He’s primarily a extremely talented studio engineer and producer, although he also performs as an artist in his own right. He was indeed also one of the earliest pioneers of dub reggae, alongside King Tubby. The amount of amazing music he is directly responsible for is genuinely bewildering. He was enormously prolific in his mid 60s – late 70s prime, producing hundreds of singles and albums, with the vast majority being good to great, and a decent proportion being all time genre defining classics.
It is fair to say that he has always been highly eccentric (he commonly used to blow weed smoke into his recording consoles and drip his blood onto his tapes when recording for example), but think it’s also fair to say that for large periods of his life he suffered with mental health issues. In the early 1970s he built the Black Ark studio in his back garden, and such was the quality of the music he produced there, it became the most famous studio in Jamaica, with even non reggae bands like the Clash and Wings recording there. At the height of his popularity in 1979, he burnt the studio to the ground, convinced that it was inhabited by unclean spirits. In 1983, some Dutch mega fans helped him painstaking re-construct the studio from the ground up. Two days after they’d finished construction, he burnt that one down as well.
As I’m sure you can imagine, a lot of the focus of the non-specialist press marketing is his mental state ( ‘insane genius’, like @thewarn says) which I find suspect for a few reasons, but mainly because this seems to be the hook that people use to sell him to the non-reggae audience, rather than his amazing music. Also, some of it goes further and suggests that it’s almost an accident his music is so good – like he is possessed by ‘madness’ when he records – rather than being an extremely gifted musician. Obviously there is the wider issue of using someone’s poor mental health to market them also, but this is not something unique to Perry. Finally, like @littlebirds says, he tends to get sold as the be all and end all of reggae (again, probably because he has these additional ‘selling’ points) which ends up meaning that loads of other equally amazing Jamaican music gets ignored.
Again, none of this is a criticism of Perry at all – he is amazing, and think it’s always good when an album like Heart of the Congos gets some publicity, however this comes about. It also seems that Perry himself is happier and healthier these days, and he is still recording and playing live.
