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| Music of Jamaica | ||
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In Jamaican popular culture, a sound system is a group of disc jockeys, engineers and MCs playing ska, rocksteady or reggae music. The sound system is an important part of Jamaican culture and history. [1]
The sound system concept first became popular in the 1940s, in the parish of Kingston. DJs would load up a truck with a generator, turntables, and huge speakers and set up street parties. Tom the Great Sebastian, founded by Chinese-Jamaican businessman Tom Wong, was the first commercially successful sound system and influenced many sound systems that came later. [2] In the beginning, the DJs played American rhythm and blues music, but as time progressed and more local music was created, the sound migrated to a local flavour. [1] The sound system remained successful when the conservative, BBC-modeled Jamaican establishment radio refused to play the people's music, while DJs could play whatever they wanted and favored local sounds such as reggae. [3] The sound systems were big business, and represented one of the few sure ways to make money in the unstable economy of the area. The promoter or DJ made his profit by charging admission and selling food and alcohol; often thousands of people were in attendance.
By the mid-1950s, sound systems were more popular at parties than live musicians, and by the second half of the decade, custom-built systems began to appear from the workshops of specialists such as Hedley Jones, who constructed wardrobe-sized speaker cabinets known as "House[s] of Joy". It was also around this time that Jamaica's first superstar DJ and MC, Count Machuki, rose to prominence. As time progressed, sound systems became louder—capable of playing bass frequencies at 30,000 watts or more, with similar wattage attainable at the mid-range and high frequencies—and far more complex than their predecessors. [4] Competition between these sound systems was fierce, and eventually two DJs emerged as the stars of the scene: Clement "Coxsone" Dodd, and Duke Reid. [5] Besides the DJ, who rapped over the music, there was also a selector, who selected the music/rhythm tracks.
The popularity of a sound system was mainly contingent on one thing: having new music. In order to circumvent the release cycle of the American record labels, the two sound system superstars turned to record production. [5] Initially, they produced only singles for their own sound systems, known as "Exclusives" or Dubplates—a limited run of one copy per song. [6] What began as an attempt to replicate the American R&B sound using local musicians evolved into a uniquely Jamaican musical genre: ska. [5] This shift was due partly to the fact that as American-style R&B was embraced by a largely white, teenage audience and evolved into rock and roll, sound system owners created—and played—a steady stream of the singles the people preferred: fast-shuffle boogies and ballads. In response to this shift in supply, Jamaican producers introduced to their work some of the original elements of the Jamaican sound: rhythm guitars strumming the offbeat and snare-drum emphasis on the third beat, for example. [4] As this new musical form became more popular, both Dodd and Reid began to move more seriously into music production. Coxsone Dodd's production studio became the famous Studio One, while Duke Reid founded Treasure Isle.
As sound systems continued to gain in popularity through the 1960s and 1970s, they became politicized in many instances. The DJs would often satirize current affairs and local events, taking on a “singing newspaper” role. [3] Many sound systems, and their owners, were labelled as supporters of a particular political party (such as the PNP or the JLP), but most of the sound systems tried to maintain political neutrality. Nevertheless, as a cultural and economic phenomenon, the sound system was affected by the vast socio-political changes taking place in Jamaica at this time. [7]
An important part of sound system culture is the sound clash, an organized battle between two systems. The Guinness Sounds of Greatness is one of many such clashes. In 2009, the Guinness clash was organized into three parts: a "juggling" round, where each system gets 15 minutes to get the crowd going; a "tune fe tune" exchange of "commercial releases"; and a "dub-fe-dub", when the systems alternate "specials done specifically for the sound system playing the recording". [8]
The culture of the Sound System was brought to the UK with the mass immigration of Jamaicans in the 1960s and 1970s. [9] Notable UK Sound Systems include Sir Coxsone Outernational, Jah Shaka, Channel One, Aba Shanti-I, Jah Observer, Quaker City, Irration Steppas, Fatman International and Saxon Studio International. One of the first sound systems in the United States was Downbeat the Ruler, founded in Bronx, New York, in the late 1970s.
