple critique of Christianity. Unequivocally,
the Arkestra must also be understood in relation to the Arks of the Bible. Stefany Anne
Harries | Africa on the Moon 49
Golberg’s 2014 essay on Ra, since reproduced on the Arkestra’s own website, confirms this
with reference to Ra’s own words:
The name Arkestra itself was an allusion to the Ark of the Covenant. ‘A covenant of
Arkestra,’ said Sun Ra, ‘it’s like a selective service of God. Picking out some people.
Arkestra has a ‘ra’ at the beginning and the end. Ra can be written as ‘Ar’ or ‘Ra,’ and
on both ends of the word it is an equation: the first and the last are equal…. In the
middle there is ‘kest,’ which equals ‘kist,’ as in ‘Sunkist’…I read that in Sanskrit ‘kist’
means ‘sun’s gleam.’ This is why I called my orchestra ‘Arkestra’ (2014).
Aside from the extraordinary similarity with Perry’s assertion above, what Ra’s discussion
here illustrates most clearly of all is that no particular privilege was accorded to any strand
of his philosophy. That which stood up to Ra’s penetrating interrogation was subsumed into
his system completely, aligned with elements drawn from all of human history and all across
the globe. Though his approach to his materials is superficially more disordered, the same
is true of Perry. That the Black Ark might be the Ark of the Covenant and full of animals
and also a spaceship is the point. Perhaps the Noah analogy connects to a whole animalistic
and ecological strand of Scratch’s iconography (Corbett 1994: 19), and explains for us the
presence of the “Super Ape” (1976) and the “Croaking Lizard” (1976), but simultaneously
we see that the Black Ark may be carrying its animal passengers to an ultimate destination
on another world.
This over-arching sense of pluralism or hybridity also allows Christian iconography
to interact in Perry’s work with the more complex and difficult to classify (Middleton
2015: 3) structures of Rastafari, and even with “the aura (if not the actual practice) of
Jamaica’s Obeah tradition of neo-African black magic” (Veal 2007: 142). These apparently
diverse elements are manipulated in a number of ways in Perry’s practice, but most
conspicuously linguistically. It’s worth considering in parallel an observation from John
Corbett that “Perry’s is a discursive kingdom, a creative world of hidden connections and
secret pacts exposed in language” (1994: 128), and Darren Middleton’s suggestion that
“the first Rastafari scrutinized sacred writings from their social location [and] practiced
an ingenious form of mother-tongue exegesis or vernacular interpretation” (2015: 9). In
Perry’s free-ranging monologues and in his musical works, Rastafari, Obeah, science fiction,
ecology and the Bible are not merely presented alongside one another, but are integrated in
a comprehensive re-versioning.
Writing about the post-punk tendency to identify dub as musically iconoclastic,
Christopher Partridge notes “in much Jamaican dub, the deconstruction of the canonical
and, arguably, the reified in reggae, was less a subversion of musical hegemony and more
a celebration of it” (2010: 223). We might note a related tendency on a philosophical or
ethical plane here. It is not celebration of extant philosophies that Ra and Perry are engaged
in, of course, but iconoclastic deconstruction is not an accurate portrayal either. These
artists share a joyful perception of the recombinant potential of ideas.
Dancecult 7(2)50
Of Lightness
If an interrogative engagement with Christian symbolism connects Perry and Ra so too, to my
mind, does the significance of what Glenn Ligon identifies simply as “lightness” (2001: 87):
Ra’s interest in flight is a kind of politics. Being light is a refusal of the limitations
of what is considered human. . . . To be light, to be able to fly away, is to be able
to imagine something beyond what we see. What we see now is pretty grim, so Ra’s
ability to see beyond a particular historical moment as a way to change it remains
compelling (Ligon 2001: 87).
Noting the previously discussed complications with an aesthetic characterisation of Lee
Perry dubs as organic, we might also turn to the notion of lightness for a way to describe the
uniqueness of the sound of The Black Ark:
The sound achieved in the Ark was unique. The music was springy and light, as though
it had been dabbed gently onto the vinyl, like kisses. At a time when other studios
were making passable dub impressions of steamhammers getting to work on massive
chunks of concrete, the Ark dubs were often spidery constructions of lacy delicacy
(Kelly 1984: 7).
In understanding the importance of lightness in Perry’s 1970s work, it is perhaps instructive
to compare it with the contemporary output of fellow dub pioneer King Tubby. We can
draw an aesthetic distinction between the airy, upward motion of Perry’s mixes and the
archeological downward delving of King Tubby dubs with reference to certain specifics of
production technique.
