Dub, Scratch, and the Black Star  

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"Dub, Scratch, and the Black Star" is an essay by Erik Davis.

Excerpt:

As Luke Erlich wrote, "If reggae is Africa in the New World, dub is Africa on the moon."[13] Just look at the cover art: Mad Professor's Science and the Witchdoctor sets circuit boards and robot figures next to mushrooms and fetish dolls, while Scientist Encounters Pac-Man at Channel One shows the Scientist manhandling the mixing console as if it were some madcap machine out of Marvel comics. It's important to note that in Jamaican patois, "science" refers to obeah, the African grab-bag of herbal, ritual and occult lore popular on the island. And as Robert Pelton points out, the figure of the scientist is not so distant from the spirit of the trickster that runs throughout this tale: "Both seek to befriend the strange, not so much striving to 'reduce' anomaly as to use it as a passage into a larger order...like the scientist, the trickster always yokes just this world to a suddenly larger world."[14]




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