ROOTS 'N FUTURE
published as 'Chant Down Babylon', The Wire, 2000
by Simon Reynolds
Where better to open a meditation on the white romance with
Jamaican music than with a record guaranteed to induce cringing from a higher
percentage of reggae connoisseurs (and probably a hefty proportion of the Wire
readership too) than any other? I'm talking about "White Man In
Hammersmith Palais". Whatever you think of its rabble-rousing
punky-reggae, The Clash's 1977 single is interesting because lyrically it's
actually about the projections and misrecognitions that inevitably occur when
white folks "engage" with black music (as opposed to simply consuming
it). Joe Strummer attends an All Nighter featuring such "first time from
Jamaica" stars as Dillinger and Delroy Wilson. But the performances--"showbizzy,
very Vegas," Strummer recalled years later--frustrate his expectations:
instead of "roots rock rebel" fighting talk, "it was Four Tops
all night/with encores from stage right". The transracial identification
felt by punk rockers towards roots rockers---captured earlier in "White
Riot", with its admiration and envy towards the black rioters at 1976's
over-policed Notting Hill Carnival--collides with a different reality of
Jamaican pop culture, leaving Strummer demoralised and confused.
Roots reggae is now almost exclusively valued for dub's
legacy of disorientating studio techniques. Which makes it disorientating in
itself to go back to the mid-Seventies roots heyday and discover that reggae
fans, black and white, actually looked to the music for "a solid foundation"
(as The Congos sang it), for certainty and truth, for militancy and motivation.
"Roots rock rebel" neatly condenses how Jamaican music was seen both
by rock and by reggae itself. Reggae was anti-imperialist: Rasta's
Pan-Africanism connected with the period's post-colonial struggles, from the
communist MPLA in Angola resisting a South African invasion that was covertly
backed by the USA, to the Patriotic Front liberation forces in white-controlled
Rhodesia (Bob Marley later headlined Zimbabwe's 1980 Independence
Celebrations). Reggae was anti-capitalist: Rasta's rhetoric of downpressed
sufferers and judgement day for Babylon's plutocrats was co-opted by Michael Manley's socialist
government, whose warm relations with neighbouring Cuba led the USA to try to destabilize
Jamaica via an IMF money-squeeze and other dirty tricks. And reggae was
anti-fascist, providing the between-band soundtrack to Rock Against Racism
concerts and bringing radical chic to a thousand student bedrooms with its
poster iconography: Pete Tosh, a Che Guevera with natty dreads and black
beret; Medusa-headed spiritual warriors
Black Uhuru, Burning Spear, and Culture; Steel Pulse preaching about
"Handsworth Revolution".
Even before punk, rock culture had seized on reggae as the
"rebel beat" of the Seventies, a much needed dose of authenticity at
a time of post-countercultural burn-out: critics like Greil Marcus lionized Bob
Marley as a Caribbean Dylan and the
Wailers as Jamaica's own Rolling Stones ("Street Fighting Men," but
this time for real). Punk itself has been interpreted (by subcultural theorist
Dick Hebdige) as partly based in the yearning for a "white ethnicity"
equivalent to Rastafarianism: U.K. punks as exiles on every High Street,
stranded in a Babylon burning with boredom. During the half-decade from
1977-81, reggae vied for supremacy with funk as the musical template for
progressive post-punk groups. After the Pistols's break-up, Richard Branson
wooed Lydon by flying him to Jamaica as A&R consultant for Virgin reggae imprint
The Front Line, whose logo (black power fist clenched around barbed wire)
conflated militancy and martyrdom; PiL's own dread vision rode the basslines of
a blue-eyed Londoner who'd reinvented himself as Jah Wobble. In Scritti
Politti's early Gramsci-influenced DIY phase, "Skank Bloc Bologna"
linked the Notting Hill riots with Italy's 1977 anarcho-syndicalist uprisings;
even after Green lost his Marxist faith and went post-structuralist, his
deconstructions of the lover's discourse ("The 'Sweetest Girl'" et al)
swayed to a lover's rock lilt. Pop Group and The Slits worked with UK
dubmeister Dennis 'Blackbeard' Bovell; Ari Up eventually became a full-blown
Rasta. The Specials fused social realism with the sulphate-twitchy rhythms of
ska, and the mixed-race UB40 hymned the integrationist Martin Luther King
(rather than separatist Marcus Garvey) over dole queue skank. And always,
always, The Clash: getting Lee Perry to produce "Complete Control",
covering "Armagideon Time" and "Police and Thieves,"
pulling off a convincing roots facsimile with "Bankrobber" (Mikey
Dread at the controls). Former colony Jamaica responded to all this sincere
flattery from the British Empire's bastard children with songs like Marley's
"Punky Reggae Party": "The Wailers will be there/the Slits, the
Feelgoods and the Clash." Not quite sure why pub rockers Lee Brilleaux and
Wilko Johnson's were on Bob's guest list, but clearly it was a time of strange
alliances.
