Riffs - Volume 2, Issue 2 - December 2018

riffsjournal.org ISSN 2513-8537

Experimental writing on popular music

Volume 2 — Issue 2

Riffs

1

Front cover image: Rusty Rebel at PST, Digbeth.

Ian Davies Photo Š 2012 - 2018 | All Rights Reserved Front cover design: Adam Williams

Riffs

Experimental writing on popular music

“Playing MUSIC, for me right, it gets some heads together.... get a little TRIBAL thing going on, you know.

Get the FREQUENCY up....

Everybody’s on that frequency. It’s always been about that…and EXCITING people and changing their frequency.”

Robbo Dread, Birmingham 2017

Vol. 2 Issue 2 December 2018

Riffs Birmingham School of Media, Birmingham City University 5 Cardigan Street Birmingham B4 7BD UK

Guest Editor Simon Jones Managing Editors Craig Hamilton Sarah Raine Designer Rhiannon Davies

Editors Emily Bettison Asya Draganova Matt Grimes Dave Kane Ed McKeon Richard Stenton Sebastian Svegaard Iain Taylor

Riffs is published twice a year.

A Call for Proposals are circulated before each issue. All written, audio, and visual contributions should be submitted in accordance with the editorial guidelines (provided at the end of this issue).

Send all contributions to info@riffsjournal.org Copyright information Contributors hold the copyright to their submitted piece. They may distribute their work in the journal format as they see fit. Contributors also have the right to republish content without permission from the journal.

Riffs: Experimental writing on popular music (online & print) ISSN 2513-8537 Funded by the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR)

Vol. 2 Issue 2 December 2018

Contents

Editorial - Simon Jones (Middlesex University).............................................................................................6

Rusty Rebel of Rebel Rock Sound System: On inspirations, Birmingham and unity cover feature with Rusty Rebel by Ian Davies (Independent Photographer)....................................10 The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Yes, It Was Mykaell Riley (University of Westminster)......................................................................................................16 Bass Culture and a Very Tangled Englishness Joe Muggs (Mixmag, WIRE, The Boiler room)...............................................................................................19 ‘Who Feels It Knows It’: Re-thinking knowledge, resistance and community through the sub-bass of the reggae sound system - Sebastian Davies (University of Amsterdam).............24 “Dis one is for alla the junglists”: From Rebel MC to Conquering Lion and beyond Matt Grimes (Birmingham City University)....................................................................................................34 Surfing through music: Sharing the surf lifestyle on a reggae frequency Anne Barjolin-Smith (University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, France).....................................................42 With Thanks to Harry Nichols: A (very personal) cockney history of reggae Tony Cordell..............................................................................................................................................................48 One LP/45: One Love William Ellis (Independent Photographer).....................................................................................................52 Sound System Outernational Perspectives (Goldsmiths, University of London)...................................................................................................................60 An Introduction - Vincent Moystad & Oana Pârvan..........................................61 Rewinding the Tape of History: King Tubby and the Audiopolitics of Echo Brian D’aquino .................................................................................................................66 Sound Systems and the Bending of Space: Funambulism from Fanon to Albert Einstein Nayress Ben Gaga...........................................................................................73 From Italian Dancehalls to South East London: An epiphanic Journey through Sounds and Systems Claudia Nardini......................................................................76 Noisy Echoes - Pablo De La Cruz...............................81 Sharing Science - Margarita Iriarte................84

E D I T O R I A L 6

“Playing music, for me right, it gets some heads together. Get a little tribal thing going on, you know. Get the frequency up...

Everybody’s on that frequency. It’s always been about that…and exciting people, and changing their frequency.”

Robbo Dread, Hockley, Birmingham, 2017 (Jones and Pinnock 2018: 120)

As early as 1947, Hedley Jones, the legendary Jamaican sound engineer, was building bespoke, hi-fi quality amplifiers for Kingston’s formative sound systems, along with bass reflex, mid-range and tweeter speakers (Lesser 2012: 10).

The Jamaican reggae sound system remains the most celebrated example of a communal entertainment institution centred around the re-performance of recorded music. It was in the Jamaican context that the creative possibilities of this process were first realised. Jamaican sound system culture has a rich heritage that extends deep into the roots of Jamaican popular culture. But its lineage also feeds forward into multiple facets of contemporary popular music. Its profound legacies can be heard in countless genres, from jungle and UK garage to dubstep and grime. Sound system culture prefigures the DIY, anti-commercial ethic of rave and dance music in the 1980s and 90s. Its methodologies and performance practices have provided blueprints for numerous non-reggae sound system cultures, from underground soul to hip-hop.

Until recently, however, these legacies have remained largely unacknowledged or ignored.

After decades of being maligned as a public nuisance and a source of criminality, of being regulated, suppressed

and undervalued – the sound system is now finally getting its dues. This current issue of Riffs is part of this long overdue recognition.

While the Jamaican variant of sound system culture is the most recognisable, it is far from the only instance of this culture. Parallel examples have evolved elsewhere in the world, most notably in Colombia (in the form of the picós) and other parts of Latin America. Exported by Jamaican migrants, sound system culture took root in communities throughout the black Atlantic diaspora, in North America and Europe. The most celebrated connection within this diaspora was the formative influence of reggae sound system culture on the nascent hip-hop movement of the 1970s in the South Bronx.

While the sound system has been adapted to the varying social geographies of these different contexts, these cultures share a number of underlying structural and aesthetic similarities.

They have been forged out of similar historical experiences, of displacement, disempowerment and economic marginalisation.

They have emerged out of contexts where the needs of mainly black working-class communities were ignored by mainstream media and leisure industries. They evolved as peripatetic institutions

providing accessible entertainment in response to racialised forms of exclusion and segregation in the public leisure sphere. Driven by these necessities and by the desire for autonomy from mainstream leisure venues, they have existed largely in a network of municipal buildings (such as town halls, school gyms, community centres and youth clubs) and private dwellings (flats, houses, backyards). These spaces have also been carved out of an underground network of unauthorised leisure spaces and commandeered premises, such as warehouses and industrial buildings, and outdoor spaces, such as public parks and open fields.

Sound system cultures are powered by craft technologies.

They are underpinned by a DIY ethic of making do, in which sound technologies are customized and made answerable to sound system aesthetics. Turntables, vinyl records, microphones, amplifiers, speakers and sound effects units are made oral and tactile. Key items of equipment, like speaker cabinets and record boxes, become cherished artefacts and are accordingly adorned with hand-painted graphics and artwork. These technologies are made responsive to the particular cultural and musical priorities of sound system culture, most notably the central prominence and

signifying power of bass.

Wardrobe-sized speaker cabinets are thus designed and handmade in order to deliver this most crucial dimension of bass culture. Audio signals are processed to achieve fidelity and harmony between the major sound frequencies of bass, mid-range and “tops”.

The engineers and operators who practice these craft technologies represent the true “scientists of sound” within sound system culture. In their hands, these technologies are transformed into performance instruments that are used to embellish the delivery of recorded music. The dub process is recreated live through an array of sound effects, sonic sculpting and performance practices. The rewinding of a popular tune or revered classic, versioning, exclusivity, selection and sequencing of music – these practices all serve to embellish and enrich the live re-performance of recorded music.

By far the most significant of these performance practices are the forms of “musical talking” that are superimposed over recorded music. Toasting, rapping, deejaying, MCing – these and other forms of orality lie at the heart of sound system cultures. These forms remain at the heart of black British musicking, their legacies audible in the oral stylings of jungle, UK rap and grime. These practices remain a site of prodigious artistry.

Their enduring appeal and populist power are rooted in their democratic character, and their adaptability, as modes of expression.

While these oral practices have assumed different stylistic forms, they are founded on similar aesthetic principles.

Central to all of these forms is the principle of delivering improvised, rhymed lyrics over stripped-down rhythm tracks with sparse instrumentation, yet memorable drum and basslines. These provide the foundation for spontaneous, original lyrics, part spoken, part sung, delivered in non-stop streams of consciousness.

The sound system provides a platform for these latter-day griots, from which to articulate their own alternative viewpoints, and dissect the realities and predicaments affecting the lives of their primary audience. The sound system is an arena in which grievances can be openly aired and truths about power uttered in ways that would be impossible through mainstream media channels.

In these spaces, knowledges are shared, wisdom dispensed and political insights imparted. Local, national and international events are mythologised and deconstructed. A rich reservoir of dramatic techniques is drawn upon to deliver morality tales and parables from the microphone.

The mission of the conscious deejay has a didactic, educational dimension, to enlighten and uplift.

Through the microphone, the deejay engages directly with the audience through interactional exchanges, and call and response routines.

The audience itself becomes a major source of inspiration and thematic material, frequently

improvised on the spot in “headtop” style.

Centrally important too in these forms of orality is the practice of naming.

The adoption of aliases and nicknames by deejays and sound system personnel, the praising and “bigging up” of audience members through salutations and dedications – these naming practices create alternative forms of status and social recognition. But they also serve to confer respect and grace on their recipients.

Sound system cultures operate as micro-economies with their own revenue-generating activities and autonomous promotion channels. These are tied into wider cultural economies on a local and international scale. They interface with networks of record shops, studios, independent labels, musician-producers and sound engineers that exist autonomously from the mainstream music industry.

Sound systems have always been a crucible for musical innovation, and a wellspring of distinctive genres which have been produced in response to the needs of their audiences.

Think of champeta (in the case of picó culture), or the succession of genres that were shaped by Jamaican sound systems, from the 1950s onwards. Through the tight, dynamic relationships that exist between sound system and crowd, audience responses have constantly fed back into the creative production process, to musicians, producers and sound engineers.

S I M O N J O N E S 7

Sound systems have also been the focus of social networks which have crystallized around them. Sounds have their own internal division of labour with identifiable roles and responsibilities (engineer, operator, selector, etc). These networks radiate outwards from the core members to embrace larger posses of helpers and supporters. This collaborative ethic has been widely emulated in the various “crews” and “tribes” of other multi-genre sound systems, around soul, hip-hop and dance music, for example. The sound system has proved to be a flexible configuration that has been put to use in varied multi-ethnic contexts.

In Britain, sound systems have been an integral part of the fabric of African-Caribbean community and cultural life. They have provided the accompaniment to a range of social functions and family celebrations (from birthday parties, christenings and wedding receptions to bank holiday outings and cricket socials). The sound system dance represented a physical and psychological sanctuary from the pressures of a racist society, and a defensive enclave against the dominant culture. It was both a space of cathartic relief and a source of spiritual nourishment that gave people the strength to survive and resist in challenging times.

It is hard to overestimate the importance of sound systems to a whole generation of black youth in Britain in the 1970s and 80s. Some sense of this is conveyed in Scientists of Sound in the overwhelming sense of unity and camaraderie that sound system culture

8

embodied for this particular generation (Jones and Pinnock 2018). For those we interviewed in the book, their involvement in sound systems offered a sense of belonging and togetherness, and a focus of purposeful activity into which creative energies were channelled.

Through its unique practices the sound system summoned into being an alternative public sphere. It had the power to temporarily transform the spaces in which it played for the duration of an event, whether a flat in a tower block or a church hall. It did so, first and foremost at a material level by literally vibrating the walls and architectural structures of those spaces through its powerful basslines.

These resonated through the bodies of the participants within them, enveloping and immersing the dancing crowd. But these affects were also materialised through all the channels and frequencies on which the sound system broadcast. Live singing and deejay lyricism, the interjections of MCs, sound effects and live sound sculpting; all were interwoven with recorded melodies, voices and sounds. These combined to form a multi-layered, polyvocal soundscape, heard together as an ensemble performance. The overall effect was to create a rich sonic tapestry and auditory environment in which the spatial and temporary relations of the dominant culture were briefly suspended.

It is these features of sound systems which explain their cultural drawing power during their heyday in the UK. The space of the sound system signified symbolic and physical territory won through struggle. The all-night operating hours of sound system events, such as blues parties, represented an unregulated, autonomous realm of leisure activity that was the antithesis of mainstream leisure venues like commercial nightclubs. These features made the space of the sound system an ongoing focus of struggle, viewed by the powers-that-be as a threat to public order, to the discipline of leisure-work boundaries, and an unacceptable level of autonomy.

Sound systems, as a result, have faced constant threats to their existence in form of systematic suppression and intrusion by police, and racial violence and intimidation by far-right nationalist groups.

These spaces were targeted by an onslaught of disciplinary and legal measures which attempted to police and regulate them. New, expanded local authority and police powers were introduced in the early 90s, restricting sound system events and the freedoms of assembly and movement associated with them. Tighter licensing laws, stricter environmental protection and noise abatement regulations, as well as new risk assessment procedures and surveillance systems – these combined to shrink the number of spaces where sound system dances could take place.

These measures were part of a

wider trend to confine musical entertainment to particular venues and narrow models of orderly consumption.

These have occurred against the backdrop of broader, underlying shifts. These include the gradual erosion and privatization of public leisure space, the segregation of those spaces along racialised and class lines, the rising cost of public leisure for working-class young people, and the professionalization and commodification of dance music and club culture.

Sound system cultures represent one point of resistance to these trends.

