Barbelith Underground > Radio & Music > Earthquake on Orange Street

A thread for discussion of Jamaican music, from Ska to Dub, Rocksteady to Dancehall and all points in-between.

Not sure if there’s been a thread on this before, but as it’s a genre (or series of related genres) of music that often gets criminally overlooked by people with otherwise eclectic tastes I thought I’d start one.

I first got into Jamaican music (which for the purposes of this thread I’ll generically and slightly inaccurately lump together and call ‘reggae’) after seeing Lee Scratch Perry whilst on various substances at Reading Festival. Who is this crazy old guy with circuits strapped to him making some of the weirdest yet still supremely danceable music I’ve ever heard? It took me a year or so to investigate further and buy an album. I picked up “Who put the Voodoo ‘pon Reggae” for obvious reasons, which is one of his later recordings in collaboration with the Mad Professor. It’s not one of his most accessible, but is mad as a fucking wild space monkey on a sentient submarine. So it more or less fulfilled the criteria I was looking for.

Shortly after this, I received a tape in the post from someone containing loads of old 60s Ska stuff, mostly by Prince Buster (whose track ‘Earthquake’ gives this thread its title) which never left my stereo for months. I became quickly hooked and with the help of a nearby second-hand record shop found myself buying tons of stuff on spec. I’ve never yet bought something from this genre at random and been disappointed. There is such a vast quantity of brilliant, varied, both accessible and experimental music to discover that I could probably listen to it exclusively for years and not get remotely bored. This coming from someone who, until a few years ago, thought they didn’t like reggae at all. Having only ever had late period Bob Marley shoved at me by dope-addled hippies I had no idea what else was out there to discover.

According to Lloyd Bradley’s excellent book ‘Bass Culture’ – one of the pivotal moments in the history of reggae was when Prince Buster travelled to the Rastafari commune Pinnacle in the 1950s to bring Rasta master drummer Count Ossie in on the recording of his massive hit ‘Oh Carolina’. During the period of slavery, drums had been banned as a vital component of African religion, but they lived on in two underground forms: Kumina and Burru, both of which were practised at Pinnacle along with other forms of African Spirituality.

Kumina is the musical component of the spiritualist religion Pocomania – which, in broad general terms, could be considered as a Jamaican equivalent to Haitian Vodou or Cuban Santeria. In some ways it’s not unlike Pentecostal Christianity, but involves possession by Ancestral Spirits rather than the Holy Spirit. Prince Buster’s love song ‘Oh Carolina’ married the musical forms of African Spirituality with the emerging sound system culture. If you’re at all interested in the connections between magic and music, this is something you might want to look into – and it’s a damn site more danceable than Coil or Psychic TV.

The Rocksteady era is responsible for producing some of the best Soul music ever made, and the Dub genre is responsible for producing some of the most experimental insanity ever made. Any of the major Dub producers such as Lee Perry, King Tubby and Augusto Pablo could quite accurately be considered the William S Burrough’s of musical experimentation. The DJ sound and the practice of toasting over tracks, as developed by artists such as Big Youth, Count Machuki and U-Roy is as undeniable an influence on Hip Hop as the Dancehall style is on UK Garage.

But still Jamaican music tends to be overlooked and under-discussed in a lot of circles, which I think is mostly due to a lack of knowing where exactly to start. It’s a massive field and there’s so much stuff out there that it’s difficult to know where to begin unless you have a well-developed instinct for the random purchase.

My own recommendations might include the following compilations:

Good Times Skank - a compilation of tracks put together by one of the Notting Hill Carnival’s premier sound systems.

Ska Bonanza - a double CD which is probably one of the best introductions to the 60s Ska sound I’ve come across.

Any of Soul Jazz’s compilations 100% Dynamite through 500% Dynamite each of which have a good selection from the various genres and sub-genres of Jamaican music, and give you a good idea of the sort of stuff you might like to hear more of.

The Trojan compilations Tighten’ Up particularly Tighten’ Up Volume 2 which introduced the Jamaican sound to the UK in the 60’s and 70’s.

I could go on, but I’d end up listing everything I own, so I’ll stop there.

I’d like to hear other people’s recommendations, particularly about Dancehall and more recent stuff as I’m not all that clued up on that side of things yet.