Few are the Chilean experiences of this genre or variation of reggae that is dub poetry, some of that is on the album that Gondwana presented in the late nineties in "Phat Cherimoya Dub". Taking poetry out of books and putting them into a dub reggae base is the proposal of the Chilean Absalón Opazo, poet and radio player who these days premieres two video clips and a soundcloud channel available to all who like reggae and poetry.
"I heard the first dub songs in the mid 90. I remember that it was a time when many Chileans returned from exile, and his children brought these records that we had never heard and that blew our heads off ”, Absalón Opazo tells about his approach to the “dub” genre, born in the late 1960s in Jamaica.
The dub is characterized by a particular style of percussion, echoes and sound effects, among its most recognized exponents worldwide is Lee “Scratch” Perry, Mad Professor, Augustus Pablo, and legendary producer King Tubby, considered by many to be the “father” of dub.
Dub poetry (Dub Poetry) was born in Jamaica in the late years 70, when the poet Linton Kwesi Johnson launched the foundational "Dread, Beat an’ Blood” (1977), which was followed by “Reflection In Red” by Oku Onuora (1979) and Benjamin Zephaniah's “Rasta” (1980). Years later (1983) another record of the genre would arrive: "Check it" by Mutabaruka, an icon of this style in the Rastafari movement.
"I find it very motivating to take poetry to other areas, get her out of her corner and confront her with an audience that would otherwise, I wouldn't listen to poetry, I would not see a poet declaim ", Opazo points out, who points here another interesting aspect: "Within the musical circuit, the dub is also good ‘under’, so in a way, we are facing two expressions with a lot of periphery load and that must be latent in the current moment of the world ”.
"The Prisoner Rose" is the name of the poem that sounds in its most recent video available on Absalón Opazo's YouTube channel. Shot in February 2020 in the Elqui Valley, the text rests on a powerful base of the Argentine collective La Plataforma. Previously, on the same channel, "Tragic Realism" had spread, filmed in Arequipa, Peru, in 2018, with a base produced by the Wackies studio.
Both texts evoke the presence of an ancient America, always Indian and mestizo -as the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral describes-, almost ghost, populated with spirits that haunt and dance, in the middle of the century 21, to the rhythm of the Jamaican dub.
Canal en Soundcloud:
https://soundcloud.com/
Watch his first video here “Tragic Realism”
