According to Discogs, Scientist released no less than 10 full-length LPs in 1981 alone. Among these, Scientific Dub stands out for several reasons, not least of which is the fact that there is no overarching gimmick attached to the album title, tracklist, and cover art. Taken at face value, there are no boxing matches, space invaders, vampires, kingdoms, or wars to steal our attention; just Scientist, donning a lab coat (alright, so there’s a little bit of a gimmick), his high-speed hand motions pushing a heavily wired mixing board to the brink of short-circuiting. It’s an appropriate image, because that’s what this album is all about — the art of mixing, the engineer as conductor, the studio itself his instrumentation. These concepts might seem tired today, but remember that we’re talking about the early 1980s here, and while many an artist thrived in the dub paradigms established by Lee “Scratch” Perry and King Tubby, none did so with the prescient foresight and technical facility of Scientist.
Before Hopeton Overton Brown acquired this pseudonym, he was simply a neighborhood kid emulating his electrician father, repairing TVs, building amplifiers, and eventually, buying transformers and other electronic equipment from King Tubby. It was Studio One fixture Bunny Lee who nicknamed Hopeton “Scientist” after hearing the young handyman wax philosophical about the possible future of music engineering. “Everything you see that happened with the moving faders and all that, that was my original idea, but everybody thought I was crazy and thought that I was smoking too much weed,” said Scientist in a 2012 interview with LargeUp.com. “Automation with total recall, virtual tracks — I spoke about all that in 1980, when they didn’t even have a computer.”
Although Scientific Dub is not necessarily Scientist’s most experimental album, it does directly invite the listener to peer through the microscope, with a tracklisting composed of dub titles barely altered from their original form; Johnny Clarke’s “Can’t Keep a Good Man Down” became “Keep a Good Dub Rubbing,” The Tamlins’ “Baltimore” (released on the Taxi label) became “Taxi to Baltimore Dub,” Wayne Jarrett’s “Satta Dread” became “Satta Dread Dub,” Johnny Clarke’s “Every Knee Shall Bow” and “Bad Days are Going” became “Every Dub Shall Scrub” and “Bad Days Dub,” Jackie Mittoo’s “Drum Song” and “Darker Shade of Black” became “Drum Song Dub” and “Blacker Shade of Dub,” and Delroy Wilson’s “Just Say Who” became “Just Say Dub… Who.” By making little if any attempt to disguise his source material, Scientist practically issues a challenge to the original composers, as if to say, “No, this is how the song should sound.” Indeed, he has since outright issued this exact challenge to several non-reggae artists.
Putting aside the more obvious analogy of riddim recycling, this game of one-upmanship is not dissimilar to the way rappers “remix” popular singles by freestyling over their instrumentals, often while employing the original cadence and chorus. In this sense, Scientific Dub could be considered a proto-mixtape, with Scientist taking on the dual roles of selector and DJ (or DJ and MC if you prefer the hip-hop terminology). He’s the selector in the sense that he’s choosing the music you’ll hear, and he’s the DJ in the sense that his mix, and all the zany sound effects included therein, takes center stage as the lead voice. We can even find traces of Scientist’s DNA in the work of Robert Earl Davis, Jr. a.k.a. DJ Screw, whose story, tragic death notwithstanding, mirrors that of Hopeton Overton Brown in more ways than one. Both artists came from areas with rich musical traditions, both cornered the market with signature sounds that would inspire legions of would-be copycats, and both would forever change the sound of music in and outside of their genres. Furthermore, just as Scientist called upon a rotating roster of studio musicians (most famously Sly & Robbie and the Roots Radics) to play the day’s riddims live for his dub mix, Screw assembled various Screwed Up Click members to record freestyles over popular instrumentals, which he then hit with his own patented chopped-and-screwed technique. Finally, both artists, during the height of their popularity, were surrounded by unsavory characters and challenged by industry politics. The difference is that whereas Scientist removed himself from the limelight, stopped making music for a while, and moved from Jamaica to California, only to see his songs pirated by Greensleeves Records, DJ Screw died of an overdose in Houston before ever getting the chance to hear his sound imitated by the world’s biggest pop stars.
One could say Scientific Dub is Scientist’s 3 ‘N the Morning Part 2. It’s not his most popular work — Screw is most definitely best known for “June 27,” Scientist probably for Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires — but it offers perhaps the greatest insight into the peculiarities of his specific sound. For that reason, it’s worth revisiting time and time again.
