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 the vernacular with bromidic jargon. Though the cost of equanimity is cognitive power, it’s in the details of our mundane lives where the majority of our mortal time is spent; sweeping floors and scrubbing toilets, washing dishes and grocery shopping is hardly the hour to contemplate our ongoing apocalypse, yet it’s ideal for harvesting reserves of strength. The mundane is a sentence to hard labor that we ought to serve with all the aplomb of composing a declarative letter of war to our enemies expressing gratitude for the opportunity to scrub our corner of the world free of their contaminative putrescence. “Why!” Perry repeatedly asks at the beginning and end of City Too Hot, but the only response we might reasonably hope for is offered in concisely modulated tempos. It’s to Perry’s genius—we speak of him alongside such twentieth century studio prophets as Owen Bradley and Phil Spector—that we owe the rhythmic ingenuity of City Too Hot, awash in the dub echo through which one typically perceives the Scratch Perry aesthetic; low fi, rural surrealism camouflaged as weed high island mysticism. It’s possible to introduce poise into the nervous system from within the cataclysm. Reading excerpts from Alexei Navalny’s prison diaries you’re impressed by the certainty of the dissident’s claim that terminal incarceration on his home soil—following an assassination attempt by poison—was merely a continuing mile of his challenge to the Russian oligarchy, and, as such, prompted him to fight from within his cell with only good humor as his source of power. Navalny writes, “Nine years of strict regime…all year I had been training for situations like today, developing what I call my ‘prison Zen.’ …My approach to the situation is certainly not one of contemplative passivity…Every single day, I ponder how to act effectively, what constructive advice to give my colleagues who are still at liberty, where the regime’s greatest vulnerabilities lie…The important thing is not to torment yourself with anger, hatred, fantasies of revenge, but to move instantly to acceptance…like many political prisoners, I am serving a life sentence. Where ‘life’ is defined by either the length of my life or the length of the life of this regime…for the present, sectarians and marginals are in power. They have absolutely no ideas. Their only goal is to cling to power. Total hypocrisy allows them to wrap themselves in any cover. So polygamists have become conservatives…Owners of ‘golden passports’ and offshore accounts are aggressive patriots…One day, we will look at it, and it won’t be there. Victory is inevitable.” Or, as Lee Perry once put it, “There’s too much a gwan.”