Can't Stop Won't Stop by Jeff Chang

of Seventh Street, the militarized border between Rema and Concrete Jungle, a PNP yard whose Junglist gang was thought to be behind much of the violence:
We used to lick chalice, cook ital stew together
    Play football and cricket as one brother
    Now through you rest a Jungle
    A you might block a Rema
    You a go fight ‘gainst your brother.
    Max Romeo and Lee “Scratch” Perry captured the moment’s treacherous flux. As Romeo told David Katz: “I had this song ‘War In A Babylon’ where me say, ‘It wicked out there, it dread out there.’ I took it to [Perry], said, ‘You like it?’ He said ‘Yeah!’ with excitement, ‘but no dread and no wicked, it
sipple
out deh!’ So I said, ‘Yeah that have a ring to it’, because sipple mean slippery, it’s slidey out there.” 17 In his new chorus, Romeo asked “So wha fi do?” and the answer came, “Mek we
slide
out deh.” As the song climaxed, Romeo retreated high up to the Rasta hills as Kingston exploded under the burning sun:
I man satta on the mountaintop
    Watching Babylon burning red hot
    Red hot!
    Here was
The Harder They Come’s
Ivan, a reef fish battling the ocean current, a flash of color in the tidal surge, pursued by police and enemies, making a last run through the ghetto, leaving graffiti tags on the concrete walls that mocked, “I was here but I disapear (sic)”—laughing mightily, knowing that he’d already become indelible in the public imagination, that even politics could not erase him—and, like a premonitory smoke above the shanty roofs: “I AM EVERYWHERE.” Celebrating survival itself was the point.
    While singers and DJs offered words of mourning or escape for the sufferers, dub reggae—the mostly wordless music of dread—ran directly into the heart of the darkness. In Perry’s “Revelation Dub,” time was creakily kept by a distended, phasing hi-hat and Romeo’s vocal was either reduced to the low hum of some distant street protest or chopped into sudden nonsensical stabs—“Warinna!” “Balwarin!”—as if all words, even warnings, could not be trusted. The riddim—which Marley would later version for “Three Little Birds,” with its bright chorus, “Don’t worry about a thing, ‘cause every little thing’s gonna be alright”—was swung off its moorings, the textual integrity and authority was undermined. Perry’s sound was the epitome of
sipple
. Dub answered the question: what kind of mirror is it that reflects everything but the person looking into it?
    Dub had a compelling circularity. It exploded in the dancehall at the moment the tenement yards exploded in violence. Dub was the “B-side” to the soaring visions of the democratic socialist dreamers or the apocalyptic warnings of the Rasta prophets. As reggae historian Steve Barrow says, “The music of dub represents literally and figuratively ‘
the other side
.’ There’s an up and a down, there’s an A-side and a B-side. It’s a dialectical world.”
    As the two sevens clashed, dub peaked with album sets from Perry (
Super Ape
), Keith Hudson (
Brand
), Niney the Observer (
Sledgehammer Dub
), the Mighty Two—Joe Gibbs and Errol Thompson (Prince Far I’s
Under Heavy Manners
, Joe Gibbs’
State of Emergency, African Dub All-Mighty
series), Philip Smart (Tapper Zukie’s
Tapper Zukie In Dub
), Harry Mudie (the
Dub Conference
series), and the most influential dubmaster of all, King Tubby.
    Born Osborne Ruddock in 1941, Tubby had collaborated with Perry to demonstrate the possibilities of dub on the 1973 album,
Blackboard Jungle Dub
. With
King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown
, an album-length collection of sides with melodica player Augustus Pablo dating to the beginning of Manley’s first term, musical innovation and political disintegration seemed to