But they also provide a counterpoint to the rise of screen-based, digital entertainment technologies, and mobile personal communication devices. These forms of mobile privatization represent listening experiences that tend to be shallower and impoverished when stood against the sound system.

They entail atomised, solipsist modes of in-ear listening which compress the amplitude and dynamic range of sound frequencies. These stand in marked contrast to the intense, whole-body modes of listening of sound system culture, where musical experiences are turned outwards into shared expressions of sociability and collective awareness.

What seems to have been lost in these developments, and what sound systems continue to offer are the core ethical values transmitted through its multifarious frequencies, in the form of communal sensibilities and alternative, more human ways of knowing, being and living together.

References Jones, S. and Pinnock, P. (2018) Scientists of Sound: Portraits of a UK Reggae Sound System, Bassline Books.

Lesser, B. (2012) Rub-a-Dub Style: The Roots of Modern Dancehall, Beth Kingston.

Dr Simon Jones is a senior lecturer at Middlesex University. He is the co-author of Scientists of Sound: Portraits of a UK reggae sound system (2018) and author of Black Culture, White Youth: The Reggae Tradition from JA to UK (1998).

Notes from the Riffs Editors Sarah Raine & Craig Hamilton This sound system and reggae issue of Riffs provides a space for a consideration of sound system culture – from personal reflections to the importance of reggae sound system for whole communities. As with other Riffs issues, we include here a range of voices: academic researchers, music journalists, sound system operators, and reggae fans. While they celebrate sound system culture, they do so through a critical and analytical lens, reflecting on what it has meant to them and to others. Some frame these through the work of theorists, some through the words of others to demonstrate that which has become communal. And at points, these insights can only be expressed through the visual and the aural.

In focusing on sound system culture, the Riffs editorial team built upon relationships and networks created through reggae-focused projects that have taken place at Birmingham City University over the past year, to include the Birmingham leg of the Let’s Play Vinyl touring exhibition and Reggae Innovation, an international conference held at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in April. Through conversations and collaborations, the strands between the journal and individuals, collectives and sounds have been woven together to give a varied snapshot of a complex and important music culture. We want to thank the writers, photographers, sound men and women, promoters and venue owners, radio stations, editors, musicians and curators for their essential and thought provoking contributions.

We hope that what we have brought together here in some way changes your frequency.

Riffs sound system issue playlist (created by our contributors)

9

Photographs by Ian Davies

10

Rusty Rebel of Rebel Rock Sound System On inspirations, Birmingham and unity

“At dances, men often say: ‘What are you doing with those records?’ It feels fabulous to shock them. When I hold a piece of vinyl I think about all the work that has gone into it – especially if it’s an artist that’s no longer here – and I think about how amazing it is that it’s all on this piece of plastic, and the technical process of getting it on there.”

Rusty Rebel, Let’s Play Vinyl touring exhibition, Birmingham (March-April 2018) 11

M

y first job was working in a recording studio as trainee engineer, and then working at the Hummingbird [in Birmingham]. I was given exposure and access to PA equipment and lighting, I controlled the spotlight for artists on stage, and I loved all aspects of it aged 17/18: instruments, mics amps mixing desks, dat machines etc…. I also loved watching the men – I wasn’t aware of any women at the time on the scene, in music or sound system. I was only aware of female DJs. I thought, I can do that too! And the seed was sown from then. Musically, as I was also a DJ, my musical tastes were wide and loved all types of music. I started to dig deeper into the roots in music, realising I had missed so much and needed to rectify that. I had to give the roots music the airing it deserved – rightly so – only on a Sound System would the message be heard and felt and shared with others.

Rusty Rebel with King Earthquake in PST, Digbeth

Listen to Rusty Rebel’s first radio show here

Having been a radio presenter for many years it was an easy transition to Sound System.

At that time the equipment was the same, mic, mixer, amps and speakers albeit larger, now I have a preamp so… in 2014, Rebel Rock was created! Playing sound system was a natural progression of the equipment I used along my musical journey and experimenting with different equipment. This experimentation helped me to find the “sound” that I love. Doing my first radio show with the mighty King Earthquake, I was so nervous. It’s still on YouTube! It all escalated from that show - CONFIDENCE.

12

13

In terms of inspirations, studio engineers such as King Tubby, Lee Perry and Coxsone Dodd are so creative with technology, and there are so many others who added new sound effects and styles to roots music What is really uplifting is the support and appreciation of those near and far who like my selections and presentation, which really encourages me and gives me the desire to carry on.

Being a woman in the industry some people are unaware of me being female, maybe due to the name. Even though Rebel Rock has been around for four years, people are still surprised by the music sets that I play. I believe I am one of the first woman to have a sound system in the UK and some people are surprised that I operate, play and select tunes myself. A few ago I played a show and I was the only woman on the line up.

Men came up to me and were asking other DJs how I know the tunes that I play. They assumed that I must have been taught by somebody or belong to a certain group, that’s the reason why I play the way I do. Well, errrrrrr, it’s done naturally!

I wanted to be a sound engineer from the age of fourteen, but the school careers officer was pushing and pointing me towards care and nursing, so-called “female jobs”, of which I had no interest. I did accountancy instead, while biding time for any opportunity. Secure units, children’s homes mother and baby units: we need to reach those young people that are affected by their circumstances to hear roots and feel the

14

equipment that sends out the message of positivity, to feel the vibrations and warmth of the community. To pass on this legacy for them to take sound system forward.

Here in Brum, we have maintained the culture of sound system and it seems that Birmingham and the

WOMEN REINVIGORATING SOUND V Rocket sound – Valerie Mousai Sound – H CAYA Feminine Hi Fi in Brazil Silmara in Brazil Jah 9 Queen Ifrica And various female sounds and producers in Europe… an ever-growing list!

West Midlands have more sounds active per square mile. Birmingham, along with Leicester, is an essential place for venues and promotions.

Reputable speaker box and amp builders are also readily available to a high quality which have international reach. All of this is fabulous for the culture and the scene, and depending on the type of sound system dubplates are out there in abundance, as well as fresh new roots music which is being rapidly introduced.

Traditionally, sound systems were about much more than just the music; there has always been a cultural and community aspect surrounding the culture. Sound systems have always been about connecting people. It is about getting a message across to the people around you. It's a radio to everybody, spreading the word.

That’s what sound systems did originally, they allowed people to gather and have a shared experience.

However, it must be said that Birmingham lacks venues and a level of understanding from. It seems that other genres are music are fully represented and allowed to play/ perform wherever, such as Bhangra and dance music.

Sound system and roots music are under appreciation, as is the work involved in creating playing and maintaining the sound – cost of equipment and ongoing expense of buying music, developing specialist knowledge and the moving of it.

Other countries seem to embrace unity and women as the norm, for the future It would be great to see more women taking control of the equipment and be able to play controlling not just the music but what comes out.

… Rebel Rock to the world …

One Love Rusty Rebel Representing Rebel Rock Sound System

Rusty Rebel from Rebel Rock Sound system is a female selector with her own full sound system.

She was the first female operated sound system in Birmingham, and one of the first in the UK. Rebel Rock is her portable radio for her musical voice to be heard clearly. The sound system was launched in Birmingham in April 2014. Prior to that, she has played all types of music on radio: stations such as PCRL and Metro radio back in the 1980s, Kriss FM and Jam Radio to the present day.

Music is an extension of her nature and personality.

Her musical experience, taste and genres are vast, and has been playing dance hall and roots reggae as her specialism to large crowds. She has such a strong love for reggae dub culture and roots music that she started sneaking into dance halls at a very early age. There she was bitten by that musical bug and it has been a massive part of her life ever since.

Based out of his photographic studio in Birmingham, Ian Davies produces striking imagery for a range of commercial, portrait, marketing and PR and event assignments. Ian is a graduate of Birmingham City University.

Clients include; Jaguar Land Rover, Bacardi, Global, Emo Ltd, NHS, Prostate Cancer UK and NHS among many others.

Rusty Rebel and King Earthquake were photographed in Oldbury (Birmingham) and PST. PST can be found on Lombard Street in Digbeth (Birmingham) and runs regular sound system and reggae events. Follow them on Facebook for listings: https://www.facebook.com/ClubPST/ Ian Davies Photo Š 2012 - 2018 | All Rights Reserved

15

THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED WAS

Mykaell Riley

It’s August 2018.

At this point in the year four decades ago, I was on one of life’s incredible journeys.

Although punctuated by trains, planes and sometimes a dodgy van, it was a journey that transported me seamlessly through a collection of experiences.

IT , YES

'Rock Against Racism' in Victoria Park London in front of more than 80,000 people.

anxieties of the community and my generation in the mainstream press and to sing about it on national television.

These experiences resulted from These were heady times. 1978 was being a child of Handsworth and a the year in which I heard for the first member of Steel Pulse. time whilst walking home, music I'd worked on for so long, booming Handsworth Revolution was more than just my first album. It was the I’d left home in Whitehall Road, from someone's car. The song was story of my life and others like me.

Handsworth less than twelve weeks Handsworth Revolution and as I It was the culmination of the lived earlier, to return having achieved my attempted to catch the eye of the main ambitions and in the process, experiences of African Caribbean driver I caught sight of Thornhill people in 70s Britain. an unexpected transformation of Road police station. The building who I was. that would normally have provoke David’s genius was his ability dread, now seemed small and to condense this collective Some of the stand out moments consequently less menacing. experience into lyrics that succinctly involved signing to Island Records, communicated our lives to the supporting Bob Marley on his The release of the album meant masses. Ronnie could be relied on 16European tour, and appearing at new opportunities to share the

for the baselines, whilst Steve’s unique approach to the drums meant the key elements were always anchored. Selwyn and Basil would provide warmth and rhythm, whilst myself and Alphonso injected harmonies and percussion.

This was a functioning family of musicians fuelled on a passion for the music but driven by the need to succeed.

Back then this was something I’d repeatedly say to myself at some point in every rehearsal, gig, performance and emotion fuelled debate.

Little has changed as the main topic was black life in Babylon.

But on reflection, we were also debating the challenge of being first generation, black British born individuals, exploring how best to express ourselves through music.

It’s amazing how some experiences have the capacity to define your future. I’ve been fortunate to have had a career, and it’s in no small part due to the experience of making this album - and this on so many levels still informs my practice.

Which at the time was physically exhausting because of the size and weight of each piece of equipment.

Psychologically challenging are parents feared for our safety as we challenged; the government, the police and the media. We also explored Spirituality, and its religious impact African peoples.

Our Jamaican parents did not regard becoming this type of musician, a pathway to anywhere other than prison.

Gaining a record contract generated a lot of confidence in our potential future. It lulled everyone into the assumption it was safe to cross the road because the traffic lights were on green. In reality, this was the music industry where one had to continuously look both ways and button down your pockets.

Looking back the revolution was as much within the band, when compared to anything that was happening in the community.

Given that none of us had formal training, we were now considered experts on our chosen instruments, our interactions with the media and our relationship with the wider music industry. If only this were true. But it mattered not, we

had graduated from University of life with a 1st for our album and Handsworth celebrated in our success.

I’ve lived away from Handsworth since leaving the band, so returning home is always a big deal.

On these occasions after a long tour my father, now passed on, would refer to me as the Prodigal Son. When I now visit it’s to catch up with the family or promote local music related activities. But when I’m away I still refer to Handsworth as home.

Gil Scott-Heron said the “revolution will not be televised”, so I did my best to put Handsworth on the map.

Mykaell Riley, now Director of the UK Centre For Black Music Research at the University of Westminster, began his life in music in Handsworth, Birmingham with Steel Pulse. He founded the Reggae Philharmonic Orchestra in 1988, working with artists including Soul II Soul, Courtney Pine and Baba Maal. Mykaell is also Senior Trustee for the Black Music Education Trust, leading on documenting the history of black music.

Back then the idea of a career in Photo credit: Lyle Bignon music, let alone joining a reggae band in Handsworth, was for many laughable. In the case of my parents not something that would enter any serious conversation about my future. This meant acquiring and holding down an apprenticeship (a proper job), whilst being a band member.

We all signed up to the University of life wherein everyday reality provided the lessons. It was a period where, you were conscious of the physical, psychological and financial cost of everything, including being a musician.

17

BASS CULTURE AND A VERY TANGLED ENGLISHNESS JOE MUGGS

18

Brian David Stephens © All Rights Reserved

T

he book BASS MIDS TOPS, which I am producing with the photographer Brian David Stevens, is a story of soundsystem culture and the way it has infiltrated British clubs, radio and the pop charts over the past forty years. It's also a story of Englishness – in the sense that Peter Ackroyd paints it in Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination.

regards what he does not Brian David Stephens © All Rights Reserved as fitting into any genre but as “mongrel music”.

The chaotic multicultural throng of people that have congregated around sound systems in recent decades makes for as baffling, babbling a lingo as any found anywhere.

