# 106 - The Upsetters - Super Ape

How to review your first dub album - assume you know nothing about dub. This is unfamiliar territory for me, like Case up on the Rastafarian space station in William Gibson's (sublime) Neuromancer:

It was called Dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast libraries of digitalized pop; it was worship, Molly said, and a sense of community.

This album is sensuous. I'm not sure about worship or community, though. In fact the impression I get is quite the opposite. The funny thing about this album is that all the musicians sound totally disconnected from one another, as if each of them was sitting by his or herself in a cupboard somewhere, singlemindedly playing or singing their own little part over and over again until it was totally perfect, like musical automata without the computational capacity to conceive of that singular task being part of a track on an album somewhere. The fact that it all hangs so well together as this tapestry of disparate and splendid parts is what makes the sound of this album so appealing to me.

I knew about this album before I found it and bought it on impulse through an article in Mojo about Lee Perry and his Black Ark studio, where this album was presumably recorded. The article goes into details on his complex, intense and freeform religious convictions, including a personal genie called Eenie Meanie Tekel. Hypothetically, if I met Lee Perry in the street (a street in Switzerland now, apparently), could we have a good old hypothetical chat about Super Ape? My own spirituality - that is to say a non-spirituality, being as I am more or less an atheist - would surely be incompatible with his. Would it be a more worthwhile conversation if I claimed to believe in the same things? I don't think it would. People who listen to music from different cultures and assume they are partway assimilating themselves into those cultures are mistaken. Sure, cultural differences between two people can be bridged by mutual understanding, but it doesn't follow that you automatically become connected to a person or people by exploring their culture. A person who tries to bridge boundaries of nationality, class, race or religion by doing this comprehends people by making rigidly inaccurate mental models of them, instead of engaging them as individuals with their own ideas and thoughts; as equals, in other words. Whatever else Perry believes, he must surely, like everyone else, believe in himself as an individual personality, and not just his own culture and spirituality made flesh. It's what we all have in common that's more important. I think that if you hypothetically met most musicians from anywhere in the world on the street they'd be happier that, instead of having to immerse yourself in their culture in either its more superficial (clothes, hair, drugs) or profound (philosopy, religion) forms in order to feel an affinity with their music, you liked the music they had made well enough with their own creative ideas for it to appeal to you from across cultural boundaries by simply being good music on anyone's terms. I've never really listened to anything outside of pop and its derivatives before, but I enjoyed this album. There was stuff in it I'd never heard before, and that's enough for me.