watcha listenin to, crisp? dub. the real shit.
alright so i just got through teaching michael veal's wonderful book dub: soundscapes and shattered songs in jamaican reggae, and i've been addicted. dub illustrates about a thousand important points about the nature of art, technology, postmodernism, the concept of the song, intellectual property (not), etc. plus it is at its best an intensely excellent music and anywhere in the ballpark an extremely pleasant background to your various activities.
sound systems in jamaica in the mid/late sixties started demanding versions of hit songs with the vocals removed so that their deejays could chatter over them. considering that the songs were two-track or four-track, they accomplished these isolations at first largely by, for example, shutting down the treble, so that the bass came up, which changed the way people moved, the way they heard, who they were.
before long the great king tubby, in the back of his stereo shop, was engaged in secret manipulations of music, and sound systems and producers would bring him songs to be destroyed and reconfigured by insane analog manipulation: extended, reconfigured, echoplexed into whole worlds. then there could be multiple, or many, versions of the same material. by the late seventies, it was a style of music in its own right, with whole dub lps and engineers as stars, including tubby protoges scientist and prince jammy. eventually you could hardly trace the origins of these collages.
this sort of thinking has been fundamental to music ever since: the remix,the hip hop turntablist, sampling, etc etc: our music world is inconceivable without it.
ok the output is very uneven. tubby remixed thousands, tens of thousands of songs. it's easy to find the mediocre stuff; i like dub with an extremely vicious or evil bass line. so let me give you a few albums: king tubby, the fatman tapes; scientist vs the space invaders (the first dub album i bought, make it 1976); apeology by lee perry; keith hudson's pick a dub; and the astounding glen brown's rhythm master vol 1. the latter 2 are producers, not dub engineers, and the dubs are by the tubby combine. great dub versions are all over augustus pablo's records, by pablo and tubby, the classic being king tubby meets rockers uptown. here is the playlist for the disc i made for my non-western aesthetics course:
King Tubby, "King Tubby on the Throne"
King Tubby, "Dubbing My Way"
Augustus Pablo, "King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown"
Scientist, "De Materialize"
Scientist, "Red Shift"
Lee "Scratch" Perry, "Super Ape"
Lee Perry, "Noah Sugar Pan"
Lee Perry "Zion Blood"
Augustus Pablo, "Satta Dub"
Augustus Pablo, "Vibrate On (Version)"
Yabby You, "Chant Jah Victory"
Yabby You, "Jah Victory Dub"
Errol Thompson, "Extraordinary Version"
Phillip Smart, "Cool This Dub"
Prince Jammy, "Dub There"
Dub Syndicate (Adrian Sherwood at the controls), "African Landing"
you'll do better on itunes but here's amazon.
here's what you should read about reggae.
that the rough guide is out of print is absurd. an immense work of excellent excellence. bass culture is written rather badly, and with way too much irritating quasi-clever cuteness, every strained metaphor made more useless by the phrase "quite literally," and with no sourcing of any kind for the myriad facts it asserts. editing bradley must have been a form of martyrdom. but the info is amazing and the research indispensable.
let me also point you toward blood and fire, steve barrow's wonderful reggae reissue label in the uk.