I’m not just talking here about the lyricism of the “Englishness,” he says, “is the MCs and singers, though we could and nature of subcultural communication principle of appropriation.” Our should certainly on the written page. language and literature in this view include Roots Manuva’s is a tangled, meandering “line of It's no secret that I have taken issue “Taskmaster burst the bionic zit beauty” stretching from Beowulf to splitter”, Tricky’s “Monopoly in the past with Simon Reynolds' today. It’s an endlessly unfolding improperly kissed”, Wiley’s “There’s formulation of “the hardcore [or story that reflects its roots in an oral no set time I have my tea at” and Tinie sometimes 'ardkore'] continuum”, as tradition and also in the nation's Tempah’s “I’ve got so many clothes I delineated in a number of his blogs constantly keep some at my aunt’s house” – not to - for example: https://dj.dancecult. refreshed hybrid, palimpsestic net/index.php/dancecult/article/ mention a whole armoury of “squidnature. It's characterised by dlywiddlywoioioi”s, “zoop zoop”s and view/289/268 - in the wake of tricksiness, absurdity, love of “bluku bluku”s – in any history of our his 1998 book Energy Flash. Not wordplay and shaggy dog stories; it language’s baroque adaptations. the theory itself – it remains a tries to evade seriousness at self-evidently valid and valuable Rather, I mean the conversations, every turn, yet is inexorably drawn rants and gibberings that form the glue tracing of forms and functions to the mystical. of specific sounds in the orbit of of any hypersocial scene, in studios, It's the Englishness of Chaucer, multicultural London-centric pirate raves, pubs, record shops, round Sterne, Carroll, Tolkien, but also of kitchen tables, in the backs of radio culture of the 90s and 00s – costermongers, spivs, pub but the way it has been treated by taxis... this is the fabric of the culture anecdotalists and bullshit artists just as much as anything committed to others as a new canon, a definitive through the centuries. delineation of boundaries, rather vinyl or paper, perhaps more so. That than the particular and personal time someone used While Ackroyd was talking first “Lembit” as an insult on dubstepforum syntagmatic slicing through history about literary writers, this has also is as important a memory to me in that it is. Ironically, at times it became been my experience of tracing the emergence of that particular devalued by this very canonisation: modern underground culture, its more dogmatic adherents made scene as any given shift in bass including British soundsystem it the continuum (or “nuum”) rather modulation. And it’s that culture that culture. Skream (aka Oliver Jones, I've always wanted to be part of, to than one among several cultural-aesa globally famous DJ/musician, understand, to maybe explain... which thetic continuua (say of funk/b-boy, who was integral to the birth of the is easier said than done. Conversations or psychedelic/industrial, or soul/ dubstep genre in Croydon from jazz values) that ran through the same that roll from party to party to the age of 13) once told me that he after-party, and on through weeks and times and places. This could make months and scenes and it intensely frustrating when trying to discuss the place of sounds and generations, all the while being interrupted people who were part of the same history yet were too pop, too jazz, by brutally loud bass, too internationalist, too ostentatiously aren't the easiest to refined, not “dark” enough, not transcribe. I spent “tower block” enough to be certified most of my Creative as “nuum”, yet were unquestionably & Life Writing M.A. in 2006-7 deliberating part of the story. In fact, though, the over whether and how continuum came to life precisely when it could be possible to its edges were loosened, when the existence of other co-existent lines19 capture the sprawling Brian David Stephens © All Rights Reserved

of influence and difference Brian David Stephens © All Rights Reserved were acknowledged. Place it alongside, for example, the chapters in Lloyd Bradley’s Sounds Like London or DJ Semtex's Hip Hop Raised Me focusing on the same time and same music but placing it specifically in a wider black music or specifically hip hop lineage and emphasising entirely different qualities, and the this time, though, I was starting multifarious, multivalent aliveness of to have the chance to publish what's actually being described comes more and more lengthy verbatim alight on the page. Appreciation of Q&As, thanks to some indulgent each continuum is only invigorated by editors (props to Tom Lea, Chal understanding of those which feed into Ravens, Lauren Martin, Ryan it.

Keeling) and my own indulgence It was my own discussions around this of commissioning myself at very issue of continuum vs continuua Boiler Room and theartsdesk. around the end of the 2000s and start com. Particularly important was of the 2010s – in forums, conferences, a two hour, 10,000+ word ramble articles, reviews and blog comment round the history of Bristol's sections, not to mention studios, raves, electronica and dubstep history, but pubs, record shops etc etc – that in part also all manner of other minutiae, led me to the format for BASS MIDS digressions and jokes, with Nick TOPS. I wanted to do something that “Ekoplekz” Edwards – himself captured an unfolding thread through a historian and documenter of history, but which acknowledged scenes, via the Gutterbreakz its own arbitrariness. Something blog. It made me realise that the that placed the participants in the conversation could be the thing: culture front and centre, but without that the jokes, misunderstandings pretending that my editorialising was and ephemera were as important in somehow neutral or non-existent. telling the story as the actual story Something personal but not too milestones (albums, raves, cultural proprietary. I love a good music oral I had also started working history, but the best ones, like Please periodically with Brian David Kill Me (by Legs McNeil and Gillian Stevens on publishing such lengthy McCain on the emergence of punk interviews on my own website, in the US), Yes Yes Y'all (on the first the now defunct veryverymuch. years of hip hop, by Jim Fricke), I com, along with his own portraits Swear I Was There (on the Sex Pistols' of the subjects. Our focus at this Manchester Free Trade Hall show and its creative aftermath by David Nolan - Independent Music Press, 2006), and Once in a Lifetime (by Jane Bussman, on acid house in Britain Virgin Books, 1998) seem to focus on a specific historical moment, rather than the longer-duration evolution I'd become fixated on. The constant interspersion of fragmented quotes works in that context, but it wasn't the format I was looking for. During

20

point was a more generalised “underground” – something we defined at the time as: “Not underground in the sense of obscurity, or extremity, or drugginess; it can entail any of those things, but it can equally exist in mass movements, family weddings, at the top of the pop charts. It's occult social history, the underground in the almost literal sense of something that people live and move and exist within, in which, slightly hidden from view, our culture is transmitted: not national culture or racial culture or class culture (although, again, all these certainly come into it), but yours and mine, the sort where you can look around the people you’re with and go 'yep, these are my people'.” And something about the consistency of Brian's photos on that site, alongside the voices of the interviewed, gave a consistency to the Q&As that by simple facts of presentation made them feel like part of a greater whole. Then I saw Brian's photos of Notting Hill Soundsystems being set up in the morning – just the speaker stacks, without the crowds you're accustomed to seeing them surrounded by, isolated as pure architectural statements of sound and power – and finally the idea begun to coalesce, which became BASS MIDS TOPS. So much of the underground music that was

Brian David Stephens © All Rights Reserved

most important to me, and had been through my life, was predicated on bass. So as we joined cultural dots through decades, the simplicity and directness of the bassline became the heartbeat that powered the project.

Brian David Stephens © All Rights Reserved

So, this is how we got to the format. Some 25 verbatim Q&As, beginning with Dennis Bovell, Adrian Sherwood and Norman Jay – the men who brought Caribbean soundsystem culture to the punks, the soul crews, the fashion world – and meandering through Bristol blues dances, Yorkshire breakdance battles, the birth of hardcore rave, jungle, garage, dubstep, grime and on to the new hybrids nobody has names for. Rambles upon rambles, digressions upon digressions, long conversations, the faces of the people having them, and photos of their loudspeakers: a microcosm of a history made up of thousands, millions of conversations, interactions, familiar faces and constant movement around those loudspeakers. It's the story of the participants, which of course overlap, and overlap with our own stories too: this is a small island, bass echoes through it freely, and reaches everywhere. Reggae – at proper volume anyway, not just UB40 on the radio – first reached me in Middle England in the early 80s thanks to my dad playing Sunday cricket with his colleagues at the Job Centre. Brian as a teenage goth in Yorkshire in the late 80s naturally had social circles that overlapped with the areas where techno, electro and dub sound systems met and created the first truly unmistakeable British

rave sound, at The Warehouse in Leeds and FON Studios in Sheffield. And this entanglement is there way more so for the interviewees.

Cooly G's dad and uncles ran reggae sound systems in Brixton, and her mum was an

acid house DJ, and you can hear that running through her music. Skream was comfortable slotting into the birth of dubstep at thirteen because his brother was already deep in drum'n'bass, Yes, explosive moments like Yorkshire's bleep'n'bass of 1989-90, the eruption of jungle in 1993-94, or the emergence of dubstep from its long underground gestation to become a global movement in 2006-7, are predicated on youth movements. And yes, these were often about exclusion: about kids not allowed into the older folks’ raves, or black artists marginalised by scenes they'd helped build. But this is also about a lengthy continuum, about knowledge passed down through those tangled lines of connection and communication.

The “appropriation” that Ackroyd wrote of isn't the aggressive power-differential cultural appropriation we hear of so much now: a real thing, of course, where real lives are made into commodified jokes or tragedies for the consumption of an undifferentiated corporate culture. Rather, it's about a naturally

absorbent and flexible vernacular, one within which Saxon pith is still resisting domination by haughty Latinised structures a thousand years on, and where of course the languages of every generation of immigrants since continue to writhe and interact just beneath the surface of our everyday conversation and culture. It's people appropriating from their own friends, their own families, their own neighbours, catching jokes and creating new sounds and styles with every twist they put on what they've seen and heard. When Brian and I were about halfway through the book, looking at the photographed faces so far, Brian said “this is the England I recognise”. And I hope it is for people who see the book. I'm not particularly enamoured of nation states and even less so of nationalism, but I do like stories, and I like the stories I have grown up and grown older around. And the stories around soundsystem culture have developed over half a century into an Englishness we could believe in: not the bullshit archaic Albion of haircut rock bands' fantasies, but a living, breathing, skanking mass of people, constantly hungry for the new but still congregating around the most fundamental values: tricksiness, absurdity, mysticism, intoxication and BASS.

Brian David Stephens © All Rights Reserved

21

Bibliography

Ackroyd, P: Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination - Chatto & Windus, 2002 Bradley, L: Sounds Like London: 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital - Serpent’s Tail, 2013 Fricke, J: Yes Yes Y'all: The Experience Music Project : Oral History of Hip-hop's First Decade Da Capo Press, 2002 Bussman, J: Once in a Lifetime: The Crazy Days of Acid House and Afterwards - Virgin Press 1998 McNeill, L / McCain, G: Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk - Penguin Books 1996 Nolan, D: I Swear I Was There: The Gig That Changed the World - Independent Music Press 2006 Reynolds, S: Energy Flash: a Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture - Faber & Faber, 1998 DJ Semtex: Hip Hop Raised Me - Thames & Hudson, 2016

Joe Muggs is a journalist and part time DJ. He spent the bulk of the 1990s in the midst of Brighton’s club scene, programming electronic beats for bands, writing lyrics for electronic artists and running a “techno cabaret” that featured early performances from the likes of Jamie Lidell, Cristian Vogel, Squarepusher and the playwright Sophie Woolley. From 2001 he turned professional writer, starting at The Face and The Daily Telegraph. He became particularly known for tracing the rise of dubstep and related forms of bass music for Mixmag and WIRE magazine, and later for launching editorial content on The Boiler Room platform, while his bylines have also appeared across the specialist and mainstream press. He has also worked in A&R and album compiling, notably on Ministry Of Sound’s Adventures in Dubstep & Beyond series and Big Dada / Ninja Tune’s Grime 2.0 compilation.

Photographs by Brian David Stevens © All Rights Reserved Brian David Stevens is a photographer based in London. He has work in The National Portrait Gallery and in the National Museums of Scotland. Brian's work has been published worldwide. http://www.briandavidstevens.com

22

23

‘WHO FEELS IT KNOWS IT’ Re-thinking knowledge, resistance and community through the sub-bass of the reggae sound system

24

Sebastian R. C. Davies

Every man thinks his burden is the heaviest, But (ooh, yeah, come on) they know because they feel.

Who feels it knows it, Lord.

Who feels it knows it, Lord.

Who feels it knows it, Lord.

The Wailers (“He Who Feels It Knows It”, Coxsone J.A., 1966)

That’s the nature of sound system.

I can tell you about sound system from now to tomorrow morning, but you have to feel sound system to know what sound system is really about.

Mikey ‘Dread’ (Operator and Founder of Channel One Sound System, UK)

Playing music, for me right, it gets some heads together…get a little tribal thing going on, you know. Get the frequency up…Everyone’s on the frequency. It’s always been about that…and exciting people and changing their frequency.

Robbo Dread, Birmingham 2017 Following the turn of the millennium, swathes of urban communities have been threatened by the march of inner city ‘redevelopment’. This process has dismantled vital infrastructures that supported diverse intersections of trans-Atlantic urban life, through the systematic pasteurization of the post-industrial city by overwhelmingly inflexible legislation and privatized investment. In addition to the spatial and economic pressures felt by these communities, their expressive cultures now face eradication. They are interpellated or ‘hailed’, borrowing from the work of Louis Althusser (2001), into a rational of free market expansion and increased social regulation, an ideologically defined set constituted through operations of neoliberal governance. Either this renders underground cultural artefacts

into trendy consumer objects in a highly regulated world of hegemonic, ideologically sanctioned ‘night culture’, or banishes expressive cultures to the margins of our cities, through an aggressively enforced doctrine of silence in the inner city.