Perry eschews Tubby’s more dramatic mix gestures, rarely truly isolating instrumental
elements or inverting the mix hierarchy, maintaining instead constant but translucent
filtered layers of sound. Counter-intuitively, this greater vertical layering makes for lighter
sounding mixes—as it is not heard in isolation, but pushed through the tubes of compressors
and against the saturation limits of the tape in combination with other elements, Perry’s
bass never achieves the thudding weight and all-encompassing warmth of Tubby’s. In the
drums, the prevalence of a classic, bounding one drop (from Carlton Barrett’s tenure in the
early years of The Upsetters through into the playing of Black Ark fixtures like “Benbow”
Creary), lighter on the kick drum than the Rockers’ patterns heard elsewhere, ensures
that the high frequencies of the hi-hat predominate. The high-end emphasis is often also
intensified by a gauzy web of additional percussion credited to Scratch himself.
Where vocals, horns and melodica are employed only briefly, gesturally in Tubby’s dubs,
they are a constant presence, smeared thinly over the top of Perry’s soundworld. As an
exemplar of all of this, we might take Max Romeo’s “Chase The Devil” (1976)—perhaps
the Perry production that looms largest in British pop cultural consciousness thanks to
an iconic rework at the hands of The Prodigy in the track “Out of Space” (1992), and,
incidentally, one of the productions to emerge from the Black Ark which we might most
immediately identify as Afrofuturist. The stepwise motion of Earl “Chinna” Smiths’ guitar,
Harries | Africa on the Moon 51
snaking up beneath Romeo’s yearning vocal; the irresistible bounce of “Benbow” Creary’s
hi-hat, buoyed up still further by the croaking guiro and Keith Stirling’s immaculate choppy
offbeat keys—everything in the record seems directed towards generating lift, defying
gravity. And even when re-versioned for Super Ape (1976) as “Croaking Lizard”, the riddim
is overwritten with an extensive new vocal in the form of Prince Jazzbo’s toasting. Contrary
to what we might assume prior to a focused, analytical listen, this production is most
decidedly not about the low frequencies. Even Boris Gardiner’s propulsive bass is restlessly,
upwardly, mobile.
Granted, in “Chase The Devil” it is Satan, not Romeo or Scratch, who is taking flight. But
the lightness of Perry productions does seem audibly, aesthetically to touch a transcendent
impulse closely related to Ra’s urge to flight. And in an almost unutterable sense of dismay
at immediate social realities, it surely derives from the same source.
Lest we’re in danger of reducing the spectrum of Afrofuturist musical creation to Ra
alone, it is perhaps worth observing as a final note here that an emphasis on lightness
might distance Lee “Scratch” Perry musically and conceptually from some other
important Afrofuturists. Musically, the “syrupy, bass-heavy” (Womack 2013:63) sound
of Parliament/Funkadelic and the punishing techno of Underground Resistance don’t
immediately speak of lightness. Metaphorically or conceptually, the image of an armour-
clad Rammellzee or Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” (1982) can be read as speaking of
substance, of momentum generated by mass or the weight to stand against the violence
of the gothic future. This potential distinction emerges no less strongly when we consider
Perry’s work in relation to other dub producers, though. Perry’s sonic lightness has already
been considered here as contrasting with key aspects of King Tubby productions, and
is no less distinct from the surgically precise Scientist dubs that followed in the 1980s
and will be discussed later on. The larger picture always shows dub and Afrofuturism as
simultaneously distinct and interwoven, as complex webs within a web of concept and
creation where no singular mode of understanding goes very far. As a case in point, we
might return to Paul Sullivan’s related identification of Perry’s sound as “aquatic” (2014:
43), and observe that in certain respects, the closest purely sonic parallel to Perry’s dubs
of the 1970s is found across decades and continents in the similarly submerged techno of
Detroit’s Drexciya (see Williams 2001: 167–72).
To Find Another Race
The semi-comical spectre of Old Nick in “Chase The Devil” and the prevalence of Old
Testament Judeo-Christian references throughout reggae and dub raises a fundamental
question in respect of the relationship between dub and Afrofuturism. An informed
understanding of the latter requires that we reach back to the beginnings of African
American music, to slavery, to transportation:
The twist is that if you are black and believe in the supernatural, and are issued from
an ecological determinant that does not permit of such a psychological extreme as
Dancecult 7(2)52
American Puritanism… the circumstance of finding yourself in a culture of white
humanist pseudo-Puritanical store-keepers must be revolting. And if you are the slave
of such a culture, your sorrow must be indeterminable (Baraka 1963: 10).
