In a story that I don’t think I have even processed in my life because of how incredibly surreal and dreamlike it was, Lee “Scratch” Perry winked at me before he went on stage with The Orb. It was a wet and particularly libatious (and maybe more) night in Stavanger, Norway, during the Nuart Festival’s opening/closing party. Perry arrived like a deity to the stage, almost gliding in a slow waltz-like movement, and because of my access at the festival, I was near enough the stage to lock eyes with one of the most important artists of the 20th century. Though a pioneer of dub, that reggae and Jamaican soundsystem culture that shares DNA with the dancehall-to-reggaeton pipeline that has dominated the 21st century. He is an origin story.
I must say I’m not really in favor of a review without experiencing the show myself. But I felt like this particular one, Dancing the Revolution: From Dancehall to Reggaetón, on view this summer at the MCA Chicago, felt like a particularly fascinating curation, not only because I have an interest in shows that incorporate sound and culture. I have tried, in the past, to think of the best way to look at my own curation when it comes to certain prevailing musical cultures, incorporating politics, community and identity, and to tackle Reggaetón as an artistic movement by such an establishment museum feels like an act of protest unto itself. And it looks fantastic.
The exhibition's whole thesis is genealogical: it traces a line from Jamaican dancehall through Panama's reggae en español, into Puerto Rico and the Bronx, and out into global reggaetón. One artist quoted in the show's materials puts it directly: dembow moved from the Dominican Republic into Panama's reggae en español, then to New York and the Bronx, before circling back to Puerto Rico and developing into reggaetón — so, in their words, reggaetón is essentially "dancehalltón." What fascinates me further is how, through painting,sound sculptures, installations, photographs, and video, the depth of which the curators can tell a history the spans the globe. There is a clear vision to how sound moves through culture, through politics, through sexual and identity politics, that is so well thought through and considered here it feels like a monumental achievement.
Back to Perry, and what I have always understood with him as a figure not so much of politics but a foundational piece in making political revolution happen. It’s not overt activism than through the practices and platforms he helped build. His roots in Jamaica's sound system culture placed him within a working-class, Black tradition of communal expression that operated outside official institutions, and his invention of dub — stripping tracks down and reassembling them through echo, reverb, and isolated bass and drum — reimagined the recording studio itself as a tool of Black creative autonomy. As a producer during Jamaica's turbulent 1970s, he shaped politically charged records with artists like Max Romeo and Bob Marley, embedding his work in reggae's broader ties to Rastafari consciousness and anti-colonial critique, even without writing overtly political lyrics himself. This positions him within a longer continuum of Caribbean music as liberation—the same lineage the MCA Chicago exhibition Dancing the Revolution traces from dancehall through to reggaetón's use in Puerto Rico's 2019 protests. Even his eccentric, shamanic public persona and rejection of mainstream industry norms can be read as a political stance in its own right: a refusal of respectability and commercial assimilation.
I remember that night in Norway so clearly for the way the sound bounced off the walls. The circular use of almost chanting mantras. Here was someone at the forefront of sound influencing two Englishmen to create a soundscape in his honor. It felt like watching influence in real time, sharing in the moment, history sent into the rhythm of the hypnotic, throbbing bass. That the show “demonstrates how music and dance can serve as bold acts of collective resistance and emancipation,” it is also about the bliss of connection and community. —Evan Pricco
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