The reggae/dub sound system suffers most from this double-edged sword of (sonic) regulation. Its discursive critique of power, as well as its formal inability to conform with the norms of club-culture, positions the sound system in direct opposition to the forms of sonic culture designated as ‘acceptable’ under this neo-liberal program of ‘aesthetic moralism’ and entertainment consumerism (Thompson 2017). Scholars such as Paul Gilroy (1991; 1999), Horace Campbell (1987), and William ‘Lez’ Henry (2012) outline the sound system’s opposition as such; the means

by which the residues of a spiritual-cultural politics of resistance, long prevalent in the Afro-diasporic communities of the Atlantic, became embodied in the first reggae sound systems and their self-deterministic mode of musical reproduction. At the heart of the sound system are the “irrepressible rhythms of the once forbidden drum” – the life-blood of the traditionalist West African rites and spiritual practices that made up what very well may be the first instances of (black) underground culture in the Western hemisphere (Gilroy 1999: 76). Today, these rhythms, coupled with the sound system ‘deejay’s didactic articulation of community and material critique of the present, stand as testament to a history of black “resistance and transcendence” against deeply structural racial subordination and systematic exclusion (Henry 2012: 360).

25

As William ‘Lez’ Henry recalls, “wherever significant black communities existed, local sound systems formed to provide a site of protest and resistance”, qualities the neoliberal order is less than accommodating of (ibid: 357).

“wherever significant black communities existed, local sound systems formed to provide a site of protest and resistance” Yet, the reggae sound system continues to assert itself upon the cultural fabric of our cities, despite such adversity. This assertion calls to question once more issues of opposition and cultural heterogeneity: how does the reggae system continue to resist and persist within the neo-liberal management of culture? How can it shape our understanding of resistance and community from the cultural fringes of our cities? And by what means can it consolidate the oftentimes divergent and conflicting social, political, and cultural constellations of contemporary trans-Atlantic urban life, into diverse, passionate, and altogether stronger communities that counter the alienating logic of the post-Fordist city? As Mikey Dread, Channel One Sound System’s veteran operator, outlines at the beginning of a recent documentary into contemporary sound system culture, the answers may lie in the formal qualities of the sound itself.

The following reflections, therefore, take a dive into the sub-bass expression of the reggae

26

sound system to respond to these queries and the growing pressures placed on the (sub)culture. They re-think notions of resistance and community, by considering the means through which knowledge is communicated and (re)produced in sound; specifically, the event at which sub-bass frequencies encounter the physical, materiality of the (human) body. The affective nature of this interaction will be explored within an ontology of ‘noise’ and in tandem with an underground form of utopian hermeneutics, prompted by José Esteban Muñoz’s reading of Ernst Bloch’s notion of the ‘Not-Yet-Conscious’ (1987). At this encounter, the reggae sound system has the ability to invoke radically utopian and entirely unique communities at/as its expression. These communities form from parallel ontological trajectories; common planes of ‘frequency’ in being – to recall the words of Robo Dread that frame this issue of Riffs – which transcend the racialized identity logic of trans-Atlantic history, without disavowing the unique and often conflicting nature of the diverse, respective experiences of this past in the present.

A piece of footage showing the last song played at a Channel One Sound System ‘dance’ in London (September 2016), supplemented by a YouTube link to the song, supports this claim by framing the analysis as a whole. This is not to say that this footage is representative of all sound system dances nor the actual experience of a working sound system.

Rather the footage provides an excellent frame of reference for the reader to the object in question: the relationship between the sub-bass frequencies produced by the sound system and the

physical materiality of, in this case, the human body – an object which is entirely contingent on the presence of a working sound system, as it occurs in a moment of interaction between the sonically excited, liquid gaseous medium of air and the individual’s physical flesh and bone. As something inherently noisy, this relationship traverses the boundaries of the conceptual/ material, process/event, discernable/incoherent. It is continuously caught in a fleeting past-ness, as the immanence of the sub-bass expression inevitably recedes from bodily experience, leaving little or no objective trace. As such, the object threatens to dissolve to a point of abstraction that evades effective analysis outside of the event itself. Therefore, it is from this referential point, the YouTube footage (and the specific sound system dance shown) that the noisy, affective method for deciphering the above relationship can be explored in one specific context. Once understood there, it may possible to apply it more generally to other auditory cultures of this kind.

Under standing the Ontology of Noise: Systems of Meaning The reggae sound system, like any system, consists primarily as a composition of “points and lines, beings and relations” (Serres 2007: 10).

These represent its hand-built speaker boxes, pieces of audio equipment, and its human crew. As a Spinozan ‘body’, it “consists of a series of dynamic relations” and has an affective capacity; the “power to act upon and be acted upon by other,

distinct, bodies” (Thompson 2012: 21). Along these lines of relation, however, lies the possibility of an event, static, a parasite – known as noise – that will “steal” the meaning of a relation by disrupting, sidelining, corrupting, reflecting, or displacing the meaning of the relation and fundamentally altering the way in which that point interacts with the system around it and its state of being-in-the-world (Serres 2007: 11). However, as Michel Serres rightly states, this noise in the relation is not “something added to the system…(but is, rather,) quite simply the system itself” (ibid: 12). Under this framework, noise is to be understood as a by-product of the material properties of the relation itself, not as that which intercepts the relation from an outside position as “extraneous material” (Weaver 1964: 19). Noise, then, is the fundamental expression of this state of being, the “trace or index of a relation that itself speaks of ontology” (Serres 2007: 13). It is the resonance of a body as it is excited by the ‘frequency’ of the world around it, the means by which it exists meaningfully in time and space.

Furthermore, by identifying the noise produced by a system, as a form of “meta-operation” or trace of an expression, noise provides a better understanding of the “mechanics at work in the system” itself and how they may adapt at the reorganisation of the system as a whole (LaBelle 2006: 224-5). Rather than merely a negatively entropic force, noise forces the system to recalibrate to a new state of relationality that previously would have been impossible under the old systematic conditions. Noise is the herald of a new order;

it “interrupts at first glance, consolidates when you look again” (Serres 2007: 14). Noise casts the system into the state of raw potential, the virtual, from which the system contracts back into actuality, imbued with new relations and meaning (Hainge 2013: 14).

This process is reflected in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of the ‘territory’ (Colebrook 2006). This describes the framing of a point or moment in the system into a hardened state of meaning and of being-inthe-world. In other words, in the virtual there is the raw potential of a point in the system to differ, to form new relations with the world around it and resonate at a different ontological ‘frequency’ than before. This is lost to a reified code of signification or meaning, as that point or body is contracted from the virtual into the actual (ibid: 6). The ‘territory’ forms the “habitual relations and recognition”, the perceptions and affects, that structure the “actual world” – that which is deemed possible at this moment in time and space within our “own regular and self perpetuating rhythms” of expression, impression and interaction (ibid: 105). By transforming the fundamental properties of a relation from within, noise initiates a process of breaking open the reified code framing the relation and casting it into a brief moment of potentiality. Noise has the power to deterritorialize, take back into the virtual, the relationship between two actors in a system and, subsequently, the system as a whole. From this wavering, entropic state, in which the system’s multitude of fractured parts hold the potential to form an infinite possibility of relations, the system then reorganises around the noisy

disruption, and a new system of increased formal complexity is contracted into the actual once more (reterritorialization).

By these means, noise has the capacity to keep updating the system, each time imbuing it with new forms of relationality that challenge structures of sameness.

With this understanding of noise, then, let us turn to the footage framing the analysis and, with the footage as a reference, attempt a dive into the experience of the sound system’s sub-bass band of sonic frequencies.

Noise and Knowledge in the Sound System Dance: ‘Tides’, Bodies, and Affect The footage shows the sound system operator, Mikey Dread, play a contemporary reggae/dub record, Reparations by Keety Roots aka Rootsy Rebel (Black Legacy Records: 2016), in a style typical of the genre. He begins by playing the first version of the song (00:00:03); he then plays a second version that contains a more didactic style of lyricism (00:03:40); and last, with the lights on in the space, he plays an instrumental, ‘dubbed’ version of the song (00:08:21). Each time he plays a new version, he blocks the sub-bass frequencies from the song, via a frequency ‘gate’ on his pre-amp or mixer, only to then reopen the sub-bass band at a specific moment. As will become clear, with each extension of the sub-bass frequencies come waves or tides of territorialization. These rush over the scene, first casting the system-bodies within the space into the virtual as they are submerged in an instance of sub-bass frequency.

27

A moment of deterritorialization, through noise, alters the crowd’s relationship to the overall system: the sound system, the space, and to one another. Once this change has occurred, signified by a visible and audible affective response from the crowd, the process of deterritorialization comes to a close as the system consolidates the noisy, sub-bass expression. The tide of deterritorialization draws back to reveal a new system-body as the space and its inhabitants are actualized through the consolidation of the sub-bass change. This constitutes a moment of reterritorialization.

The overarching system is altered with updated, modified structures of meaning – a new territory is drawn. This process increases in intensity at each version of the song, as demonstrated by the increased affective response from the crowd. By identifying the nature of the territory before and after the sub-bass is introduced, along with the crowd’s growing affective response at each point of noisy interaction, we can pinpoint the constitutive process behind a community whose structural meaning has been radically altered.

Prior to the introduction of the first sub-bass line, each body within the crumbling remains of the post-industrial urban space – the inorganic components of the sound system, its human crew and the individual members of the crowd – fulfill a relation to one another (00:00:03). However, semantically, these bodies carry strong associative identifications that meaningfully delineate one body from the next; historical-social classifications such as race, class, gender, nationality, and cultural background; as well as more physical characteristics such as spatial-temporal personhood,

28

organic-inorganic form etc. The ‘territory’ at this point in the dance is based on these markers of identity. The lyrics of the song give a sharp critique on the advent of occidental capitalism and triangular trade, as well as their residual traces visible in the neoliberal economic and political world order. Such a critique exemplifies the forms of Gramscian, organic intellectualism typical of expressive black cultures of this kind (Gilroy 1991: 196).

The sonic meaning making of the dance centers on the shared, Afro-Caribbean heritage of diaspora experience. The territory describes a “mystical unity outside the process of history or even a common culture or ethnicity which will assert itself regardless of determinate political and economic circumstances” (ibid: 158). Enshrined within the territory, there is a sense of past-ness that constitutes the community within the space as those with and those without access to the collective cultural milieu of the black trans-Atlantic experience.

This should not be discredited.

It provides a crucial means of accounting for and expressing a history of black subordination and resistance, at the heart of (white) trans-Atlantic imperialism and cultural supremacy.

Nevertheless, by taking a “doggedly monocultural, national, and ethnocentric” form, the territory of the space, at this point, may risk losing any effective, long term analysis to the vast spaces in cultural accessibility and mnemonic praxis that form between groups and individuals of differing relationship to the past, and its experience in the present (Gilroy 1999: 80). As such, the following noisy, affective method

attempts to fill in these spaces.

By re-thinking the above issues through the visceral embodiment of sub-bass expression and not the semio-text of the song’s lyrics or MC’s calls, it provides a means by which all members of the space can access the content of the historical critique, towards a social and political cohesion of greater longevity than the previous territory.

The scene changes noticeably at the extension of the first sub-bass line (00:01:35). The sub-bass lines roll in two bar stretches of low end, sub-bass frequency (35-50 Hz), driving through the crowd to culminate at the 3rd and 4th beats of each second bar in a burst of sub-bass in the higher range (50-80 Hz). Once a number of discrete bodies, “distinguished from one another in respect of motion and rest, quickness and slowness, and not in respect of substance”, the crowd are now excited into action as one mass (Spinoza 1996: 41). They leap into the air and cheer as they are “set in motion at a specific rate… through being acted upon by another body in motion” (Thompson 2012: 21). This affective response points to the “in-between-ness” of the noisy relation taking place between the liquid gaseous medium of the air, excited by the sub-bass sonic vibrations, and the organic matter of the crowd’s physical bodies (Gregg & Seigworth 2010: 2).

As the speaker cones, or ‘drivers’, begin to vibrate within the handmade plywood boxes, according to the signal being sent to them from the technical components of the sound system, they produce longitudinal waves that the listener’s ears interpret as sound. However, as a by-product of this system at work, raw kinetic energy (vibration) is also

produced as noise from the back of the speaker cone at the same frequency as the longitudinal waves from the front. This kinetic energy excites the material properties of the wooden boxes, forming a relation that, in turn, further excites the trapped air in the boxes. In speaker boxes specifically built to accentuate low-register, deep pitches, this kinetic energy is forced out towards the crowd as a noisy expression of the system within the box, longitudinal waves that are interpreted by the human body as physical sensation rather than sound – sub-bass frequency.

As an elastic gaseous medium, the air surrounding the crowd vibrates at the same frequency as the air from the speaker box.

Upon meeting the organic matter of the human body, this newly excited air interacts with, forms a relation to, the particles that make up the body’s skin, bone, muscle, hair, and organs. The body is excited to the same sub-bass frequency; it begins to vibrate at a rate of 35-80 Hz. The nervous system interprets this as physical sensation, the noisy by-product of the relation between our organic matter and the world around us.