The cultural studies/Rock Against Racism approach to reggae
didn't ignore dub totally, but it was never really able to integrate dub's
topsy-turvy sonic overturnings with its get-up-stand-up conception of reggae's
political dissidence. In neo-Marxist academia and SWP activist circles alike,
there's a certain uneasiness about drugs (ganja is barely mentioned in
Hebdige's 1987 sound system culture book Cut 'N Mix), partly because of an
anti-psychedelic premium on clear-minded rationality, and partly because
linking black subcultures with drug use was felt to be dodgy, even crypto-racist.
But the real stumbling block in the post-punk engagement with reggae was the
religiosity of roots culture. It's possible to translate Rastafarian beliefs
into Marxist terms, or treat them as allegory, mythic narratives of
dispossession and deliverance. Just don't do it in front of a true Rasta
believer--when ethnologist John W. Pulis attempted such a dialogue, his Western
liberal relativism was swiftly dispatched: "Only one reality.... na views....
I-and-I no deal with kon-sciousness,
I deal wit' truth."
Today, a totally different white hip
discourse frames reggae, emphasising elements downplayed in the late Seventies
but (inevitably) suppressing others. For simplicity's sake, I'm going to
shorthand this cluster of ideas as the Afro-Futurist discourse, but it actually
has multiple facets: dub as deconstruction (of the song, of the metaphysics of
musical presence); the producer as mad scientist, dark magus, shaman,
trickster; the Macro Dub Infection notions of dub as postgeographical virus and
of dub's sonic instability as an education in "insecurity". The sonic
praxis of these notions encompasses New York's illbient scene (We, Sub Dub, DJ
Spooky) and Brooklyn's Wordsound massive, Bill Laswell's numerous dub
initiatives, post rock outfits like Tortoise, Labradford, Rome, and Him, and
quite a few others. Theoretically, the ideas have been largely developed by
people associated with the Wire, from John Corbett's seminal essay on the
"madness" of Lee Perry (and fellow Afro-Futurists Sun Ra and George
Clinton) through David Toop's probing of the origins of modern remixology in
reggae's versioning, to Ian Penman's classic meditation on Tricky and "the
smoky logic of dub."
What all these strands of dub theory
share is the exaltation of producers and engineers over singers and players,
and the idea that studio effects and processing are more crucial than the
original vocal or instrumental performances. Which is why thousands of words
have been spilled on the wizardry of Perry or Tubby, but very little on reggae
vocalisation or the role of drummers, bassists, rhythm guitarists et al in
building kinaesthetic mood-scapes (a/k/a grooves). The mystery of
"skank" has failed to provoke a downpour of eloquence--the way
different ridims pull you into their flow, entrain your limbs in their gait,
tune your cells into their vibration. This is understandable, given the
difficulty of writing about rhythm with any specificity (mind you, it's just as
tough to go beyond generalities and talk about a specific auteur-producer's
signature, to isolate exactly what it is that gives one dub engineer, breakbeat
scientist or 303-tweaker his singularity and superior rank).
