FUSE TV - Z-Trip: My 5 Essential Reggae Songs

"It's like someone telling you you're going to remix James Brown or Led Zeppelin. This is such coveted music that i don't want to f-ck it up."

DJ/producer Z-Trip has taken on giants before—see 2007's remix of Jackson 5's "I Want You Back"—but the genre-busting producer faced a new challenge remixing Bob Marley's "Punky Reggae Party" alongside dub pioneer Lee "Scratch" Perry for the recently released Legend: Remixed.

"The email [asking me to participate] went to the wrong address and by that point, everyone had already picked out the ones that were 'the ones'," admits the DJ. "But it just so happened that Lee was in Los Angeles and was down to collaborate. That changed the whole thing. He meshed right in, like, 'We should put some more delay on the piano,' et cetera. He goes into the booth and does four takes, each at seven minutes." 

The finished remix finds Z-Trip, currently on tour with LL Cool J, Public Enemy, Ice Cube and De La Soul for Kings of the Mic, nodding to the present while retaining the original track's structure. "The way I approached it was to make something current, tempo-wise, dubstep-heavyish at the top of the remix so if someone's mixing out of that current sound, they can go right into this," says the producer. "I wanted to take it, strip it down and reassemble it as a beefed up, 2013 version of itself."

To celebrate the album's release, we gave Z-Trip the Sisyphean task of picking his five most essential reggae songs.

1. Bob Marley & the Wailers, "Lively Up Yourself" (Babylon by Bus version) (1978)
This one is the epitome of what this music is supposed to sound like live. This was the first live reggae I ever heard, so up until this point, I always heard it in the studio. The call-and-response that hip hop has, I heard it in this, plus the message was positive and it made you want to dance. So where hip hop came from, I felt like there was a piece of that in this.