It is a familiar observation, but nonetheless a centrally important one: we must surely look to
Amiri Baraka’s assessment of the yawning gulf between African supernatural belief systems
and Christian Puritanism if we’re to attain even the most elementary understanding of Sun
Ra’s motivation in developing his own alien mythology/reality. In brief and basic form we
might note that as an Afrocentric consciousness grew amongst African Americans in the
‘60s, the need for transcendence from grim social realities was not diminished. But for
some, the viability of existing gospel modalities as the expression of that need clearly was
diminished. Ra found what we might think of as an extraordinarily compelling alternative
in the assertion of the possibility of a spiritual and physical transcendence beyond the limits
of Earthly existence that didn’t require the permission of the slavers’ God, yet his own
writings continued to draw from the Christian tradition, and to interrogate and engage
with established spiritual structures.
Similarly, in many reggae-derived musics, Judeo-Christian imagery persists through the
‘70s and into the present, but crucially as filtered through the lens of Rastafari. We can
identify here a further central parallel between Ra’s self-made mythology and dub in all
its specificity. Where dub maintained (and maintains) a forward rush aesthetically, in its
relationship to Rastafari and the Christianity of the Old Testament, dub specifically looks
backwards thematically, to the historical golden ages of Ethiopia and Egypt:
When confronted by stalwarts of religion, philosophy and science who sought to
falsify history in the service of Western slavery, black preachers–though for the most
part unlearned–discovered in the only book to which they had access (the Bible) that
Egypt and Ethiopia were in Africa, and that these countries figured very importantly
in the history of civilization. To blacks, Africa (interchangeable with Ethiopia) became
a glorious, Biblical homeland equated with Zion (Sanders 1982: 60).
This looking backwards and forwards simultaneously is a defining Afrofuturist position, and
dichotomous “links with ancient Egypt and outer space” (Lock 2011: 29) are present in Ra’s
Astro-Black mythology from its earliest incarnations. And as Ra invoked the dichotomy
audibly in the temporally dislocated alien-primitivism of “Ancient Aiethiopia” (1959),
“Jamaica’s dub pioneers used echo . . . to provoke a sense of Jamaica’s ancestral African roots,
while at the same time invoking the infinity of the cosmos – and the future – by creating
cavernous spaces within the music” (Sullivan 2014: 10).
But, to Ra, and in the lineage of Afrofuturism that runs through electro to present day
hip-hop, is the possibility of rejecting modes of being, modes of blackness imposed by
history, also central? The history that was a key determinant of Ra’s mode of expression,
jazz, was that of slavery, a cultural cataclysm characterized by Kodwo Eshun as “a total break
in modernity” (Eshun 2006: 292). We might assume then that creative progress required
the rejection of that history. Introducing the Ra thesis in Travelling The Spaceways: Sun
Harries | Africa on the Moon 53
Ra, The Astro-Black and Other Solar Myths, Cheryl Lynne Bruce (2010: 11) invokes Frantz
Fanon’s statement that: “I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there for the
meaning of my destiny” (Fanon 1967: 229). However, Ra’s adoption of Egyptian and
other pre-Christian signifiers shows us that he did not reject history but rather worked
to revision it in the interests of a living present and a possible future. Eshun’s concept of
“chronopolitical” (2003: 291) artistic intervention may provide a more accurate model, in
which “science fiction was never concerned with the future, but rather with engineering
feedback between its preferred future and its becoming present” (2003: 289).
And for all that Ra seemed at times to consciously set himself up in opposition to
Christian religious teaching that he regarded as reactionary, he did not reject Christianity.
Certainly, as Graham Lock notes, “making the vision real was a central impulse in Sun Ra’s
performances. . . . His outer space utopia was offered as an alternative to the mythic space
usually invoked by those means, i.e. the Christian Heaven” (Lock 2010: 31), but Lock also
identifies facets of Ra’s mythology/reality as directly analogous to Afro-Baptist practices
and conversion experiences:
For example, many of the converts describe being taken to heaven, often by flying
through the air or by travelling along a very narrow path: Sun Ra’s story of his initial
visit to what he identified as another planet incorporates both the elements of flying
and of travelling along a narrow route (2010: 32).
The parallels can be traced further, and are often compelling. For Lock, they serve the
dual purpose of establishing a possible concrete reality at the root of Ra’s tales of alien
abduction, but also and more importantly identifying the significance of Ra’s science fiction
iconography as a representation of established spiritual/religious models. The implication
is that Ra’s “antipathy to the Black Church” (Lock 2010:31), often expressed in terms of
frustration at a refusal in those quarters to acknowledge the concrete reality of rapid change
in the space age, was founded primarily on formal rather than spiritually fundamental
points of difference.
