The Gong Show

A friend of mine showed me an essay in the liner notes to DJ Spooky’s “Creation Rebel” album. I’ve written about my respect for Spooky before, and this essay lived up to my high expectations of everything he crafts. It’s an eye-opening take on Jamaican culture, the evolution of dub, and the parallels with digital culture. It jumps and twists between connections, and should be read less as a logical argument and more as a curious exploration. In that light, it’s really interesting; plus, it makes me want to dig more into Dub.

I’m reposting the entire liner notes here, if Spooky (or the label who produces him) isn’t cool with that, just let me know, and I’ll pull this down. I can’t find a good link to this, but it’s really worth posting.

it’s not everyday that in the 21st century we get a chance to look at the way things use to be. wikipedia, youtube, facebook, ipods they’ve all changed the way that we think about how stories are told for jamaica, music was the all encompassing storyboard.

it was film. it was radio. whatever you want to call it, somehow, someway, the music of this small island reached out and changed the way music was thought about. was it the way the artists and producers like king tubby, yabby you, u-roy stripped songs down to the bone so that you had drum, bass, and sound effects? or was it the way composers like lee “scratch” perry used the studio as an instrument and made symphonies of old tape delay echoplex boxes? we’ll never really know how deep it all got, but if people were to look back at the 20th century and figure out how humanity first really got into soundsystem culture, kingston’s sound would be the ground zero of the situation.

jamaica has been called ‘the loudest island in the world’ by many, and when the folks from trojan records got in touch with me to do my first selections project ‘in fine style’ i was in awe of how deep their catalog was. this time around i wanted to show jamaica’s relationship to global culture through turntablism, sampling and rhythm science.

this remix project is basically my attempt to connect some dots–i wanted to go through trojan’s archives to show the architecture of the 21st century through the hidden connections between dub, house, music, techno, rock, jazz and of course, hip hop. i guess you could say that ‘creation rebel’ is an homage to analog culture put through the prism of cut-past and mix culture. think of software like photoshop and final cut and try and make a dub track with them! you could say that audio software is like photoshop for sound, but it’s just taking the same cut and past logic of the old reel-to-reel situation that producers like king tubby used everyday. it’s a funny thought, but if you look at history, multi-track recording begins with a gift: legend has it that in 1948 bing crosby gave a commercially-produced reel-to-reel tape recorder to guitarist and inventor les paul. paul, who had developed the first electric guitar several years earlier, pushed the boundaries of that new piece of equipment, inventing multi-track recording in the process, and thereby setting the tone for so much of what we think of as cut and mix culture.

with his concept of ‘over-dubbing’ les paul set up a situation where later artists could use the studio in ways that few people at the beginning of the 20th century would have dreamed possible. but that’s where he connects with people like king tubby and scientist, producers who were able to literally take apart their mixing boards and re-solder them back together with whatever modifications were necessary.

it’s a big leap to go from thomas edison’s invention of the phonograph to jamaica’s hyper-productive sound system culture, but that’s the hidden architecture of early 21st century sampling culture. the ipod playlist is just an update of the ’single’. usually, that’s what most of the track on this compilation were–songs that were meant to be rhythms that anyone could use. i guess jamaica is one of the first cultures to really embrace the idea of open source culture too!

king tubby or prince jammy, reggae producers who pioneered the ‘dub’ remix, used technology to show their community how to make music for the world. i hope that one day we can think of electronic music as a real inheritor of what they were teaching. dub used tech of the day–analog tape loops, old-school mixing boards, you name it–to create a radical departure from music made in the main areas of 1960s pop music. if dub is anything, it’s about making art out of patterns of culture.

forget sgt. petter’s lonely hearts club band or hendrix’s electric ladyland as studio masterpieces, i’m talking about rare dub tracks that cut across the whole idea of what a song was meant to be. dub changed the way people listened to music, and the way that music was produced. trojan was at the heart of all these changes.

the caribbean is a place where so many cultures were in collision: spanish, portuguese, indian, british, chinese. people tend to forget that one of bob marley’s producers (leslie kong) was chinese-jamaica, or that lee gopthal who was one of the co-owners of trojan records was indian. even the term ‘ganjah’ is pronounced hindi style; it’s the ganges river! and don’t even get me started about dreadlocks. any holy man on the ganges could tell you that they’re indian too.

everyone borrows from everyone. that’s what digital culture is all about. information, the cliche goes, wants to be free. i guess jamaican culture got there a little before everyone else.