This sensation, the culmination of electrical and chemical signals in the brain, causes a further by-product to be released, namely the affective response visible and audible in the crowd as they ‘get on’ the same frequency as the sound system. Caught up in a series of noisy relations, the body, in turn, becomes noisy.

It mediates the translation of sub-bass longitudinal waves into an affective force that transforms the atmosphere within the space.

This noisy process continues as the sound system operator and MC interpret the affective response from the crowd and input more effects or changes into

the sound system controls, thus restarting the cycle through the system – perception, to signal, to sound, to vibration, to sensation, to affective response.

Julian Henriques describes this experience in one of the few first-hand scholarly perspectives into sound system culture.

Coining the above sensation as ‘sonic dominance’, Henriques writes: The first thing that strikes you in a Reggae Sound System session is the sound itself. The sheer physical force, volume, weight and mass of it. Sonic dominance is hard, extreme and excessive. At the same time the sound is also soft and embracing and it makes for an enveloping, immersive and intense experience.

The sound pervades, or even invades the body, like smell. Sonic dominance is both a near over-load of sound and a super saturation of sound. You’re lost inside it, submerged under it. This volume of sound crashes down on you like an ocean wave, you feel the pressure of the weight of the air like diving deep underwater.

There’s no escape, no cut off, no choice but to be there (2003: 451-52) The sensation of losing oneself in the experience of the sub-bass vibration brings the discussion back to the process of deterritorialization. It is here, in the first and subsequent extensions of the sub-bass frequencies that the individuals in the crowd quite literally lose themselves as they are cast, for a moment,

into the virtual realm. They reach a moment of raw potentiality in their capacity to ‘differ’, or relate to the world around them.

Furthermore, by exciting the material properties of the sound system space, the immersive experience shapes a ‘body’ with types of relationships that no longer function between or with the world around them, but rather amongst or within the world (Henriques 2003: 464). By permeating the divisions between internal body and external world, the above noisy process causes the individual to be confronted with the bounded nature of their own body mass, within an ontology based on relational multiplicity. This overcomes the Cartesian mind/body, self/other dualism, such that in the place of an identity based on opposition – ‘what I am not’ vs ‘what I have been’ – comes identification through situation – ‘what I am surrounded by’. Under this new order, the individuals in the crowd bump, smile, shout, and dance together, forward into the temporal fabric of the song, as points in the greater constellation of the sound system dance. They have lost the dogged historical-cultural identities brought to the fore by the previous territory.

They are no longer a collection of discrete individual bodies in time and space. Rather, they are one body or mass, acted upon by (and in turn producing) a common affective force, as they are pushed forward into the actual, by the semantic-relational event of the sub-bass interaction. This is not to say they reach a state of sameness. Rather one’s trajectory or ‘frequency’ becomes the unifying factor at play – ‘where are we going and at what common rate?’

29

As the tide of deterritorialization recedes and the system consolidates the above changes, with a pause in the sound as the operator changes the version of the song, the process of reterritorialization reveals the new territory (00:03:35). This pulls the meaningful relations within the system back to a logic based on historical markers of cultural and racial identity, but, crucially, like the water that has seeped into the sand once the sea recedes at low tide, the residues of the last process of deterritorialization are still at work. The excited crowd, sweating, breathless and hearts beating, as one, continue to move as one body; fastened together, so to speak, by the affective glue set in place by the vibrating air.

By the time of the last and final version of the song, the above processes have shaped a new territory. It is such that a “logic of futurity” persists beyond the trans-Atlantic, “identitarian logic” of the crowd-body’s original subjective state(s) (Muñoz 2007: 452).

Re-thinking Community and Resistance by way of a Conclusion: The underground utopian hermeneutics of the reggae sound system The instrumental version of the song begins with the same introduction of chords and drums patterns that play across different modes of memory work from the previous versions (00:08:21).

This makes the “abstract concept of a changing same a living, familiar reality” (Gilroy 1999: 106) much like the change in collective identity brought about by the above processes and

30

didactically marked by the MC’s calls of “family” (00:07:35).

The illuminated space reveals the members of the crowd, now aggregate parts of a greater bodyassemblage, move and cheer together; they ‘resonate’ with the affective trace of a shared ontological ‘frequency’. They inhabit a newly opened “field of utopian possibility (...) in which multiple forms of belonging in difference adhere to a belonging in collectivity” (Muñoz 2007: 453). On this plane of quotidian utopian impulse, each member of the crowd contributes to a realm of potentiality. This realm goes beyond the sphere of the here-and-now, towards a “future society that is being invoked and addressed at the same moment” (ibid: 454, 452).

On the ontological ‘frequency’ of the ‘Not-Yet-Conscious’ comes the possibility for communities to form that preserve the heterogeneity of a diverse social-cultural order, for instance that of contemporary trans-Atlantic urban life. By putting differing forms of identity beside one another, rather than instead of or over one another, the Not-Yet-Conscious can constitute communities on the basis of parallel identifications brought together by the same directional movement in meaningful time (ibid: 453). The bodies of the Not-Yet-Conscious experience the same ontological frequency but they resonate through alternate subjective states. This directly opposes the homogenizing effects of neoliberal redevelopment and gentrification, which work through processes of ‘subjectivation’ within the post-industrial inner city neighborhoods that the contemporary reggae sound system calls home. Furthermore, noise indiscriminately forces all

those present at its dissemination to undergo the epistemologically transformative effects of its force. Thus, all those present in the crowd, regardless of social, cultural, or ‘racial’ background, form an aggregate part in the constitution of a community centered on the Not-Yet-Conscious. This community is united as one body in a shared state of being-in-theworld and is comprised of parallel identities held in a common trajectory towards the future.

However, fundamentally, it maintains a connection to disparate senses of trans-Atlantic past-ness that inform and enrich the social code within the system.

The bursts of sub-bass weave all those present into the fabric of trans-Atlantic past-ness, through the rolling sub-bass line’s formal conjuring of epistemological, colonial violence within and external to the hulls of the Middle Passage. It is, therefore, the meta-experience of sufferation that lies so deep within the sub-bass expression of the sound system: an experiential trace of bitter colonial violence coupled with the utopian, deferral of the ‘good’, which evokes the notion of Hope, the fundamental striving of all human beings towards the “rejection of deprivation” (Bloch 1986: 11). In the last moments of this sound system dance, the intermarriage between these two processes; the utopian evocation of the ‘Not-Yet-Conscious’ and the meta-experience of sufferation, actualizes a radically utopian, united community that upholds the ardent heterogeneity and resistance of trans-Atlantic, underground culture at its formation.

The contemporary sound system is, therefore, no longer exclusively representative of one resistive cultural politics,

as that of its post-war Jamaican forerunner. Rather it is productive of communities that re-invigorate the heterogeneous politics of trans-Atlantic urban life, at each respective instance of the relationship between the individual and the sound system.

This analysis has strengthened such a position by passing the interaction between the organic bodies of the crowd and just one of the sound system’s constitutive medial elements, the sub-bass frequencies, through a reading of noise and affect. As the trace of the expression of a relation that casts the host system into a state of potentiality, the virtual, noise forces the meaningful code within a system, the territory, to alter. This occurs as noise forces the body to confront the very nature of its bounded state of being-in-the-world. The change in territories or ‘tides’ of territorialization across the sound system dance have been identified and described through a theory of affect. These instances show the transformational effect of noise, as the human body comes into contact with the expression of the sound system at work.

Furthermore, this analysis has identified the interplay between the utopian striving of Hope and the shared meta-experience of trans-Atlantic sufferation.

This allows the sound system to invoke radically diverse yet unified communities, centered on the quotidian impulse of the Not-Yet-Conscious. These communities counter a hardening code of neo-liberal homogeneity in our cities. By providing a means through which notions of resistance, community, and knowledge can be re-thought through sound; where narratives of trans-Atlantic violence and urban persistence are felt rather than simply heard, the

reggae sound system along with other underground auditory cultures, present opportunities to formulate new understandings of trans-Atlantic life: past, present and future. This affective, noisy model of analysis provides just one means by which the underground may be explored and better understood. As such, it attempts to stimulate further action towards the preservation of these vital cultural actors.

Bibliography Althusser, Louis. 2001.

“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch, William E. Cain, Laurie A. Finke, John McGowan, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Jeffrey Williams, 1476-508. New York: Norton & Co. Bloch, Ernst. 1986. The Principle of Hope: Volume One. Translated

by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Campbell, Horace. 1987. Rasta and Resistance: From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney.

Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press.

Colebrook, Claire. 2006.

Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed (Guides for the Perplexed). London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd. Gilroy, Paul. 1999. The Black

Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London and New York: Verso.

---. 1991. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gregg, Mellissa J., and Gregory J. Seigworth. 2010. The Affect Theory Reader. Durham: Duke University Press.

Hainge, Greg. 2013. Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Henriques, Julian. 2003. “Sonic Dominance and the Reggae Sound System.” In The Auditory Culture Reader, edited by Michael Bull and Les Back, 451-80. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2003.

Henry, William ‘Lez’. 2012.

“Reggae, Rasta and the Role of the Deejay in the Black British Experience.” Contemporary British History 26 (3): 355-73.

LaBelle, Brandon. 2006.

Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. New York and London: Continuum.

Muñoz, José Esteban. 2007.

“Queerness as Horizon: Utopian Hermeneutics in the Face of Gay Pragmatism.” In A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies, edited by George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry, 452-63. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Özdil, Zihni. 2014. “‘Racism is an American Problem’: Dutch Exceptionalism and its Politics of Denial”. Frame 27, no. 2 (November): 49-64.

Serres, Michael. 2007. The Parasite. Translated by Lawrence R. Schehr, introduction by Cary

31

Discography Wolfe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Spinoza, Benedict de. 1996.

Ethics. Translated by Edwin Curley. London: Penguin Books.

Thompson, Marie. 2017. Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

---. 2012. “Productive Parasites: Thinking of Noise as Affect.”

Cultural Studies Review 18 (3): 13-35.

Weaver, Warren. 1964. “Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication.” In The Mathematical Theory of Communication, edited by Warren Weaver and Claude E. Shannon, 3-28. Champaign, Illinois: The University of Illinois Press.

Videography Field Marshall No Partial.

“Channel One playing Keety Roots ‘Reparations’ @Village Underground, 25/09/16, LAST TUNE!”. YouTube video, 12:38.

Posted by “Field Marshal No Partial”, September 26, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ygY0hOcn1jI Musically Mad. Directed by Karl Folke. 2008. Stockholm: Folke/ Weslien Film, 2008. DVD.

32

Roots, Keety. Reparations. Black Legacy Records. 2016. 10” vinyl record.

(Listen: blacklegacyrecords. “KEETY ROOTS - REPARATIONS”.

YouTube video, 06:08.

Posted by “blacklegacyrecords”, June 10, 2016,

The Wailing Wailers. He Who Feels It Knows It. Coxsone J.A..

1966. 7” vinyl record.

(Listen: ASF1990. “The Wailing Wailers – Who Feels It Knows It”.

YouTube video, 02:34. Posted by ASF1990, October 20, 2008,

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nhbsOed4kQ).

https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=WNwXsqdFWhM ).

Sebastian Davies is currently studying in the Cultural Analysis RMA programme at the University of Amsterdam (UVA). His research focuses on the relationship between sound and the neoliberal city, with particular interest in expressive underground cultures, noise theory, and trans-Atlantic urban identity.

His research pushes back against a public discourse that discredits underground cultures as merely ‘entertainment’ and something secondary to other, more economically viable elements of urban life.

Outside of the university, he founded and continues to run the cultural platform KURA Amsterdam. KURA seeks to provide a fresh take on Amsterdam’s nightlife by connecting hand-built sound systems, DJs, and musicians across the Netherlands and abroad, shaping a stronger and more inclusive sound system community through music. Sebastian is also the co-selector and co-operator of Backattack Sound System, a 4-way reggae/dub sound system based between Amsterdam and the city of Zwolle.

33

“DIS ONE IS FOR ALLA THE JUNGLISTS”: From Rebel MC to Conquering Lion and beyond.

The journeying of Michael West 34

MATT GRIMES

T

aking a broadly historiographical and socio-cultural approach, this article presents the development of Jungle, a unique Black British musical form, through the musical lifecourse of one of Jungle’s originators and innovators Michael West aka Congo Natty. With its roots in Reggae soundsystem culture, British Hip-Hop, Soul and Rastafarian philosophy, Jungle emerged from various previous manifestations of Black British music since the 1970’s. With his ongoing development of and contribution to Jungle music and its culture, West presents a Black British identity that reflects the multicultural society he grew up in, and continues to inhabit.

and the Soul Sonic Force’s 1982 release Planet Rock.

Rather than continuing to emulate American Electro, Hip-Hop and House, which spoke of the African American experience, the release of his next tune Cockney Rhythm was an attempt at trying to establish a UK manifestation of American Hip-Hop. What set this aside from his American counterparts was the use of a sampled Reggae bass line

PLAYLIST

Establishing a British Black Identity Born in Islington London in 1965 to a Jamaican father and Welsh white mother, as a young man Michael West often frequented north London Reggae soundsystem clashes, immersing himself in soundsystem culture.

