Reverb

Tracing the Dub Diaspora

Paul Sullivan

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781780232102
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

Dub is the avant-garde verso of reggae, created by manipulating and reshaping recordings using studio strategies and techniques. While dub was one of the first forms of popular music to turn the idea of song inside out, it is far from being fully explored. Tracing the evolution of dub, Remixology travels from Kingston, Jamaica, across the globe, following dub's influence on the development of the MC, the birth of sound system culture, and the postwar Jamaican diaspora.   Starting in 1970s Kingston, Paul Sullivan examines the origins of dub as a genre, approach, and attitude. He stops off in London, Berlin, Toronto, Bristol, and New York, exploring those places where dub had the most impact and investigates its effect on postpunk, dub-techno, jungle, and the dubstep. Along the way, Sullivan speaks with a host of international musicians, DJs, and luminaries of the dub world, from DJ Spooky, Adrian Sherwood, Channel, and Roy to Shut Up and Dance and Roots Manuva. Wide-ranging and lucid, Remixology sheds new light on the dub-born notions of remix and reinterpretation that set the stage for the music of the twenty-first century.

1 THE KINGSTON CONTEXT

THE RISE OF THE JAMAICAN SOUND SYSTEM

Dub emerged in Jamaica, just like reggae, its ‘significant other’, as part of a broader musical, social and political context that included the rise of sound system culture, the establishment of a national sound, and the founding of a local music infrastructure that incorporated record labels, studios and producers. Before sound systems, the main source of broadcast entertainment in Jamaica was through radio, which had been around since the early 1930s. Given that radios were still prohibitively expensive in the 1940s, poorer Jamaicans would often gather around a shared radio, especially in the evenings.

The first national radio station (Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation, or JBC) was not founded until 1959. However, those who did have access to radio sets could pick up commercial stations such as Radio Jamaica and Rediffusion Network (RJR), owned by the British Rediffusion Group, as well as transmissions from abroad. In the right conditions, short-wave transmissions could be picked up from the BBC, and medium-wave stations from Cuba and America such as Nashville’s WLAC, Miami’s WINZ and New Orleans’ WNOE. Most of these stations were playing rhythm and blues – the sound that fuelled the early sound systems.

Home systems such as radiograms (or ‘radiophones’, radios that had the capacity to connect to a phonograph or electric turntable externally) were also developed around this time, but were equally scarce. In 1950 a modest turntable system cost the average Jamaican an entire year’s wages, and even if such a purchase could be afforded, there was still the problem of how to secure records for it since the rhythm and blues records popular with younger (poorer) Jamaicans mostly had to be imported and were therefore expensive.¹ As was the case with radios, so with radiograms: those fortunate enough to own one often held listening parties in their homes too. These systems also became a useful way for shops – particularly those selling alcohol – to boost sales: by stringing up speakers above their doors, establishments could attract more customers. It was in this way that two of the principal sound system pioneers – Arthur ‘Duke’ Reid and Clement ‘Coxsone’ Dodd – started out.

It was not long before rudimentary ready-to-go systems could be rented from stores like that of Stanley Motta, one of Kingston’s leading producers of mento, which was the prevailing style of local folk music. In Norman Stolzoff’s Wake the Town and Tell the People, Hedley Jones, a band leader who built his own cello (a popular instrument with mento bands) at the age of fourteen as well as the first ever solid-body electric guitar in 1940, before moving to the field of electronics, claims that by the 1940s there were already two men in Kingston who

had two small sound systems that they would buy records [for] and go out and play for parties. The first one was Count Nicholas. And the one that followed was called Count Goody. Both used small RCA amplifier sets made for PA systems that used to be sold by Stanley Motta.²

Stolzoff also quotes an interview with Bunny ‘the Mighty Burner’ Goodison, who ran the Soul Shack sound system, in which he mentions a man called Roy White. The latter was booked to play records on a portable PA system between speeches at political rallies to ‘keep the crowd involved and attentive’. Soon the likes of White, Goodison, Nicholas and Tom ‘The Great Sebastian’ Wong, another early soundman, were hiring out their musical services for parties.

After the Second World World War, Hedley Jones started up a radio repair shop where he began building amps. On realizing that demand for records was growing, he also began selling imported jazz records for a new vinyl section called ‘Bop City’, named after the New York jazz club. In order to promote this new business to the public, he designed his own special amp known as the ‘Williamson form’. According to Stolzoff, this amp was the first of its kind in Jamaica, and was not only more powerful than other commercially available amps of the time, but also came with a major technological innovation in the shape of a ‘splitter’ that could manipulate the treble, mid-range and bass frequencies. After hearing the power and quality of the amp, other sound system owners, such as Tom Wong, began commissioning Jones for their own amps, and they quickly became a standard among the growing sound system community.

