En Relación a los Antecedentes

%

In the beginning, they didn’t mess with musicians. We could be standing up outside the studio on the street and you see some man running down the road with rifles and him don’t trouble you. We would walk out of the area to get the bus to go home sometimes, and they won’t trouble you.

Them know say all you deal with is music, you just going to the studio.

But I came up here [to the United States] and went to school in ’75, and went back down and worked for Tubbs in ’76. And it just looked differ-ent—everything looked like it get wickeder, it looked just evil. Homes burnt down everywhere, and you don’t want to be outside. . . . I decided

I’d have to leave again.—Philip Smart

Speaking about snow. The kids and the children who love that part of the world so much, that is to say the igloo, is a part of the heavens, is higher than the earth. The part of the mountain that is higher than the earth is

closer to heaven. So I am seeing how people act on that part of heaven that they are blessed with. ’Cause the way people act in Jamaica is not my style of life anymore. Me no want my brain to be pulled down into something too heavy and hot, because then my brain cannot fly. Me like

to see children slide on ice. Me love to see the vision of the ice. Me love to see the ice making art on the mountain. Me don’t see that in Jamaica.

Me see guns. Me take some torturing, but from the torturing me get an education to make a positive choice ’pon a negative ice.

—Lee Perry on his life as an expatriate Jamaican in Switzerland²

Bob Marley died in May 1981, having lived his final years in intermittent exile following an attempt on his life in 1976. With Marley’s passing, reg-gae lost its most powerful global spokesman. Foreign recording compa-nies gradually abandoned their support for other Jamaican artists who had ridden to international recognition on the path opened by Marley,

and the conduits for international capital began slowly drying up for all but the best-known reggae artists. This sudden shift in the priorities of the music industry remains a sore point for many roots reggae artists today, as typified by the comments of Mikey Dread: “The way the media portray reggae is like, it’s Bob Marley and after Bob Marley there’s no more reggae. Which is to me just like propaganda to keep the music back. Be-cause with the death of Elvis Presley, I didn’t see rock & roll dying. You know, they didn’t say ‘He’s the king of rock & roll and the king is dead so the whole culture is dead. . . . ’ Bob was the major man who break it inter-nationally and break down all the barriers, but they want to stop it now for us to go through. We could get it but they don’t want us in there!”³

As discussed in chapter 1, roots reggae was intimately tied to a moment of cultural nationalism in which Jamaicans of African heritage excavated the bit-ter past of slavery and colonization and rehabilitated it into a newfound pride in African cultural roots, a moment defined politically by Michael Manley’s two-term experiment in democratic socialism. But despite Manley’s efforts during his two terms in office, it was clear that hostile winds of change were in the air by 1980. Manley had antagonized the country’s upper class (many of whom fled to Miami), and defied the United States by forging a close friendship with Cuba’s Fidel Castro and lending support to budding socialist regimes elsewhere in the world (such as Angola). Meanwhile, the Jamaican economy had continued to dovetail throughout the 1970s, owing largely to fluctuations in world oil prices as well as fluctuating demand for bauxite, the country’s most profitable export.⁴

In the months leading to the 1980 elections, the stage was set for another late–cold war intervention by the United States that, while not so direct as roughly concurrent operations in Nicaragua and El Salvador, had similarly destructive consequences for Jamaica. The elections that year—pitting Manley against his longtime rival Edward Seaga of the Jamaican Labour Party—were the most violent in the nation’s history, with between eight hundred and one thousand people dying in Kingston as a result of cam-paign violence. Manley was routed out of office by Seaga and a resurgent JLP, who quickly signed on to the American agenda with the Reagan administration’s Caribbean Basin Initiative. On the ground in Kingston, Seaga’s ghetto gunmen ruthlessly subdued their People’s National Party–

affiliated rivals with American-made arms purchased with profits from the drug trade. To this day, the country has never fully recovered from the level of violence that was unleashed.⁵

As mentioned in the introduction, the international popularity of reg-gae and its Rasta component had worked together in such a way that ganja would rival reggae and bauxite as one of Jamaica’s most profitable exports,

but the drastic political and economic changes in the 1980s created an even more destructive context for the country’s role in the global drug trade.

Part of Seaga’s favor with the American government resulted from his ef-forts at eradicating ganja production and exportation; ironically, however, the situation became much more deadly when local gunmen began traffick-ing in cocaine shipped from South America. The days of ganja suddenly seemed placid compared to the nightmare that cocaine unleashed on the is-land in this perversely ironic take on the concept of “crop substitution.”

Fueled by cocaine highs and the harsh reality of their ultimate disposability at the hands of their political patrons, the gangs bought their economic in-dependence through cocaine trafficking and founded a culture of ruthless violence that detached itself from political ideals and became all-consuming.⁶ The music scene could not help being affected by these changes, and a number of musicians left the island to pursue their careers in less turbulent surroundings.

At the same time, it seemed that the cultural influence of Rastafari, which had been so integral to the power of roots reggae, had run its course. While it was true that the fusion of the rude boy and the Rasta at the dawn of reggae was a potent fusion of two outsider impulses, the close relationship between the religion-ideology of Rastafari and the mu-sical genre of roots reggae had to some degree been artificially fueled by the music’s huge international popularity, the subsequent euphoria, and the corresponding influx of foreign capital. In his most insightful essay on the cultural background of the transition from reggae to the digitally produced music that became known as “ragga,” Louis Chude-Sokei ob-served that as Kingston became mired in the politically sponsored ghetto warfare that locals dubbed “tribal war,” the vision of Rastafari, centered around an African cultural referent almost extraterrestrial in its distance from local realities, was unable to provide resistance against what he called the “Reagan-Seaga-Thatcher triumvirate.”⁷ In an era of strong-armed American neocolonialism, protracted drug skirmishes, and harsh measures instituted by the International Monetary Fund, Jamaica’s ghetto ideology collapsed from a pan-Africanist universalism to a reso-lutely local orientation.

