Hip-Hop Lives Here
Hip-Hop Lives Here
Mr. Perry, how do you still have energy for live performances at 83 years old?
I feel like a machine! There’s a computer in my head, in my legs… My brain has become a machine, like an eight-track tape machine from Japan. (Laughs) So when I go on stage, I feel energy and power. I could even fly. Live performance is giving me life, it reincarnates me and tells me what to do. And I concentrate hard when I’m performing because I want to heal the people.
Heal them in what ways?
I just love to make the people happy. Everything is about that. The music is talking, it’s the armor of justice… My music is healing, my music has feeling, my music has power.
Does that make you a healer as well?
Yes, of course I’m a healer. I am that I am!
“The devil would ask where I get so much power from and I tell him: from thunder, from lightning.”
You rather famously burned down your studio, Black Ark, in the late 1970s — that was a big loss for the music community in Jamaica but apparently you saw it as a kind of healing.
It’s the greatest thing I’ve ever done! How else could I escape if I did not do that?
Escape from what?
From the demons. I would be under the spell of demons forever, they would have killed me if I didn’t do that. So that was God’s way, just to burn it and let it kill them. It was my saviour. If I never burned down the studio, I would have died because the devil was jealous of me, and jealousy is dangerous. The devil would ask where I get so much power from and I tell him, from the rain water, from thunder, from lightning, from the stars of heaven.
You grew up in the countryside in Jamaica — is that where you got your love of nature?
Yes, nature was always important to me. And now the sunshine, the breeze, the flowers and the roses, they live in my music. I was born in the jungle in Kendal, Jamaica. When I was young, my father did not take care of me. He married a woman from Kingston and had no time for me, so I went to live with my mother on a plantation called Saxham. When I got older, I was driving a tractor in the field. Whatever God says to do, if he says to drive a tractor, I do that in the name of Christ. I followed the spirits.
Was your family supportive of your love of music?
My family, they didn’t care. They don’t have much occupation for music, they are all laborers. They’re glad I chose something even though it’s different from them. They’re glad I chose something that them couldn’t choose. They know I was chosen by God, so what can you do about it? You have to do what God wish them to do. And God want me to be in the music.
So you felt that music was your true calling?
Yes, music was my true way and my true path, my true future. Music took me over and I was glad: I saw the holy words that come up out of the blue sky to me… Then I had to start to write them down and when I had too much of them, my book was overflowing. One day, Bob Marley came to me and asked me what to do. We worked together and the song that came out was “Duppy Conqueror.” You know the one? (Sings) “Yes me friend, we’re in the streets again.” I gave Bob Marley the song to sing, and it was a hit.
Did you know at the time that it would be such a success?
The way the song was talking, I knew it could not miss. It’s spiritual to me, it talks about conquering demons, things like that… Bob’s friends, even his best friend, heard this song and he was jealous about it, “How come he get a song like that to sing?” But only Bob Marley could sing it because he sung truth. Truth, the facts of life, and a lot of people can’t take it because it’s too many sharp edges. Few people can take the truth.
What kind of truths have you learned from music?
The facts of life: love God and live. Hate God and die. I was baptized in the church of God, and God is true. Without God, I would have no power. I have no musical power without God’s power.
What else gives you musical power? At one point, you used to smoke weed and blow the smoke over all your tapes to give them the breath of life…
That is right! Reality, yes. And you know why? God made man and blew his breath into him and the man became a living soul. So I would practice and that would make the words true. The herb is the teacher, so the herb tells me what to do and I have to do exactly that. It’s like a shepherd, and I have to follow the shepherd.
Where does the breath of life come from these days?
My exercise! I used to exercise every day, at five o’clock in the morning I’d go to the sea to swim. I always take my vacations by the sea because Jesus walked on the sea, and I do what Jesus do. So the sea filled me up with so much energy and turned me into Superman! I never realized who I was… Now I know that my real origin is a fish, and I’m still a fish. Pisces — if you know the symbol, it’s two fish, one goes east and the next goes west. I have the truth in my head: everything is connected.
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Mr. Odom Jr., looking back, which of your roles has had the greatest impact on your perspective as an actor?
