Dub, roots and rock around the clock

Today's musical timeline:
8 a.m. -- The house is quiet. I sipped coffee and 6-year-old Annika slept upstairs. I listened to Lee "Scratch" Perry's "Revolution Dub" album from 1975. By including vocal snippets of British sitcom actor James Robertson Justice, musical genius Perry pioneers what would later be called "sampling."
11:30 a.m. -- Annika watched cartoons. I listened to Culture's classic, apocalyptic yet catchy "Two Sevens Clash" single. "Wat a liv an bam-bay-ee (what is left by and by) When the two sevens clash?" The classic end-of-the-world song that kept Jamaicans indoors on July 7, 1977.
1:30 p.m. -- Took Annika to a children's health fair. En route we listened to some classic songs by The Fall (aren't they all classics?). We heard "Cab it Up," which was paired with "Dead Beat Descendant" on Beggars Banquet in June 1989. Quite possibly the closest Mark E. Smith ever came to sounding like a mainstream pop idol. As if!
3 p.m. -- Exercised to "Wowee Zowee," Pavement's underrated, third album. "Flux = Rad" sounds like The Beatles if they had supported the Buzzcocks in 1977. "Father to a Sister of Thought" sounds like George Jones if he had signed with Sub Pop right out of a failed art school stint. Or something. Whatever it is, it's brilliant.
6 p.m. -- Washed the dishes accompanied by some Hugh Mundell songs, including "Great Tribulation." Mundell was barely in his teens when he recorded his first Jamaican hit for Augustus Pablo. By age 21 he was gunned down in a dispute over a refrigerator. Yet another tragic reggae story.
8 p.m. -- Relaxed with a whiskey sour and some Jamaican deejay music, including Dennis Alcapone's 1970 single "Spanish Amigo." Toasted over Ken Boothe's "Old Fashioned Way," this song grows on you until it covers you like liquid sunshine.
Hmm... "liquid sunshine?" Is that the whiskey sour talking?
Posted by Hello