In one of the many introspective moments in the documentary The Upsetter: The Life and Music of Lee Scratch Perry, the Jamaican reggae producer extraordinaire says “it was the people of the hairstyles” (punks) that saved his life.
“If you really want to know the truth, I am really a punk because I cannot be controlled.”
In 1977, the inability to land a visa to Nigeria found Perry spending an extended period in London, at the height of the punk explosion. The Clash had just covered Perry’s Police and Thieves and bassist Paul Simonon, who grew up in the south London suburb of Brixton, regarded Perry as “the Ennio Morricone of Jamaican music … the soundtrack to my childhood”.
Simonon had used the Tighten Up series, a 1960s reggae compilation series put out by Trojan, to learn bass melodies, according to Perry’s biographer David Katz. Although Perry’s initial reaction was to charge that The Clash had desecrated Police and Thieves, he agreed to work with the band on Complete Control, a blitzkrieg jam about staying one step ahead of the suits.
Perry’s tweaks were to throw echo on the song and tone the band’s guitars down, but in postproduction The Clash, to an extent, reversed Perry’s touch.
For Joe Strummer, The Clash’s guitarist and vocalist, the influence of reggae on punk extended beyond the sonics and into the realm of “new information”, without which the punk scene would have been “pitiful”, as he says in Don Letts’s film Punk: Attitude.
In her research notes for The Lost Women of Rock Music, Helen Reddington writes that “the clarity of production in reggae allowed listeners to understand the value of the bassline and the power of the bass itself. This gave practical lessons to any aspiring bass player.”
For Perry, a former road construction worker in Negril, Jamaica, bass and drums were the Earth’s inner core communicating to humankind. “If I was not in Negril I would not have been a top producer, because it was when I was working with the rock that I picked up those sonic vibrations. When you throw the rock, it sounds like the thunder rolling and I’m sure that’s where everything is coming from. That’s how I got involved in the music business. I learned it all from stone.”
Artists associated with punk music often use rock ’n roll figureheads such as Chuck Berry, Little Richard and, to an extent, James Brown as shorthand for punk’s performance regime. In Letts’s film, for example, the New York Dolls’s David Johansen says: “Rock ’n roll had become this be-denimed drum solo kind of thing and what we wanted to do was to bring it down to three minutes and put that Little Richard drag on to it. That’s what rock ’n roll was to us.”
Bass player Darryl Jenifer, of Washington DC hardcore group Bad Brains, says in reference to Chuck Berry that: “Running across the stage on one leg doing the duck walk is some punk shit, you know what I mean?” Starting out as jazz funk unit Mind Power, they later changed their name to that of a Ramones song (Bad Brain), flipping bad on its head to mean good.
“They start off as a typical punk band where they just stand there and play really hard and fast and scream, but by 1981 and 1982, the lead singer HR starts doing very acrobatic things like backflips and nothing like that had been seen before,” says American punk historian and musician David Ensminger. “It was so atavistic, it reset everything.
“The Sex Pistols had done something like that before, but if you look at the footage, Johnny Rotten is kind of just hanging on to the mic, leering into the crowd and taking on gobs of spit and stuff like that.” In the Bad Brains documentary, superlatives come fast and furious, with former Cro-Mags singer and one-time Brains roadie John Joseph saying: “It was like God was in the room [when they played].”
“If you listen to Black Dots, recorded in 1979, that is really the transition between punk and hardcore,” says Ensminger. “The only other equivalent I can think of in 1979 is a band called Discharge, a white band from England. But the kind of speed, versatility and panache they brought into it was heads and tails in front of everybody else.”
With their idea of taming the breakneck hardcore with dubwise roots reggae, the Bad Brains deconstructed The Clash’s template and took on the idea of positive mental attitude as a slant to punk nihilism. But their fusion of this idea with Rasta politics was polarising.
However, Ensmingler says, the Brains’s influence on the straightedge scene was immense all the same: “Punk was so much about cynicism and things like that. When they brought with it a certain amount of religiosity, spirituality and positive thinking, people like myself attached to it very quickly because we got tired of that constant cynicism of Cold War politics.”
In the 2003 Afro Punk documentary Brooklynite Tamar Kali declared that the punkest person she could think of was Nina Simone. For Kali, adopting the prototypical punk image – piercings and stylised haircuts – was the reclamation of African influences on culture that had been appropriated by the West.
Raised on a diet of Doug E Fresh, Eric B and Rakim as well as The Untouchables and Fishbone, Kali called punk a feeling “that so many people can encompass. It’s not as stereotypical as Sid Vicious being the poster kid for punk. It’s a state of mind and a way of life.”
James Spooner’s Afro Punk, which mostly highlighted suburban black kids dealing with being the only black people in the moshpit, took on a different tenor each time Kali spoke.
Kali’s was not the language of the black alternative as an exception but as the default setting. In a 2009 interview with Arise magazine, she stated that Afropunk reaffirmed her “African ideals of hard work and DIY”.
But she has also resisted being ghettoised in the black rock corner, telling The Fader: “There’s gonna be a lot of terrible stuff put out in the name of black rock and I’m just glad I won’t have anything to do with it. I’m so butch, I’m so black, I’m so African, I don’t need to subscribe to anything. All I have to do is breathe.”
Today, the Afropunk Festival is seen as having left the thriving urban, black punk scene it helped highlight in the lurch. “Maybe one of the reasons your fans are so pissed now is because they don’t wanna be associated with hipsters,” writes artist Nikki Lynette in a 2012 online open letter.
This year, following a Black Lives Matter controversy involving electronic artist M.I.A., Grace Jones is headlining the first London edition of the festival in August. Ageless, iconoclastic and unflappable, in many ways Jones is the embodiment of punk as an undousable fire, and a shining sceptre of what it means to embrace one’s light unapologetically.