As it had done in the early 1960s, Jamaica began once again to turn musically inward. Part of this retreat was a reaction against the interna-tionalization of Jamaican music that had gradually occurred during the 1970s, and stylistic terms that seemed increasingly dictated by foreign markets.⁸ What had been known as “reggae” foundered on for a few years in the early 1980s in what is usually referred to as “early dancehall,”

associated with such producers as Linval Thompson, Jah “Nkrumah”

Thomas and Junjo Lawes, and session bands such as Roots Radics and Soul Syndicate. But a decisive moment came in 1985 when King Tubby’s former assistant engineer Prince (now King) Jammy discovered that he could use the pre-programmed patterns of a cheap Casio keyboard as rid-dims for songs. Wayne Smith’s Jammy-produced “Under Me Sleng Teng” and the scores of versions that followed it ushered in the era of digital “ragga.”⁹Inevitably (as in other parts of the world), digital stu-dios were found to be more cost-effective than their analog counterparts, and the “Sleng Teng” craze helped put a decisive end to the era of roots reggae.¹⁰With Jammy and other producers shelving the accumulated re-mainder of their “human” riddims (as they were now called), they also ended the dominance of the performing and recording bands of the 1970s, the analog studio system in which these bands had thrived, and the era in which Jamaica’s popular music had been strongly rooted in its jazz, wind-band and related traditions.¹¹Most of Kingston’s live studios were closed within months, and the newly crowned Jammy and his assistants Wycliffe Johnson and Cleveland Browne (known as Steely and Clevie), Squingine “Squingy” Francis and Bobby “Digital” Dixon would go on to lay the foundations for the digital age of Jamaican popular music.¹² Philip Smart considered this a natural progression of the music: “Every-body had their era of leading. Studio One had their era, Treasure Isle had their era, then Tubby’s, then you have Joe Gibbs and Channel One, and then Jammys came with the computer sound. That changed the whole business.”¹³

Concurrently with the decline of roots reggae, the early 1980s were also the last years of dub as a contemporary musical movement in Jamaica. By the early 1980s, Lee Perry had already destroyed the Black Ark and moved gradually into exile. King Tubby’s studio continued as a center for dub during this time (mainly through the work of Scientist), while other engi-neers such as Phantom (Noel Gray) and Peego handled the ongoing du-ties of day-to-day mixing after the music went digital.¹⁴Tubby himself, however, had grown less interested in mixing, preferring to concentrate on building a new 24-track studio in the backyard of his house on Dro-milly Avenue. He had substantial success in 1985 with Anthony Red Rose’s

“Tempo,” an early piece of digital ragga with a moody, eccentric mix that gave at least a preliminary indication of what digital dub might have sounded like in Jamaica had Tubby lived to develop it.¹⁵But Tubby was murdered early one morning in February 1989 outside of his home in Du-haney Park, in an apparent robbery attempt.¹⁶Scientist is one of several people with whom I spoke who remain unconvinced that Tubby’s still-unsolved killing was a mere robbery gone bad: “Jamaica is a place where

anybody who tries to rise and help Jamaicans do something positive, is killed by the gunmen. That was no robbery. Tubby’s studio—there wasn’t gonna be anything else like it in Jamaica. People were afraid. It would have put a lot of other studios out of business.”¹⁷With Lee Perry abroad, Joe Gibbs’s studio closed, and King Jammy trailblazing a new era of digital music, King Tubby’s murder represented the symbolic end to the era of roots dub music.

The long-term significance of dub on Jamaican music, however, can-not be adequately explained in terms of mere market popularity, a finite commercial moment, or the dominance of any particular individual.

While it is true that dub music achieved a certain market presence for a time in the 1970s, most album-length recordings of dub were pressed in very limited quantities. By its very nature and setting, it was a creation of producers and engineers, with its primary market being sound system op-erators and reggae record collectors, as opposed to the general public, among whom it was a highly specialized taste. In Adrian Sherwood’s view, “[Dub] wasn’t that popular in Jamaica. It was a sound system thing.

It was immensely popular with the sound system people—‘version upon version,’ with a live DJ chatting over it. That’s how it was used in Ja-maica.”¹⁸Sound system operator Bobby Vicious concurs: “Even the av-erage reggae lover, they can’t listen to more than three or four dub mixes in a row. They need the words. You see, that’s how you test a true dub lover.”¹⁹

Many of Jamaica’s musicians (including its jazz musicians), however, acknowledge dub as an important phase of the music—somewhat ironic, given the complicated authorship issues that arose as a result of version-ing, as well as the distance that dub moved the music away from tradi-tional conceptions of instrumentalism. For example, a 2004 CD of jazz instrumentals by guitarist Ernest Ranglin and pianist Monty Alexander contains several canonical songs or riddims of the roots era strongly asso-ciated with dub, including Burning Spear’s “Marcus Garvey,” the Congos’ “Fisherman,” Augustus Pablo’s “East of the River Nile,” and the generic “Stalag 17” riddim, which has provided the foundation for un-countable versions over the years.²⁰Such developments attest to the fact that to measure dub in terms of the criteria of market “popularity”misses the point. It is more appropriate to speak of dub as a body of production techniques that, like any innovation, is gradually subsumed into the com-mon practice of a given tradition. This is in fact the case with dub music, which is rarely produced in Jamaica today as it was in the 1970s, but the primary innovations of which can be considered core elements of Jamai-can music in the digital age.