As wattage also started to increase, more emphasis began to be placed on lower frequencies and a whole new scale in speaker design emerged. In early 1950, Jones constructed an amp for aspiring soundman Roy Johnson, whose system featured speaker cabinets that were literally the size of wardrobes. Nicknamed ‘the House of Joy’, Johnson’s system became a prototype for the larger type of sound system that emerged soon after.

Hedley and his apprentices, Fred Stanford and Jacky Eastwood, were at the forefront of constructing this next phase of systems which would dominate Kingston nightlife throughout the 1950s. Jones and Eastwood built a system for former policeman and liquor-store owner Arthur ‘Duke’ Reid (which he called ‘The Trojan’), as well as for Coxsone Dodd (called ‘Downbeat’). Stanford would go on to work for Reid, servicing his equipment and building new sets for his friends. Dodd and Reid not only became Kings of the Dancehall (along with Wong), but were the first to go into the studio to record exclusively for the sound systems.

The sound systems soon grew into sonic powerhouses that literally could be heard for miles around. Initially, the soundmen played in a variety of informal venues (for example in empty yards, community halls and private homes) but outgrew these spaces and began to organize events in enclosed open-air areas known as ‘lawns’, and later ‘dance halls’ – a slightly misleading name, given that there were neither walls nor roofs, let alone a hall. Most of the key dance halls were located in downtown Kingston, around the central area known as ‘Beat Street’, where larger venues with names like ‘King’s Lawn’, ‘Chocomo Lawn’ and ‘Forrester’s Hall’ drew ever-burgeoning crowds.

The sounds were generally controlled by two people: a deejay, who introduced and sometimes spoke over the records to keep the audience’s interest piqued, and a selector (‘selecta’), who chose and played the records and, when technology enabled it later on, sometimes mixed the singer’s or the deejay’s voice.

Each sound was associated with an area and usually had its own set of followers. ‘Dances’ became important social, cultural and even political events, as Jamaicans gathered not only to listen to the trending music of the day, but to discuss community topics, flirt and socialize.

As more systems emerged, competitions known as ‘clashes’ began to take place. These were a partial continuation of the competitive performance traditions of many West African cultures such as those in Trinidad and Brazil. Here, though, the larger clashes could feature up to eight systems on one lawn, each trying to outdo each other and become the ‘Champion Sound’.

An important component in these musical battles was the specific records each sound system owned and played. Given the paucity of records in Kingston in the 1950s and ’60s, sound operators largely depended on the imports that started flowing into local shops, or were available through mail order or obtained on personal trips to Florida and other southern U.S. states, where shoppers would sometimes pick up technology as well as music.

So crucial was having exclusive records for a system’s success that operators quickly developed stealth strategies: buying up all available copies of a new record was not unheard of, nor was the retitling of a record, or scratching off labels (or sticking on fake ones) to try to confuse the ‘spies’ who began cropping up at dances. One particularly memorable anecdote involves Dennis Alcapone and Lloyd Daley hiding under the speaker boxes of leading sound systems like those of Duke Reid and Coxsone and recording their specials directly onto a Grundig machine for clandestine airings on Daley’s Matador set. These so-called survival strategies also periodically erupted into violence and even sparked gang warfare. Reid, a former police officer and professional marksman, was well known for firing shots into the dance to keep the crowd hyped – as well as for roughing up competitors and sabotaging rival sound systems, as, indeed, were many others.

Among the most famous competitive stories of the era, related in Lloyd Bradley’s Bass Culture, is that of Willis ‘Gatortail’ Jackson’s song ‘Later for the Gator’ (1950), nicknamed ‘Coxsone’s Hop’, which Coxsone used as musical ammunition against his rival Reid and other systems for years, fiercely protecting its identity. Some seven years later, word got out that Reid had not only worked out what the song was, but had got hold of a copy. Coxsone visited Reid’s Trojan Sound system with Prince Buster to see if the rumours were true. Buster maintains they were at the bar:

We wait. Then as the clock struck midnight we hear ‘Baap … baa da dap da dap, daa da daaap’, he have a glass in him hand, he drop it and just collapse, sliding down the bar. I had to brace him against the bar. The psychological impact had knocked him out. Nobody never hit him.³

In the 1960s, Kingston’s new rude boy scene would usher in a new, aggressive mood to the dance hall; this was a consequence of the escalation of political violence and gang warfare that would engulf sound system culture.