In dub and other Jamaican musical forms, the language and imagery of the Old
Testament seems to remain closer to the surface, to never be as completely reimagined as
in its integration into Ra’s mythology. Nonetheless, we can identify similar re-purposing
of Christian sources, and a similar intent to revise the power structures that were often
attendant upon them. Where Ra told audiences “You’ve outlived the Bible. Which was your
scenario. You’re in a science-fiction film now” (quoted in Lock 2010: 32), Lee “Scratch”
Perry asserts “I am an extraterrestrial, not from another planet but from heaven” (quoted in
Mottram 2007). Christian iconography as it manifests in reggae-derived musics including
dub is of a vein which would doubtless appear strange, verging on the heathen at times to
Amiri Baraka’s American Puritans, but it is never expunged, never explicitly rejected, from
“Chase The Devil” to The Congoes “Feast of the Passover” to Scientist’s “Jerusalem Dub”.
As has already been touched upon, the will to reimagine Christianity was already
substantially present in Jamaican culture in the form of Rastafari. Michael Manley has
Dancecult 7(2)54
suggested that Rastafari provided a solution to the central problem of Christianity as a white
person’s religion, and therefore a tool of subjugation inseparable from the inhumanities of
the slave trade:
Man has a deep need for religious conviction, and Rasta resolves the contradiction of
a white man’s God in a colonial society … I think that the only Jamaican who truly
knows who he is has to be the Rasta man (quoted in Sanders 1982: 59).
If we accept this assertion, the immediate implication is that the need to create an entirely
new mythology to encompass the complexities of Afrodiasporic cultures’ relationship to
Christianity and to pre-Christian histories that drove Ra in the US was absent in Jamaica.
Moreover, in Jamaica, in dub in general and Perry’s work in particular, the ancient Africa
of the Old Testament co-existed not only with adapted religious structures derived from
the same source, such as Rasta and those of the Afro-Protestant Pocomania sect, but also,
more visibly and immediately than in the US, with culturally distinct practices like Obeah
(Veal 2007:142). The socially determined religious framework that dub existed within was
arguably already considerably more muddied, plural and malleable than the one that Ra
worked with, within and without.
However, alongside this differentiating factor, fundamental parallels between Ra’s
mythscience and Rasta are also evident. Particularly, we must observe a parallel with Ra,
the exiled Saturnian, in Rasta’s identification of its people as exiled from a homeland,
both spiritually and physically (geographically), to which they must one day return.
Furthermore, Ethiopianist and other Afrocentric movements existed in the U.S. and were
hugely significant in shaping African American cultural and social identity through the ‘70s
and beyond. Ra’s work didn’t emerge in a vacuum. More accurately, I feel the geographical
distinction we must draw between our respective understandings of dub and the work of
US-based Afrofuturist musicians as distinctive musics of exile is one of scale rather than
distance.
If Rasta’s Ethiopianist stance had its clear equivalents in the U.S., the thing that very
clearly did not and could not happen was that those equivalents became intertwined with
a musical form which came to dominate the entire cultural identity of the nation, as reggae
did in Jamaica. The sheer scale of the North American popular cultural context that these
elements existed within made such an exaggerated impact impossible, and inevitably, the
more explicitly Afrocentric jazz became through the ‘60s and ‘70s, the further from the
white American cultural mainstream it drifted. The near mono-cultural ubiquity of ska,
rocksteady and later reggae-derived musics in Jamaican pop, in strange contradiction to
the marginalized social status of Rastas there (Sanders 1982: 59), meant that the music,
in rude health, inevitably transitioned to Britain with the migrants of the mid-twentieth
century. That transition was central to the music latterly punching above its weight in terms
of global cultural significance.
Harries | Africa on the Moon 55
Corner Crew Dub
So, through Rastafari we can understand dub as a music of exile, but an exile in some
important respects distinct from the experience of African American Afrofuturist creators.
Babylon, in common with slavery in the Caribbean and the US, is dystopia now, but it is a
dystopia, which permits of only one resolution. Whereas some African Americans looked
to the assertion of their Civil Rights in the US, or to the possibility of a separatist state
within that nation as espoused by the Nation of Islam (Gardell 1996: 60), or in the case of
Ra looked very much elsewhere, contemporaneous Jamaican Afro-consciousness looked
only to a return to the source, to Africa, for deliverance. In this regard the closest parallel in
the US to the position of Rastafari as expressed in dub is that of Marcus Garvey’s Universal
Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL). In
the philosophy and active policy of the UNIA-ACL, the long term goal of “Africa for the
Africans” (Garvey 1986: 68) was paired with an immediate, practical engagement with
issues of social welfare. It is this same pairing, broadly speaking, that we might note in dub
as a manifestation of Jamaican culture and Rastafari. It is perhaps the sense of Babylon as a
universal condition escapable by a single route only, but ameliorable by positive action in
the meantime, from which the strain of street-level social consciousness and comment in
dub derives.