The really distorting side effect of
the Afro-Futurist privileging of the producer, though, is that the fact that
reggae actually involved people saying stuff about stuff has almost totally
been forgotten. Lyrically, most Seventies roots reggae is as plainspoken and
bluntly demagogic as Tom Robinson Band. This is not to say that the shift in
how reggae has been conceptualized---from "the sound of politics" in
the Seventies to "the politics of sound" today--hasn't opened up
exciting ways of thinking about the music; indeed, it was originally a
necessary corrective to the exhausted post-punk over-emphasis on messages and
meaning. But it has also de-politicized and de-spiritualized a music that was
originally "part journalism, part prophecy" (James A. Winders). At the extreme, Jamaica is effectively erased
in all its materiality and knotty cultural contradictions. So Calvin Johnson,
founder of Olympia, Washington's K Records and frontman of Dub Narcotic Sound
System, can blithely declare: "I never saw dub as a type of music, but as
a process. The fact that it originated in reggae is inconsequential."
The totem, touchstone, and discursive bulwark for the
Afro-Futurist take on reggae is Lee 'Scratch' Perry. I'm going to take two
tacks here: firstly, contesting the reduction of roots culture to this single
smoke-wizened figure, and secondly , suggesting that the mad scientist version
of Scratch is itself reductive. As the Afro-Futurist consensus about dub has
solidified over the last decade, the apotheosis of Perry at the expense of his
less flamboyant yet more consistent peers (Tubby, Keith Hudson, Augustus Pablo,
Tommy Cowan, Joe Gibbs, Scientist, etc) has intensified.
In the Afro-Futurist discourse, Lee Perry and Bob Marley are
conceptual twins, linked but opposed. Interestingly, two critics who've
contrasted Marley-ism (reggae as text/truth/roots) with Perry-ology (dub as texture/play/deracination)
also use the same metaphor to reject the former and big-up the later. Ian
Penman, in his Tricky meditation (Wire 133, also in the essay collection Vital
Signs) mocks Bob as "an olde worlde flat-earth icon". Kodwo Eshun, in his brief Perry chapter in
More Brilliant Than The Sun, praises Scratch's location "far from
Rastafari's flat-earth metaphysics". Apart from the ethnocentrism of the
Rasta as flat earth theory analogy (odd, given the Afro-Futurist tendency to
valorize voodoo, alchemy, Gnosticism, and other superstitions), it's misleading
to imply that dub and roots reggae can be understood separately from that
strange Jamaican religion. For starters, Rasta's sacred burru drums--bass,
funde, repeater--are embedded deep in reggae's rhythmic matrix. Perry himself
is a devout Rasta. He produced and often had an instigating conceptual role in
scores of songs with titles like "Psalms 20", "Zion's
Blood", "Dread Lion", "Sodom and Gomorrow", "Feast
of Passover", plus numerous topical social comment tunes like Max Romeo's
"War In A Babylon". Even a seemingly whimsical Perry lyric like
"Roast Fish and Cornbread" is actually about ital, the dietary
guidelines that are crucial to righteous Rasta living.
Lee Perry's antic personality is enormously enjoyable (even
if enjoyed, surprisingly, by people who usually profess contempt for pop's cult
of personality), his sonic achievements mighty (if strewn amid much
bad-TV-left-on-in-the-background flimsy fare, and tarnished by a post-peak
trail of underachieving disgrace as long as George Clinton's. And that gig he
did at Dingwalls in 1987 was fucking atrocious). Still, towering if erratic dub
genius aside, I can't help suspecting some dubious ulterior factors behind the
privileging of Perry. One is his fertility as a text for exegesis: Perry's
syncretic cosmology of superstitions,
science fiction, and pulp movies, his
is-it-schizophrenia-or-performance-art-that-never-stops eccentricity, his Sun
Ra-like wordgames and encryptions, will support a micro-industry of
dissertations and seminars for decades to come. The other reason for the Perry
Cult is, I reckon, because the tomfoolery and quirked-out levity of much of his output offers a blessed repreive
from the sheer earnestness of roots reggae, which is often literally
sermonising, all parables and chapter-and-verse.