SYSTEM TO STUDIO: THE CREATION OF A JAMAICAN SOUND

The choice of music played on the sound systems was restricted to the kinds of recordings accessible at any given time. Initially, this meant a mix of locally produced mento and imported rhythm and blues. Before R&B, other types of imported music had been popular in Kingston such as big band jazz and swing. This was mainly due to the U.S. occupancy of the island during wartime. Live jazz groups were especially popular amongst the upper echelons of Jamaican society, while mento – the nation’s first indigenous music – was increasingly disparaged as a rural or ‘redneck’ sound. The sound systems, with their reliance on recorded music rather than on musicians, played a large part in killing off a local live music scene that had already been greatly diminished by the war. As Prince Buster memorably put it,

So the promoter never mek no profit – dem did prove too expensive fi the dance promoter. Den alone eat a pot of goat! So when sound come now, the sound no tek no break. When these few sound system come, it was something different.⁴

As the U.S. moved away from rhythm and blues towards rock-and-roll, the supply of the former started to dry up in Jamaica, causing something of a crisis for the sound systems, which needed fresh supplies of exclusive R&B tunes to survive. It was for this reason that in the late 1950s soundmen – fed up with being charged extortionate prices by specialist dealers – began hitting the studios with the aim of recording local singers and musicians. The island’s recording facilities at this time were limited to those belonging to mento producer Stanley Motta and radio stations like RJR, JBC and Federal. The latter was run by Ken Khouri, who had managed to acquire a cutting lathe as early as 1949 and recorded people at parties and homes. By producing their own takes on the R&B sound – Motta’s studio recorded Derrick Harriott’s ‘Lollipop Girl’ in 1969, as well as some of Laurel Aitken’s first tunes – these studios aimed to compensate for the lack of so-called authentic product coming in from the States.

Pressed onto dubplates as one-off exclusives, these early recordings were meant for the dance halls rather than for commercial consumption. A normal press would hence usually consist of around 100 records, usually without labels. Dubplates would grow to become an essential factor in the unique system-to-studio process that developed around this time. Made of soft wax coating over a metal core, acetates were created specifically to provide a limited number of performances before decaying. They allowed new tracks to be previewed inexpensively in the dance halls to gauge how crowds responded before being cut on (expensive) vinyl.

Dubplates therefore became an exclusive currency, given to sound system operators by studios for previewing unreleased songs, which in turn fed into the competitive nature of the systems. It did not take long for producers to realize that the more successful dubplates offered a means of building up demand for a potential commercial release.

Lloyd Bradley has claimed that Duke Reid was the first major soundman to ‘dip his toe into recording when he began producing his own sessions in 1957’; but there is evidence to suggest that Coxsone Dodd, who was making frequent record buying trips to the U.S. in the 1950s, had already begun making his own recordings at Federal by 1956.⁵ Either way, the music began to morph from derivative R&B into something more distinctly Jamaican as local bands fused their attempts with local styles such as mento and other Caribbean sounds. This mixture was initially known as ‘bluebeat’ – a name taken from the record label run by Emile E. Shalit, who began to import these early Jamaican releases into the UK.

Bluebeat became more popularly known as ‘ska’, whose signature rhythmic thrust is alleged to be based on a beat invented by Memphis pianist Roscoe Gordon. Its emergence coincided almost directly with Jamaican independence on 6 August 1962, though curiously, there seems to be no evidence of any conscious effort to create a ‘national sound’.⁶ The music took a definitive leap forward in the early 1960s when Prince Buster (Cecil Bustamente Campbell) started making records for his own Voice of the People system (and later for the Bluebeat label). A former boxer who had previously worked as ‘security’ for Dodd, Buster was one of the principal forces in fusing local styles such as mento and buru with jazz horns and shuffling R&B. Ska’s infectious melodies, upbeat rhythms and African-American vocal harmonies made it hugely popular not only in Jamaica but beyond too, especially in Britain, which by then already had a large Jamaican population following the post-war influx of the Jamaican diaspora. The sound provided the perfect catalyst for Jamaica’s nascent music industry, with producers such as Motta and Khouri rapidly incorporating it into their repertoire. The arrival of the jukebox in the late 1950s, as well as a large increase in the ownership of radio sets, helped disseminate ska to ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 THE KINGSTON CONTEXT
• 2 KINGSTON’S DUB PIONEERS
• 3 LONDON: SOUND SYSTEM CULTURE, DIGIDUB AND POST-PUNK
• 4 NYC: DUB, RAP, DISCO AND ILLBIENT
• 5 LONDON II: UK RAP AND THE DUBCORE CONTINUUM
• 6 THE BRISTOL SOUND
• 7 BERLIN: GLITCH AND TECHNO
• 8 CANADA’S DUB POETRY AND DANCEHALL
• CONCLUSION
• References
• Bibliography and Filmography
• Select Discography
• List of Interviews
• Acknowledgements
• Photo Acknowledgements
• Index