The importance of social commentary in the work pouring out of the Black Ark during the
few extraordinarily productive years of its existence is apparent at a glance. So many of the
Perry productions which endure in a global pop consciousness come from this place—“War
In A Babylon” (1976), “Police and Thieves” (1977), “Life Is Not Easy” (1978). The impulse
to tie this expansive music to gritty reality is omnipresent in dub, as expressed succinctly in
the introduction to “Gimmie Mi Gun” by Dr. Alimantado:
The man can’t say dat Iah!
How the man mean I can’t say dat?
Then the police n’soldier deh deh far
Then what! When a gunman backround di corner
And a police n’soldier no deh deh
We a go use fe defend I-self ! Seen
According to what is going on in the world and society today
That motivate me to do this song, I say. . . .
(from Best Dressed Chicken In Town, 1978)
An increasingly unsettled and violent youth culture in Jamaica is frequently linked to the
musical evolution of rocksteady and then reggae from ska, and then in those musics towards
increased bass weight, more pensive moods, and harder rhythms. Dub is one of the end points
of this aesthetic trajectory. Sullivan perceives the Jamaican pop soundworld as growing “more
ominous as it soundtracked the emergence of the rude boys, Jamaica’s first youth subculture”
(Sullivan 2014: 22). But if the sense of threat evoked by the rise of street violence worked its
Dancecult 7(2)56
way into the sonic makeup of the music, the music-makers also responded with a tellingly
specific brand of righteous morality in narrative content and themes.
For Michael Manley, the urgency of social messaging in Jamaican popular musics again
derives, at least in part, from the backward gaze of Ethiopianist or Rastafarian beliefs. In this
light, the preponderance of revolutionary motifs in the music of Bob Marley is understood
thus: “Faith begins with an acceptance of the possibility of continuity. If you cannot survey
a continuity into your own past, you cannot believe in a continuity into your own future.
Marley had that faith” (Manley 1982:12).
On one level, the urge to street level social comment in these musics sits uneasily with
certain canonical Afrofuturist modes. Kodwo Eshun notes the importance in Afrofuturist
thought of attaining or retaining “a possibility space which leaves behind or moves away from
traditional notions of black culture as based on the street, for instance, based on traditional
notions of masculinity, based on traditional notions of ethnicity. It’s a boredom with
those ideas” (2006: 10). Literal comment on the violence, inequity, even just the mundane
specifics of life as a black American is certainly relatively scarce in the music which defines
Afrofuturism as canon or concept. Even as the lineage extends to contemporary alternative
hip-hop this conceptual marker remains significant. Reviewing Shabazz Palaces’ Lese
Majesty for The Wire magazine, Hua Hsu notes that the presence of some (mild) old-school
rap braggadocio is in “jarring” (2014: 51) contrast to a lyrical style otherwise characterized
by “Afrofuturist dreaming and a swaggering commitment to its own alien language” (2014:
51). If the lyrical/narrative position of Lese Majesty needs to be understood in relation
to both science fiction and the immediacy of hip-hop social comment, we can perhaps
understand the reluctance of Shabazz Palaces and other contemporary artists to accept the
Afrofuturist tag (Stannard 2015: 19). The iconoclastic model of Black Atlantic Futurism
evinced by Eshun above permits no such compromise.
However, a second contemporary hip-hop example shows us that that model is not
by any means the whole of the picture of Afrofuturism, and that the pairing of explicit
Afrofuturist imagery and literal social comment can be successful. On The Psychic World of
Walter Reed, Killah Priest combines these elements not just thematically across the course
of the album, but often within a single rhyme:
Investigation found the macs and volts in his apartment
The informant, mob cops, crime bosses
And cover ups, FBIs and flying saucers
Watching night watch, online love affairs and true crimes
Congregation of Masons showing new signs
Government conspiracies
The X9 hollow in the hands of this Killa Bee
Jericho flesh build walls around my mind from a speck of dust
To my exodus to the black holes to the nebulas
(“New Reality”, 2013).
Harries | Africa on the Moon 57
And still other examples can be found. A similar balance occurs throughout the recorded
oeuvre of DOOM (formerly MF Doom), albeit with the direct science fiction references
translocated to a superhero/supervillain mythology.1 Even in the case of Tricky, whose
lyrics often play with obfuscation and ambiguity, Alexander G. Weheliye observes that the
absence of signifiers of “nonindividuated sociality . . . hardly provides a safety net from the
real” (2005: 188).
