Ranking Dread

New York spring ripples concrete in heat waves now, where you wake with covers kicked away, weary from a sleep more kin to a night of wind sprints, where the morning coffee must be on the rocks, lest you schvitz with an edgy, caffeinated pall the remainder of the thick, fecund day, where the trash trucks rumble in full bloom and bouquet. In this tropical heat, the only thing that makes such humidity tolerable to my heat-addled brain is the sway of reggae. It reflects the glare of sunlight, and yet the shadow of its dub offers respite from the heat, too. Something about its languid, stoned pace regulates my own metabolism and alpha waves, synching my biorhythms to its own drums and bass, moving the rational head towards something more subliminal.

All I can tell you about Ranking Dread is that it was recently sitting on shelves at Other Music and Kim’s, with a red, white, and black design that Jack White (hell, even Sailor Jerry) could dig. Notes talk about Dread raising up out of Trenchtown with Tappa Zukie. Yet as Zukie went international, Dread went outlaw, living a life on the run after shooting a cop. He made it in England for awhile (under the assuages of Zukie), far away from the isle’s law, with Fattie Boom Boom, some Dennis Brown joints, and a dub album from 1982 that has King Tubby and Scientist sound-clashing over him like some sort of only child in a divorce. Dread is here in presence mostly: his words, lines, intentions slipping in and out of focus. Soon after this dub showcase, he was extradited back to Jamaica and died in prison in 1996.

Tubby deploys Sly & Robbie to be the center from which the distorted Playland carousel melody spins itself dizzy for “Bom Dub” and “Jam Dub.” Both dubs use the digital curlicue of a warped jack-in-the-box as its foundation, pelted with peanut shells from spider monkeys in bellhop jackets with each turn, while further back lumbers the much heavier stomp of them Taxi boys. Scientist’s side is nice, as the voice says you have to play it twice with “Yes Yes Yes Dub,” pulsed along by Style Scott and Roots Radics. Its spinning sensation is more like that of a vortex, building from the slurred horn line rather than the synth blips on Tubby’s half. Its melody stands right at the tip of my tongue, so nearly-recognizable, and yet I can’t quite place its appearance in my past. Blame a head made cloudy by 100% humidity.