When he was 20 years old, he and some friends started their own soundsystem called Beat Freaks in which they would play a mixture of Hip-Hop, Reggae and the New York and Chicago house records that were just starting to infiltrate UK record shops. Influenced by these diverse sounds, West’s first foray into music production was through his 1985 untitled release under the name of Micron, followed by the tune Solar Rock, which was heavily influenced by the style of Hip-Hop/Electro style that was developing in the USA through artists such as Afrika Bambaataa and Soul Sonic Force. The title itself was perhaps homage to Afrika Bambaataa

from Mikey Dread’s 1979 tune Operators Choice. West drew on a number of Jamaican influences for his music productions as a homage to the music he had experienced, and continued to experience, at the Reggae soundclashes. It could be argued that West’s combination of Hip-Hop and Reggae, was also a way of expressing Black British youth experience and identity for his generation. So whilst Jamaican Reggae music played a part in his local culture, through the Caribbean diaspora of his father’s generation, being born in England created a distance between his father’s experience of Jamaican culture and West’s own experiences of growing up in North London. As noted by both Paul Gilroy (1987) and Simon Jones (1988), young

blacks in 1970’s Britain also sought to establish a Black British identity that was reflective of their localised experiences. Lloyd Bradley (2002) suggests that in the 1970’s, the older generation of Caribbean immigrants used American Civil rights and Black Power as a revolutionary template.

For British Reggae bands, such as Steel Pulse and Aswad, this did not resonate entirely with their experiences of being young and black in 1970’s/80’s Britain. As Bradley notes: “To the new young bands, roots Reggae was a particularly relevant expression of blackness [...] Oddly, Rastafari’s notions of displacement actually made greater sense in the UK that it did in Jamaica [….] It was easy to brood on the idea that if you were born in England or arrived as a child, it wasn’t by choice and the Caribbean was where you should be. Thus it wasn’t a quantum leap to mentally translate the Africa/ Jamaica theme to a West Indies/ Great Britain forced exodus.”

(2001: 430-431) This referential harking back to a sense of ‘homeland’ to establish a unique Black British identity would be a trope that West himself would draw upon later in his life.

Street tuff rebel music Through soundsystems like Unity, Heatwave and Jah Tubbys, alongside emerging young UK toasters such as Tenor Fly who cut his teeth MC’ing on Lloyd Coxsone’s Sound System, West was also exposed to ragga music, a subgenre of dancehall that was originating in Jamaica at that time. Unlike previous incarnations of Jamaican Reggae music, Ragga was instrumentally

35

driven by electronic forms where, like Hip-Hop, sampling served a prominent role in its production, something that West was already familiar with by using sampling techniques and electronic instrumentation in his early productions. 1988 saw West form the group Double Trouble who had major chart success with the single Street Tuff , the use of the spelling ‘tuff ‘ perhaps referencing Bob Marley’s nickname and business empire Tuff Gong.

Again, as a nod to Jamaican and London soundsystem culture, he sampled the bassline from The Maytals 1968 hit ‘54-46 That’s My Number’ and combined this with self-produced synth stabs and syncopated breaks, frenetic patterns of cut up and rearranged sampled drum breaks from US Funk and Soul records. When Double Trouble split after their chart success, West continued his contractual relationship with Desire Records, and during 1990, released a number of singles and an album titled Rebel Music:

36

It could be argued that Rebel Music was a nod to Bob Marley and Reggae/Rastafarian cultural heritage. The album single Culture samples Jimmy Cliff and Dennis Alcapone and lyrically references Bob Marley, with West asking that people should study their culture. For the first time on record, West also used the term Jungle music and Junglist in his lyrics, suggesting that this term was linked to the Jamaican

culture that West suggested people should seek to understand and engage with. Whilst the historical factuality of the time of such musical developments and introductions are always going to be contested, it’s worth noting that West and a few other producers such as DJ Hype, who was part of the Heatwave Soundsystem, and his friend Scientist, had already been experimenting with Ragga and Dub basslines since early 1990. As pirate radio station Kool FM’s MC Navigator explains the term jungle comes from junglist and was first heard in raves as a Rebel MC sample:

of the authorities. From this UK acid house/ techno rave scene a particular sound was emerging in the early 90’s. The electronic instruments that spawned techno, such as the Roland 909 and 808 drum machines and the use of rudimentary samplers in early US Hip-Hop were being repurposed

by UK producers in the early 1990’s as they produced a sped-up form of techno called hardcore.

As Simon Reynolds (1994) notes, the hardcore techno tunes of 1991 that were based around looped hip hop beats became hugely popular and “the gritty funky syncopation drew more black British kids

Rebel got this chant — 'alla the junglists' — from a yard-tape [ie, a sound system mix-tape from Jamaica]. There's a place in Kingston called Tivoli Gardens, and the people call it the jungle. When you hear on a yard-tape the MC sending a big-up to 'alla the junglists', they're calling out to a posse from Tivoli. When Rebel sampled that, people cottoned on, and soon they started to call the music 'Jungle' (Mc Navigator cited in Reynolds 1994) In Jamaica, a Junglist is a slang term which refers to a person living in Jungle, an area of West Kingston, Jamaica. However, the term further developed into slang for people who operated outside of the law, or according to the ‘law of the jungle’ such as rudeboys and gangsters. This co-option of the term Junglist in the UK seemed to resonate with the activities of UK Soundsystem culture that also operated outside of the law in terms of the legality of the soundclashes that at times took place in unlicensed premises, along with the unlicensed selling of alcohol and the illegal drug culture that existed in and around soundsystems; practices which would often bring the soundsystem operators into direct conflict with the authorities.

A similar situation simultaneously existed in the UK acid house/ techno scene, where warehouse parties and the popular use of ecstasy, attracted the attention

into hardcore rave. In turn they brought new musical inputs, Ragga and Dub in 92 and Soul in 93” Whilst previously sampling Reggae, Ska and Ragga and infusing his music with audio samples of gunshots, rewinds, sirens, air horns and lyrical references to soundboys, rudeboys, badboys and gangsters, West’s use of visual references to Jamaican and Rasta culture became prominent during and beyond this period.

BLACK MEANING GOOD His 1991 follow up album Black Meaning Good (https://www. discogs.com/Rebel-MC-BlackMeaning-Good/master/20284) continued to draw musical reference from ragga and Hip-Hop but visually referenced Jamaican and Rastafarian culture in a more

direct way than Rebel Music had previously done with red, gold and green being the only colours on an otherwise black and white cover.

What is particularly visually striking is the illustration of what it seems are black slaves carrying texts that show how the word black has always been linked to a negative expression created and perpetrated by white people.

The illustration suggests that the slaves are having to shoulder and carry around with them the burden of those negative connotations, as West and his Black British counterparts continued to do in contemporary UK society. As a challenge to this, West reclaims that word as something that has positive connotations and meanings and the lyrical content of a number of the songs suggest a move towards the expression of more conscious lyrics.

Rebel MC’s late 1990 release Wickedest Sound sampled Barrington Levy’s Under The Sensi, along with Mikey Dread and Cutty Ranks and live Ragga toasting by employing the skills of UK Ragga MC Tenor Fly. These vocals were layered over a rhythm of infectious breaks, chopped up and rearranged versions of the now eponymous Amen Break, a sample from GC Coleman’s drum solo from the 1969 funk soul song Amen Brother by The Winstons, that is the foundation of any Jungle and early Drum and Bass tune.

Not only did West strip down the Amen Break to single drum hits he innovatively rearranged them in a hyper syncopated way that was a presage of the Jungle drum rhythm that would later emerge. West and others at the early inception of Jungle took inspiration and production values from the likes of Lee Scratch Perry who as Wall (2012) suggests, pushed the boundaries of

dub production through innovative uses of the mixing desk as a form of instrumentation as well as production. As West Explains; “..when you have a certain way of making music, it’s a lot to do with the technology that is available at the time. Jungle music was at the cutting edge of technology […..] The technology was already here. Akai made the samplers but nobody was doing what we were doing with the breakbeats. [….] Were going to use the desk and sampler and any other bit of equipment we can, in the way we wanna use it.”

(West cited in Clay 2013) This innovative use of technology and approach, to pushing the technical capabilities of both the machinery and the sonic boundaries of the bass frequencies, propelled the development of Jungle as a musical form. Wall (2012) warns against seeing technology as deterministic in the development of musical sounds. In this sense he suggests that whilst technology can enable, it should not be seen as the sole driving force of a society’s culture and history. As Anderton et al (2013:17) argue “technology ‘affords’ us with a certain range of possibilities and we have agency in choosing our responses within that process” (17). So whilst technology can contribute towards a shift in culture we have to be mindful that it is also social, cultural and economic forces that also shape a particular sound. For West, the possibilities technology played in the development of Jungle as a musical form, also afforded him a way of gaining independence from the mainstream music industries. However, West’s approach to the production and distribution of Jungle was not just technology driven. It was

also influenced by cultural, social and economic forces, such as the relative affordability of the technology, the Jamaican and Rastafarian cultural and musical references he drew upon for his productions, and the multicultural society in which he grew up in, reflected in the uniqueness of the sound he was creating. As West succinctly puts it: Jungle wasn’t just about the music it was about the way of life. Jungle was about supporting yourself; making and producing your own tune, having your own label, distributing your own music. Suddenly becoming your own boss and having that mindset of “I don’t need anyone, all I need is my studio, where I can build my tunes, and then I can get them pressed up and I’ll sell em”. And that in itself is influential” (West cited in Clay 2013)

WORD, SOUND, POWER The importance of West gaining his independence was brought to the fore when he parted company with Desire Records towards the end of 1991, over differences of musical direction. Inspired by Bob Marley’s Tuff Gong label West set up his own label, Tribal Bass Records, supported by the independent label Big Life and released Word Sound Power, an album that demonstrated a clear influence of and debt to Reggae and Rastafarian culture:

37

The very title of the album draws heavily on Rastafarian philosophy where the idea that the vibrations of speech and music impact the world, both physically and socially. As Stephens (1999: 294-295) notes the relationship between Word/ Sound/Power is recognised in Rastafarian philosophy and religious practices as a holy trinity, where the repetitive use of the combination of conscious words and appropriate sounds equals power. West’s cultural knowledge and understanding of this Rastafarian holy trinity easily transposed onto his experiences of Reggae sound system culture that would often reference Rastafarian philosophy through the Reggae records that were played out on the soundsystems

Behold the Conquering Lion After the relative mediocre success of the album, West retired the Rebel MC moniker and retreated to his studio to work on a number of DiY projects. As a homage to soundsystem culture, he released a number of dub plates during 1993 and 1994 under the pseudonyms of X Project and most significantly Blackstar and ‘Conquering Lion.’ The release of Inahsound, Lion of Judah and the ground breaking Code Red/ Phenomenon 1 under the latter monikers cemented the now recognisable hyper-syncopated Jungle breaks and tempo whilst combining samples of basslines and vocals from old roots and dub Reggae productions and

We were born in a soundsystem culture, and the sound system culture was about sound, word and power. The words would be the man on the mic, the sound was the sound of the riddim and the power was the amplification through the speakers. I wanted to be around that trinity (West cited in Beaumont-Thomas 2013) Song titles referencing Rastafarianism and African heritage such as Let Jah Light Shine, African Descendant, Jahovia and Creation Rebel alongside salutations to Jah seem to suggest that the Reggae and Rastafarian motifs previously sampled by West, had been replaced by a deeper philosophical interest in Rastafarianism, which is reinforced in the conscious lyrical content of the songs penned for this album. Musically, the album also saw West move away from Hip-Hop rhythms and samples and more towards dub basslines and more syncopated Jungle drum breaks.

38

repurposing them for a more contemporary British youth.

This innovative approach created music that was made for the club and soundsystem; music that was produced to dance to.

This innovative new approach that combined historically located Reggae tropes with hyper syncopated breaks gave West and his fellow Jungle producers a distinctive sound of their own.

It could be argued that just as early roots Reggae enabled Steel Pulse and Aswad to establish a sense of black British identity, Jungle seemed to suggest a similar journey for many young black and ethnic youth in 1990’s multi-cultural Britain. “Jungle was a revolution. Jungle was the first time we’d got our own music, our own way of talking, our own way of dressing. Everything.” (West

cited in Clay 2013) By 1994 the term Jungle and Junglist had become common parlance amongst those who attended raves and the emerging musical form garnered interest from mainstream media including a 1994 BBC 2 documentary Jungle Fever about the scene and its protagonists. In the BBC’s particular historiography of Jungle, West’s presence was strangely absent, which may have been an oversight on the BBC’s part or a result of West converting to Rastafarianism, taking on his spiritual name Mikail Tafari, and not wanting to engage with the babylon media.

At this time, West set up his independent recording and distribution operation from his house in Tottenham; “My Yard was full of tune-like a warehouse!