Positioning Afrofuturist thought as oppositional to more grounded strains of social
commentary is ultimately too simple anyway. For a central example to the contrary we
might look to Sun Ra’s “Outerspace Employment Agency” from Space is the Place (1974),
an unequivocal takedown of social stereotypes and systemic barriers to social justice. When
Ra says in Space is the Place, “I hate your absolute reality” (see Coney 1974), he is neither
dismissing nor rejecting the reality of black life, but rather those who would absolutize it
to the mundane. The “Outerspace Employment Agency” seen in this light becomes more
than satire, even a formative example of the principle identified by NK Jemisin (quoted in
Womack’s Afrofuturism) as “art as real world planning” (Womack 2013: 177). Beyond this,
the urge to kick against the dissatisfactory in the world was in the DNA of the music itself, a
driving force of Ra’s direction of his musicians: “‘Play some fire on it,’ Sun Ra would tell his
musicians. ‘If you’re not mad at the world, you don’t have what it takes’” (Golberg 2014).
Returning to dub, perhaps the aforementioned spectre of an increasingly troubled youth
culture hanging over dub music from its inception should form part of our understanding
of key musical statements from another prominent dub futurist: Scientist. Scientist’s dubs
on Scientist Meets the Space Invaders are markedly hard-edged by comparison to Lee Perry’s
organic mulch or even Tubby’s more technically rigorous mixes. This can be explained in
part by advances in technology in the years immediately following the late ‘70s heyday
of those latter giants, but that’s only part of the picture. Creative production choices like
Scientist’s use of densely mixed, hard-toned and markedly short reverbs in the place of
Tubby’s de-tensioned springs or Perry’s swirling echoes point to a conceptual intent behind
the toughness of these dubs too. Bass is thickened with chorus and flanging effects, the
comforting familiarity of guitar and organ harmony is absent for long periods, and where
more expansive delays are employed, as at the opening of “Time Warp”, high feedback
values produce an immediate and aggressive distorted crunch. Noting these choices
alongside song titles like “Laser Attack”, “De Materialize” and “Super Nova Explosion” and
that iconic cover art featuring Scientist locked in explosive battle with pixelated alien foes,
extraterrestrials in Scientist’s world seem to be aggressors to be repulsed.
This is of course in contrast to some canonical Afrofuturist music, perhaps primarily to the
“invitational” mode (Whitehead 2010: 25) of Sun Ra’s position as an alien himself, wherein
the alien is necessarily a positive signifier. Or, see also Model 500’s trailblazing techno
masterwork “No UFO’s” (1985): “They say there is no hope / They say, ‘No UFOs’ / Why is
no head held high? / Maybe you’ll see them fly”. Scientist’s aliens are a them beaming down
to us, but with violent intent, and they certainly haven’t been invited. A similar positioning
of extraterrestrials negatively, as aggressors, does appear elsewhere in Afrofuturist music.
Dancecult 7(2)58
We can connect Scientist’s hard, combative dub to the excoriating techno-blitzkrieg of Mad
Mike/Underground Resistance’s “Death Star” (1992), or to the generally ambivalent, fear-
inflected representation of extraterrestrials in Rammellzee’s elaborate mythscience or Kool
Keith’s work as Dr. Octagon (see Dr. Octagonecologyst, 1997).
It may be a stretch of the imagination to suggest that in the preservative echoes of dub, we
observe what Walter Benjamin describes as a need to “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up
at a moment of danger” (cited in Weheliye, 2005: 79). However, it may be possible to assert
that like Rammellzee’s unique modes of creation, a production like Meets the Space Invaders
(1981) arrives simultaneously from a place of immediacy, a specific social present, as well as
from a science-fictional, quantum infinity stretching between past and future.
Dub Come Save Me
All of the above can carry us so far. We can learn a lot about the foundations of dub by
understanding its relationship to religion, to Jamaican youth and street culture, to sound
systems and dancehall. We can get a sense of the complicated contexts that spawned Super
Ape and King Tubby’s Meets Rockers Uptown. And by extension we can map the many
connections and disconnections between dub and what we might identify as an African
American Afrofuturist musical lineage. Within the discussion so far, I have made the
attempt to tie these contextual considerations to the content of the music itself, and to
understand the distinct styles of iconic producers in relation to environmental or social
conditions. However, this approach has the potential to be reductive when misapplied or
misunderstood, as it may fail to recognize dub’s development towards abstraction rather
than emotive representation or lyrical narrative. This is a significant shortcoming when,
ultimately, so much of dub’s magic resides in its refusal of narrative and its assertion of
sound as pure sound, not sound as signifier.
If we talk about dub, then, we need to find our way back to the sound itself. Sullivan
notes, that “although dub was, and is, more or less a fluid process with no rigid rules, certain
sonic tropes are recognizably consistent when tracing its development. Chief among them
are reverb and delay (echo)” (Sullivan 2014: 9). Whilst we can understand echo as a type of
memory, what Mark Fisher calls “technologised time” (2013: 47), perhaps even as a retaking
of a cultural space which was colonized, we should also allow ourselves to understand these
“sonic tropes” as sound––and sound that speaks without needing explanation. When Ian
Penman observes that “Dub’s sub-sonic echo is no mere FX—it is the effect proper of a
certain subjective view of the world: the dark sonic mirror reflection of a Rasta’s phantasmal
worldview” (1995: 39), it is perhaps regrettable that he does not quite pursue this line far
enough. The sub-sonic echo at hand (see also Weheliye 2005: 92) is the historical echo
and the social echo. But the audible echo, the sonic echo is “no mere FX” either—it is the
substance of this music, at its very core, and an objective reality as well as a subjective one.