Time to probe the peculiarities of Rastafarianism a little
deeper. Dub's tricknology is sometimes linked to the trickster gods of West
African animism (spirit-worship). But Rasta itself is not pagan. It has little
in common with Haitian voodoo, Cuban santeria, or the other Africanized remixes
of Catholicism. Instead of a panoply of spirits disguised as Catholic saints,
Rasta has just the one God, the stern patriarch of the Old Testament---not
someone with whom you can cut deals, as you can with voodoo's loa. If anything,
Rasta is Afro-Protestant, sharing with mainland America's fundamentalists an
emphasis on close reading of the Scriptures and a millenarian belief in an End
of Time whereupon the righteous get transported to the promised land. Rasta
resembles some of the revolutionary heresies of the Middle Ages documented in
Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millenium. The belief in Haile Selassie, His
Imperial Majesty of Ethiopia, as the Messiah recalls those Medieval sects whose
utopian hopes involved the resurrection of a king or Emperor who would be
saviour of the poor and scourge of the corrupt (false kings, the clergy). Historically, as much revolutionary energy
has been mobilized by the idea of going back as going forward. Rastafarianism
also owes a lot to Judaism---the kosher-like ital laws, the taboos about
menstruation, and above all the Exodus saga of a people uprooted and enslaved
(first by the Egyptians, then by the Babylonians) but struggling to return to
their homeland. (Rasta's own version of racial envy goes: "Black Zion! We
want a Zion of our own"). Transmitted via reggae, this mythic narrative
resonates with dispossessed peoples across the world, from aboriginal Australians
to Native Americans (roots reggae is hugely popular on the reservations, and
rivaled only by death metal!).
Because of its anti-institutional bias and trust-in-Jah
fatalism, Rasta has never had the will-to-power to actually create the
theocratic society it basically proposes. To grasp how weird it is that such an
anti-modern creed has been so influential over Western youth culture, imagine
the following alternative history scenario:
the parallel universe where post-revolutionary Iran generated a form of
popular music so globally inspirational it spawns its own Ayatollah-friendly
Polices, UB40s, Ace of Bases. Both Rasta and Islamic fundamentalism are
anti-imperalist, anti-America, and opposed to ungodly Western liberalism--from
women's reproductive rights (Rasta decries birth control and abortion) to
homosexuality.
Which brings me to what prompted this piece in the first
place: the gap between my intense pleasure in and (for want of a better word)
"identification" with roots reggae, and the glaring fact that my
experiential framework and worldview are utterly remote from the Rastafarian's.
For instance, one of my absolute favorite pieces of dubbed-out roots
vocalisation is Linval Thompson on the King Tubby mixed "Straight To
Babylon Boy's Head" (compiled on King Tubby's Special 1973-1976). Thompson
sings: "From I was born in this world/My mama always tell me/That Babylon
is a-wicked... Babylon drink rum/Babylon eat pork/Ride on dreadlocks... If you
don't believe me, just look in the Bible... Babylon have to face/the Judgement
Day." Now, I had a bit of bacon only the other day, and although I think
"Babylon" is a handy nickname for the multi-tentacled malevolence of
globalizing capital, the Good Book is just another book for me, not God's
truth. Listening, rapt and swoony to roots songs like this one, I feel a bit
like Morrissey: twisting the words of "Panic" slightly, "The
music that I constantly play/Says nothing to me about my life"--yet I love
it to death anyway. How can it happen, such violent cathexis, this flooding
intimacy of pleasure, this beckoning? It's surely mediated by all the
cross-cultural baggage of projections and preconceptions, but it doesn't feel
like it --- it feels like an instantaneous spark of connection, almost
pre-cognitive. It's tempting to woffle about inarticulate speech of the heart,
about pure spirit cutting across all barriers. Morrissey, who once declared
"all reggae is vile," actually provides my only clue. There's an
uncanny vocal resemblance between Thompson and the Smiths frontman--the fey
flutter and lambent grain, the mixture of rejoicing in the fallen-ness of the
world and confidence in the singer's elect righteousness. Mozzer sang about his
Mum a lot too.
I feel a similar inexplicable soul-bond with The Congos
shimmering falsetto harmonies as they beseech "open up the Gates of
Zion," plead "send us another Moses", and promise
"repatriation is at hand." Probably the pinnacle of the roots era in
terms of vocal groups, Heart of the Congos is prime evidence for the case that
Lee Perry's best work was his productions of superlative singers rather than
his own talkover dub. On the Congos's album, there's none of the mixing-board
buffoonery that sometimes makes Perry resemble Jamaica's own Gong; even his
favorite sonic effect, the moo-ing cow, can't deflate the devotional trance of
"Children Crying." Instead, the famous Black Ark 4-track sound--a
numinous haze of will-o'-the-wispy susurration that actually stems from the
"degradation effect" (Steve Barrow) caused by Perry's having to dump
multiple tracks onto one track to free them for further
overdubbing----enshrouds the Congos's harmonies like the nimbus of light around
God's head.