I think with Hamilton, there was something that I suspected about myself: I just thought that I was capable of more than I’m being asked to do in this business. As I watched my white brothers and sisters rise up the ladder, I was happy for them but I felt like if I was given a shot I could do something, if I was allowed to do more than just what I’m being asked to do in the margins — because we are constantly pushed into margins. So, Lin brought us all into the room and asked the most of us, and we got to prove to ourselves what we were capable of. Leaving that show, I would never again have to ask myself if I was capable of something great. I know now, if I’m given the material and the resources, if I’m given the opportunity, I can do something great too.
Does knowing what you’re capable of also make it easier to say no to the roles that aren’t right for you — or have you made some tough decisions over the years?
It’s not tough for me. That’s your integrity. I tell that to young people, you don’t sell yourself out, you don’t sell yourself short, you don’t sell your people out for anything, even if it means some hungry nights for a bit. You’ll make mistakes, we all make mistakes, and film is a great gamble. You don’t know when you accept a film! Sometimes it doesn’t work, and it’s a miracle when it does. But you can’t go in knowingly taking something that you think is going to be damaging or detrimental to your people, not for anything. So that’s not hard.
“There’s been such a lockout for so long about people being at the helm of telling the stories of their own lived experiences; let us be in charge.”
Still, sometimes you simply have to put food on the table, right?
Yeah. But you figure, we are creatives and so yes, there’s choices that you make for lots of different reasons. But it’s very easy to walk away if I think that the part is some sort of caricature or something that I do not think is true or that my voice won’t be respected when I tell them this is not true to my lived experience or anyone else’s that I know. If I think those things won’t be respected, that’s a very easy pass. I think that’s part of what’s beautiful about a film like One Night in Miami being directed by Regina King.
What do you mean?
Well, there’s been such a lockout for so long about people being at the helm of telling the stories of their own lived experiences, whether that’s with gender or race; let us be in charge. So to have Regina at the helm of that meant a lot. Especially because in many ways, Sam Cooke has been one of my teachers for my whole life. I’ve listened to plenty of Sam Cooke, never did I imagine or intend to play him in anything. But that’s what he meant to me, I really just looked at him almost as you would look at a mentor. If you are singing stuff from the church, if you are a black man singing soul or R&B or pop, Sam Cooke is the blueprint.
That must have been a daunting role to play when there’s so much to live up to.
Are you kidding me? Very. Yes, I ran from this project for as long as I could, for as long as my representation would allow me to! They told me to take a look at the script again after I kept running from it, and I looked at it again and I saw what they saw. Sam was also inside Regina in a certain way. She was offering me something that sent me down a path that was more truthful, more entertaining, more interesting always.
As a trained singer who has spent years working on Broadway, did you ever feel boxed in by those experiences when you made the transition to film?
That is a real thing, and through the years, it is a thing that is sort of a stench that I haven’t shaken. There’s plenty of stage actors that we can point to over the years that excel as storytellers, and their training has prepared them for that. You want to use your whole body, everything you have to help tell the story in the most effective way. And I’m just grateful to my teachers, I’ve had some great training at Carnegie-Mellon University. My classmates at Carnegie, I was there at the same time as Joe Manganiello, Matt Bomer, Josh Gad, Josh Groban, Zachary Quinto… A lot of those guys that I just mentioned were musical theater actors, and they are only known for acting right now. So our training was really about making sure that the story was always first.
“It’s an intense time. You make it, you insulate yourself to tell that story, and then you let it go.”
Is it difficult to juggle your life as an actor with your life as a musician and recording artist?
It’s very difficult to juggle. But I love the variety and I finally found a team of people to work with that understand that about me, so I let them worry about my calendar. (Laughs) The variety is very important to me and in a weird way, it makes them stronger. Going off to shoot a movie makes me better when I’m in a studio, doing a play, off-Broadway or on-Broadway, is going to make me better when I go make a television show — so we have to make room for all of it.
Do you have the headspace to do all of that at once? Are you, for example, working on songwriting at night after shooting a film?
I try not to! That’s the one thing I can’t do. That’s another reason why the schedule is so important: things need to be protected. When I was doing One Night in Miami, that was all that I did. I can’t really audition for anything else, I can’t be preparing for something else at the same time, it really is a deep dive. That’s another reason why I am so excited at the end of any project to let it go, because it’s an intense time. You make it, you insulate yourself to tell that story, and then you let it go.
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