Julian Henriques notes the significance of this material aspect, stating that “Dub’s musical
aesthetic can be described as an excavation of the material and energetic qualities of sound,
removing all but the essential drum and base [sic], to create an echoic space in the music for
the listener to enter” (2014: 197).
Harries | Africa on the Moon 59
Penman’s concern seems to be that this reading of dub makes it vulnerable to appropriation,
to being “written of/off as if it were purely and simply a formal musical device which can
be lifted and appliquéd willy-nilly” (1995: 38). But to emphasize the purely sonic in dub is
to emphasize its abstractness, ultimately its confounding, complex otherness. When Tubby
and others built a new form on the spectral foundations of Byron Smith’s inadvertent
removal of the song from a song (Sullivan 2014: 7), the effect was not to simplify the music
any more than Malevich’s “Black Square” (1915) simplified painting. I would argue that
dub’s untethering of sound ultimately makes it more complicated and irreducible, as well
as adaptable, fundamentally plastic, perpetually in transformation—but harder to “lift”
because it is harder to grasp.
If we accept dub as focusing to a considerable degree on sound as sound, this facet in
conjunction with its technological origin makes diversification inevitable:
Technology was responsible for the birth of dub and has stayed crucial to its
development. By the time producers and engineers had started engaging with dub
outside of Jamaica, they were already using new, or different, equipment and methods
compared to their Kingston counterparts (Sullivan 2014: 215).
Questions of where the diversification of dub as a cohesive form ends and the appropriation
and assimilation of its tropes into other forms begins, are complex and ultimately subjective.
Sullivan goes on to say that the technology-derived plasticity of dub “created a tension
between those who viewed dub as a genre specific to 1970s Kingston, and those who
believed it should use the new technologies to innovate” (2014: 215), but this is probably
a moot point. Artists that we might identify as carrying dub forward necessarily do so in
circumstances radically different from those of its inception, technologically and socially—
but the dub echo as fundamental sound object (not effect or ornament) means that dub is
most assuredly Roots Manuva, Portishead, Tricky, The Bug, The Pop Group, Burial just as
it is Tubby, Jammy, Scientist or Scratch. In short, dub is its own sonic diaspora, a shifting
world of sound that transcends geographical, social and ethical borders—in Paul Sullivan’s
phrase, a “meta-virus” (2014: 11).
My initial unease around the treatment of dub in Afrofuturist analysis, noted in the
introduction to this essay, stemmed in part from the fact that the term “Afrofuturism” only
emerged in the early 1990’s (Dery 1994: 180), as a retroactive descriptor for a body of work
dating back several decades prior. The danger that I perceived in this was that its discourse
would be curatorial, and the half century-spanning diasporic forms in question would be
simplified so that they could be ringfenced. However, just as dub has evolved, engaging with
different musics and taking on different meanings, so has Afrofuturism endlessly diversified,
not just as a concept, but as a living creative movement. Womack’s 2013 survey considered
divergences such as D. Scot Miller’s Afro-surrealism (2013: 165), which have emerged since
Dery’s “Black to the Future” (1994). Moreover, as with the echo in dub, a key function of
Afrofuturism is the disordering of linear time. An attempt to isolate the rhizomic structure
that is Afrofuturism in a moment in time, or to a specific historical period overlooks this
key function. I’m reminded of Paul Gilroy’s assessment of Africentric assertions of cultural
Dancecult 7(2)60
anteriority: “The anteriority of African civilisation is asserted not in order to escape this
linear time but in order to claim it and thus subordinate its narrative of civilisation to a
different set of political interests without even attempting to change the terms themselves”
(1993: 191). Very clearly, Afrofuturism attempts to change the terms.
• • •
Afrofuturism and dub. An echo back and forth that changes with each iteration. The
feedback turned up high, distortion of the image on the tape. Sun Ra and Lee “Scratch”
Perry, “alien döppelgangers”.2 Not the same, but connected, complicit. If singular conclusions
evade us here, it is because we’re speaking of musical worlds built to resist absolutes,
where commonalities do not preclude distinctiveness and distinctiveness does not imply
fragmentation:
The very least which this music and its history can offer us today is an analogy for
comprehending the lines of affiliation and association which take the idea of the
diaspora beyond its symbolic status as the fragmentary opposite of some imputed
racial essence (Gilroy 1993: 95).