John Peel once described the sound of Misty In Roots, his
favorite UK reggae group, as "Medieval". Rasta's liberation theology
is a disconcerting weave of revolutionary and reactionary, and its paradoxes
are intrinsic to dub's own double-feel of pre-modern and postmodern. Could it
be that dub only works because it is simultaneously about "a solid foundation,"
absolute bedrock certainty, and yet offers an adventure playground for the
perceptions? It is Jamaican
psychedelia, but it is also Jamaican gospel. Therein resides this music's
abiding mystery: the intermingling, the warp'n'weft co-existence, of two
different modes of consciousness. Because reggae has penetrated British culture
so deeply and feels so familiar, it's easy to forget that Jamaica is still part
of the undeveloped Third World. Reggae is a membrane between pre-industrial
antiquity and hi-tech futurism. Hence Perry's own magick-meets-sci-fi imagery
of "vampires" and "bionic rats."
There's another gap that inspired this piece--between the
Afro-Futurist version of dub as headwrecking delirium and my personal pleasure
in the music, which is less a sensation of being hurled into an alien, chaotic
soundscape and more like coming home, being returned to my true element. The
notion of dub as apocalypse, ambush, assault course, seems more like a response
to a non-Jamaican lineage (a continuum that runs from On U Sound and Mark
Stewart through Massive and Tricky, and many others) that sensed and amplified
a potential for mindfuck in Seventies reggae.
Listening to the original roots era dubs, though, there seems be
different stuff going on. There's a kind
of impressionistic pictorialism, like Ethiopianist program music--the golden
horizons and mirage shimmer of an Abyssinia of the stoned mind's eye; patient
processional rhythms suggesting freedom trains, the stoic trek of exodus and
homecoming. The other aspect is an erotics of sound: dub's teasing drop-outs,
its dapplings and tingles, flickers and fluctuations, correspond to Roland
Barthes's notion of eroticism as "intermittance", as glimpses
"where the garment gapes."
Dub's polymorphous perversity is why its techniques migrated so well
into disco's endless foreplay, its caresses without climax.
The trajectory of dub & roots after its late Seventies
peak corresponds to a familiar syndrome: the black popular music (social,
designed for dancing) that gradually turns into highbrow art, its past
cherished and conserved by white curators and archivists, its present sustained
by a mostly white vanguard who rarify the music and place it firmly on the
cerebral side of the mind/body dualism it once so successfully dissolved. You
can see this syndrome recurring through the histories of jazz, soul, funk, old
skool hip hop. Often running in parallel to the avant-garde abstraction option,
there's a purely antiquarian approach--the pointless fidelity of trad jazz or
digi-dub.
The first casualty of the bohemianisation of dub wasn't the
usual one (danceablity), it was the voice. Dub and dub-influenced music in the
Nineties almost always consists of instrumentals. At best, you got love songs to dub reggae, rather than love
songs to Jah. At worst, you got a music that is all effects and no affect. The symbiosis and synergy between roots and
dub, it's a bit like Swiss Cheese. Without the holes, the cheese is less
eye-grabbing but it still works on a basic nutritional and flava level. But the
holes, on their own (i.e. tricknology abstracted and decontextualized) are
nearly nothing. For sure, Tubby's dubs of singers like Linval Thompson are more
thrilling than the originals: hole-some is better than wholesome. But Tubbs needed
material to go dub crazy with in the first place. The same applies to more
recent tricknologies like breakbeat science---the science needs something to
manifest itself through, the flesh and sweat and "feel" of the
"Amen" or "Think" break.
The present moment is an odd time to be re-thinking dub. Its
profile on the Hipster Influences Shares Index peaked around 1995-96, when you
could hear its spectral presence everywhere from Tricky to Chain Reaction to
Tortoise to Spooky. But with the roots reissue programmes of labels like Blood
& Fire increasingly scraping barrel-bottoms and left-field music culture's
attention drifting to other exoticisms (like Tropicalia) there seems to be a
certain exhaustion of interest in dub. Things like the Grand Royal issue
devoted to Lee Perry's every last curry-goat fart seal the sense of
overdocumentation, of terra cognita.