DJ Kool Herc, known as the Father of Hip-Hop, was responsible for importing many of the elements of Jamaican sound system culture to New York. Having immigrated with his family to the Bronx from Kingston at the age of 12, Herc grew up around dancehall parties, and despite being too young to enter, he would hang out outside the parties and listen to the music. When he started hosting his own parties in New York, he was known for having the loudest and most impressive sound system of anyone in the city, which heavily emphasized bass. He also introduced MCs (Masters of Ceremony) to the Bronx party scene, who are considered by some to be the first hip-hop rappers, as they emulated the toasting style of Jamaican reggae deejays. [10]
Sound systems were the method in which Jamaican migrants were able to maintain their cultural connection with their roots. They broadcast the remixed samples of reggae beats and created an underground music culture. This culture was separate from the larger population which relied on the radio to provide popular music.[ citation needed ] These sound systems were played in warehouses, clubs, and street corners. This was not simply just music played on the radio for a few people to hear, but a culture that involved many people was developed out of being consumed by sound through large sound systems.[ citation needed ] Sound system culture presented what Julian Henriques refers to as sonic dominance. [11] He is strategic in his usage of the word dominance because it is visceral and this term embodies the "power and the pleasure of the sonic" (452). The sound is an "enveloping, immersive, and intense experience" (451).[ citation needed ] The experience is so strong that "sounds carry people, as much as people carry sounds; 'vibes' find bodies to move" (230). Dance acts as a natural, immediate response to dancehall sounds, and as Henriques puts it, "bodies have no musical burden to bear; rather they are borne along, even berthed, by music." [12]
According to Henriques, the sound system has also played an influential role in the global influence of Jamaican music internationally. [13] It has "proved itself to be one of the most efficient of musical distribution mechanisms," (218) which has resulted in Jamaican music's influence on genres such as Hip hop, Jungle, and Dubstep. [13] While part of its influence can literally be credited to its superior audio fidelity over radio, the sound system also acts as a symbolic transmitter of shared experiences across the African diaspora. [13] [14]
The 1978 Jamaican film Rockers featured authentic culture, characters and mannerisms of the 1970s Jamaican reggae scene, featuring Leroy "Horsemouth" Wallace with his wife and children and in his own home, and the Harry J Studios in Kingston.
The film Babylon , released in 1980, so accurately captured the raw smoldering tensions between White and British Afro-Caribbeans centered around Brixton in the 1970s and 1980s, that it would be given an X rating in the UK and blacklisted in the United States, due to its depiction of institutional racism. Believed to be too incendiary for general distribution, it would be buried and forgotten following its premiere at Cannes, and would take another 40 years before it would be re-released by Kino Lorber in 2019 and made available in the United States on The Criterion Channel in 2020. [15] [16]
Menelik Shabazz's 2011 documentary The Story of Lover's Rock tells the story of the intimate dance, soundsystems, and social backdrop of the Afro-Caribbean community of South London in the ’70s and ’80s. [17]
Lovers Rock , part of the 2020 Amazon anthology series Small Axe, is Steve McQueen's paean to the lovers rock genre and its influences across space and between the diaspora communities of the "Black Atlantic" culture of the British West Indian community of 1980s London. [18]
Bass ( BAYSS) (also called bottom end) describes tones of low (also called "deep") frequency, pitch and range from 16 to 250 Hz (C0 to middle C4) and bass instruments that produce tones in the low-pitched range C2-C4. They belong to different families of instruments and can cover a wide range of musical roles. Since producing low pitches usually requires a long air column or string, and for stringed instruments, a large hollow body, the string and wind bass instruments are usually the largest instruments in their families or instrument classes.
A disc jockey, more commonly abbreviated as DJ, is a person who plays recorded music for an audience. Types of DJs include radio DJs, club DJs, mobile DJs, and turntablists. Originally, the "disc" in "disc jockey" referred to shellac and later vinyl records, but nowadays DJ is used as an all-encompassing term to also describe persons who mix music from other recording media such as cassettes, CDs or digital audio files on a CDJ, controller, or even a laptop. DJs may adopt the title "DJ" in front of their real names, adopted pseudonyms, or stage names.
Reggae is a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the late 1960s. The term also denotes the modern popular music of Jamaica and its diaspora. A 1968 single by Toots and the Maytals, "Do the Reggay", was the first popular song to use the word reggae, effectively naming the genre and introducing it to a global audience. While sometimes used in a broad sense to refer to most types of popular Jamaican dance music, the term reggae more properly denotes a particular music style that was strongly influenced by traditional mento as well as by American jazz and rhythm and blues, and evolved out of the earlier genres ska and rocksteady. Reggae usually relates news, social gossip, and political commentary. It is instantly recognizable from the counterpoint between the bass and drum downbeat and the offbeat rhythm section. The immediate origins of reggae were in ska and rocksteady; from the latter, reggae took over the use of the bass as a percussion instrument.
Toasting or deejaying is the act of talking, usually in a monotone melody, over a rhythm or beat by a deejay. It can either be improvised or pre-written. Toasting developed in Jamaica, before it took up that name and being part of the sound system era, a similar sound of it is found in mento and now can be heard over musical styles including ska, reggae, dancehall, dub, grime, hip hop, soca and bouyon music. The combination of singing and toasting is known as singjaying.
In Jamaican dancehall music, a riddim is the instrumental accompaniment to a song and is synonymous with the rhythm section. Jamaican music genres that use the term consist of the riddim plus the voicing sung by the deejay. A given riddim, if popular, may be used in dozens—or even hundreds—of songs, not only in recordings but also in live performances.