We’d broken away from the whole machine. We were running our own mechanism, our own threads” (West 2012 cited in Resident Advisor) Whilst developing and building his independent label and productions, West made a number of visits to Jamaica playing his Jungle music back to the culture that it took its references and influences from and meeting with Jamaican and Rastafarian communities, where he amassed a number of field recordings. His many trips led him to release his first album on the newly formed Congo Natty label, Tribute to Emperor Haile Selassie I, under the pseudonym of Blackstar-

This album drew heavily on Rastafarian motifs such as niabynghi drumming, recordings of Rastafarian prayers, hymns and chants, old news recordings and speeches from Emperor Haile Selassie. It also included the sounds of the foghorns of the Black Star Line and Windrush steamboat carriers, which were synonymous with the African and Caribbean diaspora and their quest for economic independence, but which also to connoted the historical transportation of African slaves. The inner sleeve of the record contained a number of quotes from Revelations and the Psalms of the Bible. These cultural and religious references were cut and pasted onto bass heavy riddims, hyper syncopated breaks patterns and toasting from a wealth of UK and International MC’s and Reggae/dancehall artists, creating a hyperkinetic sound. West’s religious beliefs and practices, combined with his highly valued production skills, resulted in him becoming seen as representative of a unique form of UK Jungle that included ragga/ Rasta motifs supplemented by a deep sense of spirituality that other Jungle producers and tunes seemed to lack.

BORN AGAIN From 1995- 2007 the Congo Natty label grew and produced a number of sub-labels such as Congo Natty Bass and Congo Natty Dub and an increasing catalogue of productions, under a number of pseudonyms such as Blackstar, Lion of Judah, Tribe of Isaachar and Congo Natty, the name by which he has become better and more commonly known.

In Rastafarian culture The term Natty refers to the idea of natural or with nature whilst similarly the term Congo (sometimes used

synonymously with the word Bongo) is a positive reclamation

by Rastafarians of a colonial derogatory term for black Africans (Price 2009). This idea of living a life as a natural black African suggests that there is a connection with Africa’s/Ethiopia's tribal past. In contemporary Jamaican culture, the term Congo Natty is a name given to a Rastafarian (predominantly rural) who is selfsufficient, grows their own food and lives outside of mainstream society and its trappings (Clay 2013). West’s decision to choose this name could suggest a reference to his independent production and distribution practices that sat outside of the mainstream music industries but could also indicate how seriously he took his religious beliefs. Some of his releases during this period include remixes and re-issues of other tunes from West’s earlier productions, including a return to the Rebel MC moniker with the release of the Born Again album in 2004. The cover depicts a baby West with his mother and the face of Haile Selassie I in the background. The album’s name suggests a momentary return of his Rebel MC identity but also recognition of how far he had travelled and how his Rastafarian spirituality and beliefs emerged from that earliest West musical identity -

By 2007, despite his continuing success, the music business started to become less important to him. Spurred on by his religious

beliefs, West uprooted his whole family and moved to Shashamane in Ethiopia, an area of land that Emperor Haile Selassie I left for the settlement of Rasta’s, Jamaicans and other Caribbean citizens who wanted to return to Africa, and which contains the largest Rastafarian community in the world.

“My aim was always to get to Ethiopia and get out of Babylon.

Getting Out of Babylon meant gathering the family, getting rid of all the things that tie us down.

And that was the point of my journey” (West cited in Resident Advisor 2012) West suggested that this was a life changing transformation, a rebirth "It was like being born again. My spirit was there. I felt like I had returned home” (West cited in Clay 2013). West’s dream of living a pure Rastafarian life in Shashamane, with a focussed commitment to his religion, supported by an income from his back catalogue as his means of living, seemed to override his desire to follow his own musical career. But in late 2008 the manager of his business affairs in the UK became seriously ill and things started to go wrong.

Eventually, he had to return to the uk with “three little ones and two bigger ones and my wife. And thirteen pound. That’s not a good look. So, at that point I started again” (West cited in Resident Advisor 2012) Ever philosophical about his situation, he attributed his return as a spiritual calling from the most holy Jah Rastafari to continue on his journey to make music and create a better world for the youth of the UK. Central to the Congo Natty label was a sense of a Congo Natty family. Members

39

of his immediate family, relatives and friends that worked in and around the label were encouraged to develop their own musical productions and careers. A number of releases propelled West towards making the album Jungle Revolution in 2013 on Big Dada Recordings. Out of respect for the country that spawned his musical career, he brought together a line-up of UK toasters and MC’s and released the single UK Allstars, as a reinforcement of the place of origination and a unique and defining sound that, while including ingredients of Jamaican sounds and culture, could only have been made in the social, cultural and political milieu of the UK.

Junglist Souljah Since then West, has continued to produce Jungle music as Congo Natty, always pushing sonic boundaries and technology to its limits, defining what UK Jungle represents. As a self-appointed ambassador for Jungle he has taken its sound around the world, appearing at small clubs as well as major international festivals and even curating his own Jungle events. In a similar way that West acknowledged the influence of Reggae and Rasta culture on his musical practices, it could be argued that a number of more recent musical forms such as Garage, Dubstep and Grime owe a debt to West and other Jungle pioneers. Without Jungle, those musical forms may never have emerged.

West remains deeply political and for him, the donning of army greens is recognition of the fact that he sees himself as a soldier fighting a revolution against all injustices. He sees music as the way to break down barriers and bring people together. At the same time, he remains deeply spiritual. Reinforcing his Rastafarian beliefs, West’s productions continue to reference Rastafarian culture. Where ragga seemed to err towards the darker sounds and lyrics of Jamaican culture, West’s sound also embraces the African diaspora and presents a multitude of expositions of blackness from multiple perspectives and multiple voices that seek to embrace love, peace and unity and reflect the multicultural society he grew up in and continues to inhabit.

Bibliography Beaumont-Thomas, B. (2013) Congo Natty and the Jungle revolution. Guardian Music. July 2013 Available at: https://www. theguardian.com/music/2013/ jul/04/congo-natty-Jungle-revolution-rebel-mc [Accessed 21 March 2018] Clay, J (2013) I've Got Souls To Save: An Interview With Congo Natty. The Quietus July 11th 2016. Available at: http://thequietus.com/articles/12795-congo-natty-interview [Accessed 21March 2018) Gilroy, P. (1987) There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack: The

“Grime is soundsystem culture, it’s from the yards. The DiY approach, ‘dubplates’, pirate radio promoting it, the passing of the mic, the toasting and dissing your vocal opponent, this is a soundsystem thing for today’s generation of youth” (West 2013).

40

Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. London: Unwin Hyman Jones, S. (1988) Black culture, white youth: The Reggae tradition from JA to UK. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Price, C. (2009) Becoming Rasta: Origins of Rastafari Identity in Jamaica. New York: NYU Press Resident Advisor (2012) Congo Natty Biography. Available at: https://www.residentadvisor. net/dj/congonatty/biography {Accessed 21 March 20180 Reynolds, S. (1994) “It's a Jungle Out There…” Melody Maker, 15 October 1994. Available at https:// www.rocksbackpages.com/ Library/Article/its-a-Jungle-outthere [Accessed 21 March 2018] Stephens, G. (1999) On Racial Frontiers: The New Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Bob Marley Wall, T. (2003) Studying Popular Music Culture. London: Arnold.

Discography Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force (1982) Planet Rock.

Tommy Boy (TB823) Barrington Levy (1985) Under The Sensi. Thunder Bolt (TB102) Blackstar (1995) Tribute to Emperor Haile Selassie I (Rasta 1) Congo Natty (2013) Jungle Revolution. Big Dada Recordings (BD227) Congo Natty (2013) UK Allstars.

From; Jungle Revolution. Big Dada Recordings (BD227) Conquering Lion (1993) Inahsound. X Project (DUB PLATE 2) Conquering Lion (1993) Lion of Judah. X Project (DUB PLATE 3) Conquering Lion (1994) Code

Red/Phenomenon 1. X Project (DUB PLATE 4) Double Trouble ft Rebel MC (1988) Street Tuff. Desire Records (WANT X 18) Micron (1985) Untitled. White label Micron (1985) Solar Rock. White label (SG031) Mikey Dread (1978) Operators Choice. From: African Anthem (The Mikey Dread Show Dubwise) Cruise Records (CRUZ 001) Rebel MC (1988) Cockney Rhythm. B Ware Records (UM004) Rebel MC (1990) Culture. Desire Records (WANT X 38) Rebel MC (1990) Rebel Music.

Desire Records (LUVLP 5, 843 294 1) Rebel MC (1990) Wickedest Sound. Desire Records (WANT 40) Rebel MC (1991) Black Meaning Good. Desire Records (849 662-1) Rebel MC (1992) Word Sound Power. Big Life/Tribal Bass Records (BLRLP) Rebel MC (1992) Let Jah Light Shine. From: Word Sound Power.

Big Life/Tribal Bass Records (BLRLP) Rebel MC (1992) African Descendant. From: Word Sound Power. Big Life/Tribal Bass Records (BLRLP) Rebel MC (1992) Jahovia. From: Word Sound Power. Big Life/ Tribal Bass Records (BLRLP) Rebel MC (1992) Creation Rebel.

From: Word Sound Power. Big Life/Tribal Bass Records (BLRLP) Rebel MC (2005) Born Again.

Congo Natty. (CNVLP 001) The Winstons (1969) Amen, Brother. Metromedia Records.

(MMS-117) The Maytals (1968) ‘54-46 That’s My Number. Beverley’s Records. (no cat number)

Videography All Black: Jungle Fever [television documentary] BBC2, UK 1994.

Available at https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=nQyCyTo3mt4 [Accessed 21 March 2018]

Matt Grimes is a Senior Lecturer in Music Industries and Radio and Degree Leader for BA (Hons) Music Industries at the Birmingham School of Media, Birmingham City University. Matt has taught on the music industries programme at BCU for 13 years, with a focus on music industries innovation and enterprise, popular music studies and DiY music cultures.

Prior to joining the Birmingham School of Media and the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR), Matt worked extensively in the UK as a freelance radio trainer/ producer, bringing radio production to marginalised groups such as Romany and Gypsy Travellers, prison inmates, drug and alcohol dependents, victims of domestic violence, young adults in rural areas and community groups. His rationale behind the training is using radio production as a vehicle for social inclusion, skills acquisition, empowerment, personal development, and social/cultural bridge building by giving a voice to the marginalised.

Matt cut his music industries teeth at the tender of age of 15 when he dropped out of school and began work as a roadie and later a sound engineer, tour manager and promoter in the UK DiY punk scene. He has also previously worked as an independent music and creative industries consultant, radio producer, broadcast journalist and art technician.

Matt is currently working on his PhD research degree within the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural research where he is investigating British anarcho-punk and its construction as a cultural object, and its ideological significance in the life courses of ageing fans. He has published on the subject of anarcho-punk in a number of books and academic journals

http://www.mgrimes.co.uk/ http://www.bcmcr.org/author/matt-grimes/ Twitter: @matt_grimes

41

Surfing through music Sharing the surf lifestyle on a reggae frequency

Anne Barjolin-Smith When I say I try to understand the ways in which surfers interact with music in their everyday life, I hear a lot of “Yeah, the Beach Boys!” or “Yeah, the Jack Johnson effect!” I am not really sure what this means. What I do know, as a lifestyle sports participant and former snowboard instructor, is that music has always been an important part of my practice on and off the terrain. When I moved to Florida six years ago, I was astonished by the effervescence of its surf industry.

The peninsula is known for its poor surfing conditions but in spite of this bad reputation, the Space Coast is recognized as the crib of surfing on the East coast of the United States.

The beach lifestyle has blended with a surf lifestyle influenced by the Caribbean and the intrinsically diverse nature of the Floridian population to form a singular surf culture in which surf music has become a local surfers’ construct.

In this article, I look at the ways in which surfers from Cocoa Beach1, while acknowledging the historical heritage of surf music, have developed a taste for a style of music that reflects their laid-back 1 Cocoa Beach is a surf town located south of Cape Canaveral and an hour east of Orlando. The city has developed a strong tourism industry based on surfing and the beach lifestyle.

42

approach to surfing and allows them to collectively define their local community in a global surf culture2.

Reggae is not the only music surfers listen to but it seems to be the common denominator among Cocoa Beach surfers. Through concerts and radio programs, reggae has enabled surfers to share their culture with their beach community, “getting everybody on that frequency.” In my research3, interviews with local surfers highlight the ways in which a sense of social identity is built, articulated, and shared through musicking, a concept borrowed from Small (1998) for whom “To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing” (p. 9). This piece reflects 2

Forming the hub of the surf industry on the East coast of the United States, Cocoa Beach surfers have contributed to build the global surf culture and industry through their technical and practical innovations (some of the world’s best surfers and surfboard shapers such as Matt Kechele, Kelly Slater, or the Hobgood brothers are from the area).