It would be easy, and not especially illuminating, to trace
the permeation of dub's techniques through UK dance culture in the last twelve
years. Instead I'm going to sketch another path of diffusion, taken by what was
originally the raw material that got dubbed up: the roots vocal. From the
start, British rave culture has been defined by a compulsion to fuse house with
reggae and hip hop: the bass pressure and Yard allusions of bleep outfits like
Ital Rockers and Unique 3, Meat Beat Manifesto's "Radio Babylon,"
Moody Boys's Journey Into Dubland EP with its Hugh Mundell "just got to be
free" clarion, the Ragga Twins's fusion of dancehall jabber and hardcore
blare. Even the terms "raver" and "rave" were originally
Jamaican slang. As breakbeat hardcore evolved into jungle, vocal samples from
roots singers and dancehall chatters like Dr. Alimantado, Leroy Sibbles,
Eek-A-Mouse, Snaggapuss, Barrington Levy, Cutty Ranks, Anthony Red Rose, Reggie
Stepper, Topcat, and many more, became endemic. The Prodigy even got Max Romeo
into the charts with their 1992 hit "Out of Space." Imported
"yard tapes" of Kingston soundclashes provided a wealth of
catchphrases from unidentified MCs--"get ready for dis, for dis, for
dis", "special request", "come with it my man",
"get mash up," "champion sound a-way"--which were endlessly
re-sampled and still crop up in today's underground garage and 2-step, vibe
power undiminished.
There's a vast volume of discourse on the role of DJs and
producers in dance culture, but hardly any discussion of the MC's crucial role
in the hardcore/jungle/garage continuum: the way the mic' controller operates
as a kind of membrane or integument between the expressive and the rhythmatic,
the social and the technological. The MC vocalizes the intensities of
machine-rhythm by transforming himself into a supplement to the drum kit, while
simultaneously relaying the massive's will back to the DJ (rewind selecta!).
The MC is the most stubbornly ineradicable Jamaican trace persisting in UK
rave, permeating the music both as samples from ragga records and as live
partner to the DJ. And the MC reveals that the influence of contemporary
Jamaican music, dancehall ragga, on UK dance culture is the untold counterpart
to the over-told story of dub's legacy.
Hipsters lost interest in Jamaica during the Eighties,
partly because roots fell into a platitudinous rut, but mainly because of
dancehall's replacement of Rasta spirituality with slack talk about
sex/guns/money and a faithlessness verging on nihilism ("Africa nah go mek
me bullet-proof", as one rude boy put it). The white reggae audience
withered away, alienated by dancehall's hieroglyphic opacity (its harshly
exaggerated patois and Jamaica-specific references) and its jarring machine
beats (actually more African than reggae, a digitalized reversion to pre-ska
rural folk rhythms like etu, pocomani, and kumina). With Reagan-stooge Edward
Seaga ruling the country, Jamaican pop culture looked away from Africa to Black
America (gangsta rap) and to Hollywood bad-boy mythologies (cowboy and Mafia
movies). Cheap cocaine defined dancehall's brash and braggart vibe, rather than
Rasta's meditational sacrament "herb". Even when dancehall underwent
its own mid-Nineties "cultural" revival with Rasta singers like
Sizzla, Luciano, Anthony B., and bad boys turned conscious like Buju Banton,
white hipsters didn't recover their interest in Jamaica.
Meanwhile, though, dancehall was infiltrating UK pop culture
via second-and-third generation Caribbean Britons and the white working class
youth who'd grown up with them. Intriguingly, that influence is largely on the
level of vocals and language rather than rhythm or production. Although
jungle's MC element was gradually purged from drum 'n' bass as part of its
realignment with techno, it resurfaced in UK underground garage, from the
raucous patois boasts of speed garage anthems like Gant's "Sound Bwoy
Burial" to the current wave of MC-driven 2-step tunes from artists like
M-Dubs, Corrupted Crew, Master Stepz, and DJ Luck & MC Neat (who scored a
Top Ten hit early in 2000 with "A Little Bit of A Luck"). From the
gruff, burly-chested boom of chatters like Neat to the serpentile ladies man
drawl of Richie Dan, garage MCs provide the yang to the 2step divas's yin. But
the ghettocentric grain of the patois voice also works as a kind of
ideological/textural counterweight to garage's aspirational VIP gloss. Sampled
from dancehall tracks or live-and-direct on the mic', the MC voice is a
residual trace of non-assimilated Jamaican otherness; it's some "this is
where we came from" grit to offset garage's "this is where we're
going" slickness. It's roots 'n future, to borrow the title of a '93
hardcore rave anthem by Phuture Assassins.
