A Jamaican walks into a marine equipment store in Miami. He starts admiring a huge loudspeaker, the type that ocean liners use to announce their arrival into port in cloudy conditions.
By the time the dumbfounded store owner elicits that the man wants to use it to play records, not equip a ship, the Jamaican has one last question: “It tek two t’ousand watt?” The anecdote is from Bass Culture, a history of reggae and sound system culture in Jamaica written by author and leading journalist on black music, Lloyd Bradley.
As we sit in his kitchen in Tufnell Park over a glass of heatwave-slaking Evian, Bradley tells me why he chose to debunk the myth of Bob Marley as apostle of reggae, and stick in his place the man who to the uninformed appears an oddly-dressed crank, Lee “Scratch” Perry.
He calls Marley’s output through most of the 1970′s – the time he supposedly brought reggae to the world – “ethnically-based rock music” adding that this music was “patronizing of record buyers…implying that they couldn’t cope with the real thing, that it needed to be served to them in a way they could understand.”
To appreciate Bradley’s argument you need to read his book, that charts the evolution of a highly complex music, which began with warring sound systems [essentially a conglomerate of DJ's, owners of sound equipment and mc's] in the 1950′s. These sound boys would literally war, turning gunslingers and riddling opponents’ speakers with bullets.
The story charts the creation of the Jamaican music’s signature off-beat rhythm, through ska, rocksteady, roots reggae – UK and Jamaican, dub, lovers’ rock, and dancehall. The point Bradley makes is that reggae is a constantly changing form – and that Bob Marley’s music, at the time of his global fame, remained in stasis.
He tells me: “If you look at Marley’s output from 1974 to the stuff he made before he died, there’s no musical progression; it’s the same album. Reggae reinvented itself five times in that space. Some of the stuff Lee Perry did at Black Ark [his studio] was vastly superior as reggae to some of the stuff Bob Marley did. As global pop music, it wasn’t.”
He portrays Perry as a volatile genius, deploying his musical whims like a weed-elevated virtuoso, an ‘explorer’ who would sometimes command his singers to do things that ‘didn’t make any sense’ but corresponded to his overarching vision of sound. His 1976 album, Super Ape is considered by Bradley as the best reggae album of all time.
Perry worked closely with King Tubby, widely accepted as the all-time great of dub music. Bradley describes him to me as a “Jean Michel Jarre”, in the sense that he could not play a note, but, from his position on the multi track would remix reggae into the echoing, woozy form we now know as dub. Tubby was a master electrician, soldering equipment together to define his own studio. He was also as anal as they come, apparently going to the extent of visiting the bank to change his worn notes for crisp folding cash.
The photo above shows a soundsystem in Notting Hill in the 1970′s. Bradley himself ran the Dark Star sound system in London at that time, something its funny to imagine this well-spoken journalist doing ["I'm not Jamaican. My family is from St Kitts" he tells me somewhat sheepishly]. His book is peppered with wild tales of the sound systems, or ‘blues dances’ running in London in the 1960′s and 1970′s in then-black areas like Notting Hill or Stoke Newington – he tells me: ” If there was a sound clash between two systems [a musical battle between opposing systems] held in the same room there’d be all sorts of acts of sabotage going on – people attempting to cut wires and pull speakers down.
“People used to enjoy the cloak and dagger aspect of it, it made them think they were more important than they might have been, but if was kind of fun – sound systems were followed in the same way people follow football teams.”
Bradley discusses the racial politics surrounding the alliance between reggae and punk that grew up in the late 1970′s. Black music had been popular among white skinheads earlier in the decade, yet the brand of reggae that the skinheads liked had never been to the taste of the black community.
On the outside, the punk / reggae affinity was more concrete. Not quite true, says Bradley: “It was pretty much one-way traffic. UK reggae groups like Steel Pulse and Misty in Roots would go on the Rock Against Racism concerts because they were getting gigs, not because they had any particular allegiance to punk.
“Michael, one of the originals artists from Steel Pulse, was told that they hated playing the gigs but they got paid for it. The reason they hated it was that they were out of their own environment.”
This could be seen as rather negative, considering that the 1978 Rock Against Racism concert put Steel Pulse in front of a reported 80,000 people, and planted an ostensibly massive blow against increasing anti-immigration sentiment.
Perhaps a deeper consideration of the racial power play at work the reggae / punk relationship would show that punks who were into reggae “liked the idea that they were suffering, same as dreads” as Bradley puts it.
Books on colonial and post-colonial theory by the likes of Mary Louise Pratt and Edward Said devote much attention to these types of power structures, which are subconscious in the dominant culture – here the punks, but still keenly perceived in the other – the dread here.
When Bradley talks of black artists being “intensely suspicious” of moving outside their own musical realm back then, you get the feeling it goes beyond just the music. But then, with the Notting Hill Carnival race riots just two years before the 1978 Rock Against Racism concert, this is understandable.
Bradley has written a fascinating chronicle of reggae, a family tree of sorts that traces its beginnings from US R&B to its hip hop branches in the Bronx courtesy of the Jamaican Kool DJ Herc.
Its roots, however will remain in Kingston, JA, where songs of love and oppression will keep licking until the off-beat wears a groove in the sound system lawn.
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Nice one mate
“Its roots, however will remain in Kingston, JA, where songs of love and oppression will keep licking until the off-beat wears a groove in the sound system lawn.”
Perhaps one or three tunes about having sex and shooting guns aswell I suspect.
Nice writing m8!
Check it out: http://www.itdread.com