City Too Hot. Lee Scratch Perry. 1977. Trojan Records.
Every election cycle, Americans—registered voters or not—are reminded of the atmosphere in which we live, choked on the party exploitation of our tendency to fall into habitual bicameral thinking. It’s difficult living in extreme polarities; so difficult that, in this country, only the homeless, prison populations, and the mentally infirm are subjected to it. Abandonment in these extremes is a condemnation to reality as remote from conventional living as are the high rise apartments of heaven. Listening to Lee Scratch Perry’s City Too Hot, released in 1978, when CIA involvement aimed at disrupting Prime Minister Michael Manley’s democratic socialist government, People’s National Party, was at critical mass, you hear clearly evidence of how we live in the grey areas between extreme polarities. City Too Hot is about the chase for equilibrium, our flight into the fancy of “self care,” that empty terminology of a privileged American generation having congratulated itself on polluting