It's not just dancehall, though, that
lives large in UK underground garage: dub and roots have a more vital presence
here than almost anywhere else in contemporary music, bar the new Pole album.
Dub ideas originally infiltrated Eighties postdisco music via the B-side
remixes of tracks on New York labels like Prelude, West End, and Sleeping Bag,
and then blossomed with the spatiality of Strictly Rhythm's early garage tracks
and productions by Mood II Swing. Over the last few years UK garage outfit New
Horizons have picked up on the latent Jamaican element in New York house
imports with their B-side dubs, and developed a strange and wondrous
micro-genre of reggaematic house---the churchical organ vamps and Gregory
Isaacs-on-helium falsetto froth of "Find The Path", the
bassbin-crushing low-end and "slam down ya body gal" slackness of
their "Scrap Iron Dubs EP," the skanking dips and afterbeats woven
into the four-to-the-floor pump of "Cool Tha Menta". Even stranger
hybridity came with last year's spate of R&B bootlegs like Large Joints
"Dubplate" and the perpetrator-unknown illegal remix of smash ballad "Swing My Way"---both
bootlegs set the diva's gaseously timestretched vocal adrift in a dubby
echo-chamber, over a groove built from a rootical organ vamp and a chugging
house beat. Abducting unsuspecting R&B goddesses into a Jamaican
soundworld, these tracks offer typical only-in-London recontextualizations
of non-UK sources.
2-step garage is really a four-way
collision between gay American house, homophobic Jamaican ragga, Hackney
council estate junglism and uptown New York R&B. It's the sonic embodiment
of a British identity in flux, under the
triple attrition of American pop culture, European unity, and colonial
chickens coming home to roost. Hence the "reverse assimilation"
effect caused by the Caribbean population in the UK; diasporic peoples unsettle
wherever they settle. Fulfilling the promise of Smiley Culture's "Cockney
Translation", reggae patois has other-ized the "true" Britons,
seducing the young into speaking a creole tongue and making them unfamiliar and
alarming to the parent generation. Hence such anxiety symptoms as Ali G.'s
popularity and the articles last year in the quality newspapers arguing that
rap radio DJ/bishop's son Tim Westwood deserved to get shot because he speaks
with a Jamaican accent. (Which he doesn't--it's Bronx B-boys he strives to be
down with, not yardies). The subtext is pernicious, though: not so much
"to your own self be true" authenticity but "stick with your own
kind" apartheid.
In this undeclared kulturkampf, UK
garage fights back with ridim and song. Artful Dodger's "Re-Rewind (The
Crowd Say 'Bo! Selector')" took dancehall slanguage to Number 2 in the Pop
Charts. On the recent "Warm Up" EP, MCs Shy Cookie, Sweetie Irie and
Spee reinvent the Englishness of canonical literature and period drama in the
form of "Millenium Twist"---Dickensian dancehall starring an updated
Fagin from the musical Oliver! instructing modern urchins how to duck 'n' dive
Y2K stylee. The chorus goes "L.O.N.D.O.N, London Town/That's where we're
coming from". The paradox of London dance culture is the way it combines a
fierce sense of local identity with total open-ness to external influence: the
one-way, amazingly still unreciprocated alliance with American R&B; the
enduring ties with Jamaica; the import culture around US house 'n' garage.
London's endless permutational flux also illustrates something that offers a
partial solution to my quandary about how I could possibly love Rastafarian
roots reggae so much. Somehow music, even when targeted at a very specific
community and tailored to a precise and rather inflexible worldview, drifts out
of the hands of those who "own" it and gets under the skin of those
it was not intended for and whose world it does not "describe". It
still may not "belong" to you, but strangely you can belong to it.