But between the lines, or traversed by them, something else too. Not an absence, but an
expression of potential: echoic space.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to tobias c. van Veen for numerous specific insights into Afrofuturism that would
otherwise have escaped me, and for encouraging me to delve deeper and find a more
evolved understanding of the subject. Thanks also to Hillegonda Rietveld for detailed and
constructive editorial input.
Notes
1 The supervillain mythology referred to here is central to DOOM albums including Born Like
This (2009) and Madvillainy (2004), the latter a collaborative project with Madlib released
under the name Madvillain.
2 tobias c. van Veen, personal communication with the author (by email), 22 April 2015.
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http://www.discogs.com/Afrika-Bambaataa-The-Soul-Sonic-Force-Music-By-Planet-Patrol-Planet-Rock/release/1080424
http://www.discogs.com/DOOM-Born-Like-This/release/1701916
http://www.discogs.com/Dr-Alimantado-Best-Dressed-Chicken-In-Town/release/728062
http://www.discogs.com/Dr-Octagon-Dr-Octagonecologyst/release/2056537
http://www.discogs.com/Killah-Priest-The-Psychic-World-Of-Walter-Reed/release/4823265
http://www.discogs.com/Killah-Priest-The-Psychic-World-Of-Walter-Reed/release/4823265
http://www.discogs.com/Janelle-Mon%C3%A1e-The-ArchAndroid/release/2358638
http://www.discogs.com/Junior-Murvin-Police-Thieves/release/609735
http://www.discogs.com/Lee-Scratch-Perry-Arkology/release/195142
Harries | Africa on the Moon 63
Mad Mike. 1992. Death Star. Underground Resistance (12”): UR-022.
Madvillain. 2004. Madvillainy. Stones Throw Records (CD): STH2065.
Max Romeo. 1976. Chase The Devil. Charmax Music (7-inch): CTD01 TYNCH.
Max Romeo and The Upsetters. 1976. War In A Babylon. Island Records (LP): ILPS 9392.
The Meditations. 1978. Life Is Not Easy. Scandal Records (7”): SC.002.
Miles Davis. 1970. Bitches Brew. Columbia (LP): GP 26.
Model 500. 1985. No UFO’s. Metroplex (12”): M-001.
Prodigy, The. 1992. Experience. XL Recordings (CD): XLCD 110.
Roots Manuva. 2002. Dub Come Save Me. Big Dada Recordings (CD): BDCD040.
Scientist. 1981. Scientist in the Kingdom of Dub. Kingdom Records (LP): KVL 9004.
Scientist. 1981. Scientist meets the Space Invaders. Greensleeves Records (LP): GREL 19.
Shabazz Palaces. 2014. Lese Majesty. Sub Pop (CD): SP1044.
Sly and The Family Stone. 1971. There’s a Riot Goin’ On. Epic (LP): KE 30986.
Sun Ra And His Arkestra. 1959. Jazz in Silhouette. El Saturn Records (LP): LP-5786.
Upsetters, The. 1976. Super Ape. Island Records (LP): ILS 9417.
Filmography
Akomfrah, John. 1996. The Last Angel of History. UK-Germany: Black Studio Film Collective,
Channel 4 Television Corporation.
Coney, John. 1974. Space is the Place. USA: North American Star System.
Lang, Fritz. 1927. Metropolis. Germany: Universum Film (UFA).
Scott, Ridley. 1982. Blade Runner. USA-Hong Kong-UK: Warner Bros.
http://www.discogs.com/Mad-Mike-Death-Star/release/3060
http://www.discogs.com/Madvillain-Madvillainy/release/239980
http://www.discogs.com/Max-Romeo-Chase-The-Devil/release/552363
http://www.discogs.com/Max-Romeo-Upsetters-War-Ina-Babylon/release/163696
http://www.discogs.com/Meditations-Life-Is-Not-Easy/release/6404307
http://www.discogs.com/Miles-Davis-Bitches-Brew/release/37006
http://www.discogs.com/Model-500-No-UFOs/release/1300331
http://www.discogs.com/Prodigy-Experience/release/660
http://www.discogs.com/Roots-Manuva-Dub-Come-Save-Me/release/39956
http://www.discogs.com/Scientist-In-The-Kingdom-Of-Dub/release/440190
http://www.discogs.com/Scientist-Scientist-Meets-The-Space-Invaders/release/122876
http://www.discogs.com/Shabazz-Palaces-Lese-Majesty-/release/5942434
http://www.discogs.com/Sun-Ra-And-His-Arkestra-Jazz-In-Silhouette/release/3922959
http://www.discogs.com/Upsetters-Super-Ape/release/2494209
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113604/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072195/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017136/?ref_=ttco_co_tt
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083658/