Roots reggae is a subgenre of reggae that deals with the everyday lives and aspirations of Africans and those in the African Diaspora, including the spiritual side of Rastafari, black liberation, revolution and the honoring of God, called Jah by Rastafarians. It is identified with the life of the ghetto sufferer, and the rural poor. Lyrical themes include spirituality and religion, struggles by artists, poverty, black pride, social issues, resistance to fascism, capitalism, corrupt government and racial oppression. A spiritual repatriation to Africa is a common theme in roots reggae.
The music of Jamaica includes Jamaican folk music and many popular genres, such as mento, ska, rocksteady, reggae, dub music, dancehall, reggae fusion and related styles.
Dub is an electronic musical style that grew out of reggae in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is commonly considered a subgenre of reggae, though it has developed to extend beyond that style. Generally, dub consists of remixes of existing recordings created by significantly manipulating the original, usually through the removal of vocal parts, emphasis of the rhythm section, the application of studio effects such as echo and reverb, and the occasional dubbing of vocal or instrumental snippets from the original version or other works.
Dancehall is a genre of Jamaican popular music that originated in the late 1970s. Initially, dancehall was a more sparse version of reggae than the roots style, which had dominated much of the 1970s. In the mid-1980s, digital instrumentation became more prevalent, changing the sound considerably, with digital dancehall becoming increasingly characterized by faster rhythms. Key elements of dancehall music include its extensive use of Jamaican Patois rather than Jamaican standard English and a focus on the track instrumentals.
Jungle is a genre of dance music that developed out of the UK rave scene and sound system culture in the 1990s. Emerging from breakbeat hardcore, the style is characterised by rapid breakbeats, heavily syncopated percussive loops, samples, and synthesised effects, combined with the deep basslines, melodies, and vocal samples found in dub, reggae and dancehall, as well as hip hop and funk. Many producers frequently sampled the "Amen break" or other breakbeats from funk and jazz recordings. Jungle was a direct precursor to the drum and bass genre which emerged in the mid-1990s.
Studio One is one of Jamaica's most renowned record labels and recording studios; it has been described as the Motown of Jamaica. The record label was involved with most of the major music movements in Jamaica during the 1960s and 1970s, including ska, rocksteady, reggae, dub and dancehall.
There are several subgenres of reggae music including various predecessors to the form.
The dance halls of Jamaica in the 1950s and 1960s were home to public dances usually targeted at younger patrons. Sound system operators had big home-made audio systems, spinning records from popular American rhythm and blues musicians and Jamaican ska and rocksteady performers. The term dancehall has also come to refer to a subgenre of reggae that originated around 1980.
A sound clash is a musical competition where crew members from opposing sound systems pit their skills against each other. Sound clashes take place in a variety of venues, both indoors and outdoors, and primarily feature reggae and dancehall music. The object is to beat or "kill" their competitors.
The Heptones are a Jamaican rocksteady and reggae vocal trio most active in the 1960s and early 1970s. They were one of the more significant trios of that era, and played a major role in the gradual transition between ska and rocksteady into reggae with their three-part harmonies. The Heptones were contemporaries of the Wailers and the Maytals, and every bit their equal in the mid-1960s.
Soul Jazz Records is a British record label based in London. Outside of releasing records, the label also publishes books, occasionally films and performs as a DJ set. The music releases labels from a variety of genres, including reggae, house, hip hop, punk rock, jazz, funk, bossa nova and soul.
Reggae is a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the late 1960s. Australia has several bands and sound systems that play reggae music in a style faithful to its expression in Jamaica. Australia has a relatively small Jamaican community, but reggae penetrated local consciousness via the popularity of reggae among the non-Jamaican population of England in the 1960s and 1970s. Many indigenous musicians have embraced reggae, both for its musical qualities and its ethos of resistance. Examples include Mantaka, No Fixed Address, Zennith and Coloured Stone.
Tom the Great Sebastian was an early Jamaican sound system started by Tom Wong in 1950, named for a trapeze performer in Barnum and Bailey's circus. The group has been called "the all-time giant of sound systems" and helped launch several notable artists. Count Matchuki is generally credited as Tom's first deejay, before he joined Coxsone Dodd, and Duke Vin was one of Tom's selectors. The sound was also backed by Prince Buster. It was later known as Metromedia.
Dancehall pop is a sub-genre of the Jamaican genre dancehall that originated in the early 2000s. Developing from the sounds of reggae, dancehall pop is characteristically different in its fusion with western pop music and digital music production. Dancehall pop is also different from dancehall in that most songs use lesser Jamaican Patois in lyrics––allowing it to be globally understood and consumed. It also incorporates the key pop music elements of having melodies, hooks, and the verse-chorus format. Additionally, the genre moves away from the reggae and roots reggae music origins in social and political protest, now lyrically centering on partying, dancing, and sexuality.
Julian Henriques is a British filmmaker, researcher, writer and academic. He is a professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, in the Media and Communications Department, with his particular research interests being culture, technology and reggae sound systems.
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