3

In my doctoral thesis, entitled Ethno-aesthetics of surf in Florida: Musical expression and identity marking (translated from French), I explore the ways in which Floridian surfers interact with music in their everyday lives.

the experiences of various Floridian surfers, among whom are two DJs: Lance-O, a specialist of reggae music, and Bart Kelly, the anchor of a local surf radio station called Endless Summer Radio. Both DJs work in coordination with local surf businesses such as Sun Bum, a lifestyle brand, which hosts in its backyard free intimate concerts called Sonny’s Porch4 (reggae artists like Mike Love and Collie Buddz have performed there—see videos). The two DJs and the surf brands sponsor musical events including the annual Rootfire at the Park festival in Cocoa. In order to understand how these surfers share their lifestyle through their surf music, they and I had to consciously question the paradigm of historical surf music. I asked participants to reflect on their own musicking and to define their aesthetic preferences because in my research, I do not just work on subcultural communities, I collaborate with them. This perspective has enabled me to argue that surfing is characterized by a lifestyle crossover founded on a cultural palimpsest: surf music can only be known as such by participants whereas non-surfers may simply view it as reggae, rock, 4 As part of my research, I participated in these concerts—sometimes as a photographer for the events (Sun Bum, n.d.).

punk, etc. According to a surfers’ saying, “only a surfer knows the feeling,” then only they know what constitutes the surf music that they use as a platform to share their subculture. Therefore, my approach to surf music as a cultural vector is a three-step process that first deconstructs the paradigm of historical surf music, then lets the lifestyle participants redefine their music through sonic, semantic, and cultural palimpsests so that finally only they can claim ownership of their ethno-aesthetic5 signatures founded in a lifestyle crossover that is shared through local reggae radio programs, concerts, and festivals.

Deconstructing the aesthetics of surf music In this article, aesthetics is conceived in relation to surf music: it consists in the activation of stylistic choices implemented according to expressive and representational criteria of various surf subcultures. The aesthetic trend we look at here is understood as the experiences of an idiosyncratic reality6 that pertains specifically to the Cocoa Beach surfers community through their construction of a surf music adapted to their implementation of a surf lifestyle.

5 My doctoral thesis is based on a rehabilitation of the concept of ethno-aesthetics developed by anthropologist Jacqueline Delange (1967). I use it to determine the aesthetic relations between surf and music in the singular space of a given surf community constituted through identifiable history, cultures, and society.

6 There are various ways of conceptualizing surf culture. The idiosyncratic approach focuses on the possibilities to organize one generic surf discourse in different ways according to the affective, experiential, and cognitive inclinations of each individual. Cocoa Beach participants consume commodities but also produce trends and evaluate surf praxis within their subculture. Through their professional activity as surfboard shapers, lifestyle brand managers, DJs, etc., the participants I interviewed set up trends in what surfing and the surf lifestyle ought to be in Cocoa Beach.

Surf music does not constitute a consistent and homogeneous genre such as for instance, country music, which arguably in the United States follows a consistent thematic logic (oversimplified as manual labor, trucks, love, and beer) as well as characteristic vocal and instrumental techniques (twang, banjo, guitar, etc.). On the contrary, surf music is a movement or a super-category that comprises a multitude of musical genres determined by spatiotemporal factors as well as by the cultural and aesthetic capitals of the subculture’s members. In my work, I question the canons of surf music that rest on a nostalgic and idealized conception of surf music that intrinsically confines it to white California from a set period spanning from the 1960’s to the 1980’s (Crowley 2011; Blair 1978, 2015). What I call historical surf music is characterized by semantic and sonic elements such as the texture of the reverb sound of electric guitars still functioning today as a reminder of a so-called authentic surf music discourse.

Anybody who does not surf can assign this music to the surf music category. Therefore, a more relevant approach is to identify surfers’ musics (constituting strands of surf musics) that are deprived of these obvious sonic characteristics and that can only be understood as surf music by participants who share a knowledge of their subculture built through collective praxis. Their implementation of semantic and sonic discourses distinct from the historical surf music rests on their cultural capital, their identificatory needs and appropriation skills. In other words, one musical genre can bear different meanings and foci according to its audiences’ socio-cultural objectives, perceptions, evaluation, and means of implementation. More than a set of symbols, surf music as it is implemented by communities of surfers is a space dedicated to the articulations of the being, the thinking, the acting socially within

the social ecosystem of the surf lifestyle.

Reconstructing surf music through palimpsests In my research (Barjolin-Smith 2018), I claim that regional contemporary surf musics (each surfing community builds a surf music from various music genres) have diverged from a generic movement and emerged following two different processes: by creating new content with old content, or by completely shifting away from the historical movement. Hence, surf music has been subject to a form of cultural palimpsest, which in its original acceptation is a physiological mechanism that allows newly memorized data to replace those that pre-existed in memory. In the surf culture, palimpsests happen beyond sonic memory and can be cultural.

They occur in the surf lexicon (anglophone words have replaced Hawaiian technical terms and have become the norm around the world), in history (the historical Hawaiian origins of surfing are mythified while the birth of the Californian surf culture is enthroned), in the practice and the ideology (the Hawaiian royal sport7 has become a global counter culture). To understand a cultural palimpsest, one must possess the linguistic and cultural tools to decode and perform the substitutions and to appreciate their sonic, cultural, practical, and historical foundations. The palimpsest is not meant to provide an interpretation of the surf lifestyle but it is meant to highlight cultural variations within a subculture, and to allow participants to keep control of their subculture. The coding and decoding induced by the palimpsest imply a knowledge 7 In 1911, Jack London published his Cruise of the Snark travelogue in which he described his surfing experience in Hawaii. In this ode to surfing, he called the practice “A royal sport for the natural kings of earth” (p. 75).

43

of the culture which gives the participants the means to recognize each other and to mark out their communication space8 (Galisson 1993: 43). The capacity to partake in the conversation legitimizes participants and confirms their belonging to the group. For instance, this occurs when a surfer shows awareness of a region’s surfing style or aesthetic trends that are validated by the community even if they do not reflect a mainstream approach to surfing. Surf music conceived through the lens of the palimpsest aggregates individuals who recognize themselves in it because they master the know-hows of a subculture built collaboratively.

In Cocoa Beach this is achieved by substituting historical surf music for reggae music. As surfboard shaper9 and musician, Ricky Carroll, explains: “nowadays each area just kinda does their own thing and claims it as that’s their surf music” (June 13, 2017). This form of cultural palimpsest endows surfers’ communities with the cultural, linguistic, and aesthetic tools that enable them to distinguish their subculture from the stereotypes of surfing and to share their approach of the subculture with the beach community or anyone willing to experience their lifestyle, to be on their frequency.

Moreover, the role of music in the singularization of surf subcultures is significant owing to the fact that music is omnipresent in surfers’ lives. Admittedly, it constitutes the lifestyle’s background in several ways: it enhances surf movies to such an extent that for DJ Bart Kelley, “There cannot be surf films without music” (June 13, 2017); it animates competitions; it reinforces forms of expression related to surfing10; it gives texture 8 Translated from: “c’est donc ce qui donne aux interlocuteurs le moyen de se reconnaître, de baliser leur espace de communication.”

9 A shaper builds surfboards.

10 The surf museum in Cocoa Beach

44

to surfers’ everyday lives and practices—according to the DJ, “Most people, if they didn’t have music, they would feel like their surfing is missing something” (ibid). All these implementations of their music take place in the public space so that surfers’ musicking spontaneously involves both surfers and non-surfers. But surfers can also actively and voluntarily share their world when they implement and sponsor concerts and festivals such as Rootfire at the Park in which surf music functions as a cultural vector.

In other words, music becomes a way to diffuse the subculture, or rather, the ways it is perceived11 (Benard 2009: 70). Thus, surf music bears a cultural mandate that affords it a power of transmission, representation, and inclusion. In a dialectic of openness, the surf lifestyle is shared with outsiders through all the forms surf music may take.

Reggae frequency: Sharing an ethno-aesthetic signature of surfing Regardless of its stylistic characteristics, music is a way for participants to manifest a sense of belonging through various aesthetic experiences. Musical belonging is materialized in groups of affinity inscribed in a complex network of regional, national, and transnational sociocultural dynamics that give birth to communities on the beach, in concerts, in competitions, etc.

Drawing from my participant observations, I argue that the notion of belonging sets cultures and subcultures in space and time thanks to discourses justifying their geographic, temporal, sociocultural, aesthetic, and identity legitimacy. For instance, most of my interviewees have travelled to

hosts exhibits commemorating great surfers’ achievements on the water or in the arts. Local bands animate private viewings.

11 Translated from: “un moyen de diffuser la subculture, ou plutôt la façon dont elle est perçue.”

Meccas of surfing such as Hawaii but justify their attachment to Florida based on its ability to provide a laid back all waterman lifestyle12. They conceive the region as an ideal space located in the heart of the Caribbeans, and they praise Cocoa Beach’s singular capacity to produce surf champions, creative surfboard shapers, artists, etc. There is a mix between the objective geographic characteristics of the region and the construction of a sociocultural identity that does not stop with surfing but involves all the aspects of the lifestyle including the ways in which surf music is conceived. Floridian surfers find themselves at the ideological and physical crossroads between several cultures (Caribbean, redneck, Hawaiian, Californian, etc.) and between several identificatory fluxes (surf lifestyle, social status, etc.).

According to DJ Lance-O, “as far as scenes, . . . Florida is different.

Tallahassee is very different than Miami, and Orlando is very different than Titusville. . . . Then you go south, you’ve got the Latin mix, you’ve got the Caribbean mix” (January 16, 2016). Surfers navigate from one cultural identity to the other and are able to reorganize their position in their musicking.

Therefore, in order to accurately determine the characteristics of surf musics pertaining to specific groups of surfers, I have developed the notion of ethno-aesthetic signatures of surfing. Apprehending musicking within a singular cultural context has allowed me to highlight the aesthetic trends of a cultural community and their implementation of music as a cultural tool. Tendencies observed among Cocoa Beach surfers 12 The surf subculture is built on the idea of a lifestyle crossover in which authentic surfers are all around watermen experienced in boating, fishing, diving, etc.

As one interviewee put it: “I think it’s not only about being the lifestyle of the surfer, I think it’s the lifestyle of a waterman. And so it’s feeling comfortable in and around the water. It’s fishing, it’s boating, it’s the beach, water lifestyle...” (September 10, 2016).

converge toward a lifestyle, which they claim is founded on a “fun and simplicity” axis influenced by the Caribbean culture of reggae. In fact, surfers interviewed in Cocoa Beach share a vision of surfing that is sometimes opposite to that of their neighboring regions. For instance, interviewees criticize other communities of surfers for being too “aggro.”13 They consider that their own practice and lifestyle should be laid back and simple because their goal in surfing is to have fun. When asked what a good surfer is, most interviewees respond that it is an easy-going person who is having the most fun. This “fun and simplicity” motive needs to be present in a music which according to Lance-O: “[i]s very deeply rooted in a positive message. It’s about love, or it’s about having fun” (January 16, 2016). For him, music should display optimism, love, and joy and the melody should convey these notions that are evident in reggae.

The same semantic imperatives are shared by Bart Kelley: “I try to keep everything positive, and I try to keep everything fun” (June 13, 2016). This is especially true for one of his programs called Sun Bum Positive Sunday14 in which the DJ mainly broadcasts reggae.

According to him, this genre constitutes the positive and fun music that best represents the surf lifestyle in the region. For these two DJs and surfers, pleasure goes beyond listening to music. It is the ability to assemble musics in order to participate in the construction and the implementation of the local surf narrative accessible to the entire community. Therefore, while it is suggested here that historical surf music was built upon principles of rebellion, hedonism, and exclusive forms of sonic experimentation circumscribed in eras15, Floridian 13 “Aggro” stands for an aggressive and territorial behavior displayed by surfers.

14 Endless Summer Radio created a partnership with Sun Bum. 15 For Kent Crowley (2011), surf

surf music was built as a cultural aesthetic inspired by optimism, hedonism, and inclusive forms of sonic experimentation. The music that Cocoa Beach surfers relate to, implements their perception of their practice, which they share at-large with the beach community.

Live or broadcasted surf music as it is conceived by Lance-O and Bart Kelley allows outsiders to experience the relations that surfers entertain with their activity in a positive and fun spirit. Accordingly, the emotional response triggered by musicking gets people together.

According to Small (1998): “So, if ‘to music’ is not just to take part in a discourse concerning the relationships of our world but is actually to experience those relationships, we need not find it surprising that it should arouse in us a powerful emotional response.

The emotional state that is aroused is not, however, the reason for the performance but the sign that the performance is doing its job, that it is indeed bringing into existence, for as long as it lasts, relations among the sounds, and among the participants, that they feel to be good or ideal relationships. (137)” The success of the two DJs’ performances as well as the success of local festivals and concerts demonstrate music’s ability to give corporeality to surfers’ joyful emotions in ideal relationships between sounds and the aesthetic reality of surfing. Shared through musicking, pleasure can become a social power since according to Guilbault (2010), the feeling searched for and shared allows communities to form and to be cultivated: music stems from a 1960’s revolution which took place in Southern California and “usher[ed] in folk-rock, fusion, punk, grunge, and most importantly, heavy metal” (p. 4). These waves of rock and punk broke away from other forms of popular music by transgressing established aesthetic and social categories (Regev 2013; Brackett 2016).

[P]leasure in live performance . . . is not innocent. It transforms audience members ‘in the know’ into subjects of community and, simultaneously, it constitutes the outsider as the necessary, even welcome—even though not fully accepted— counterpart of its formation. In so doing, pleasure then becomes a productive force of power. (287) In the demonstration of pleasure (in concerts or through repertoires built around this axis—see videos and radios) participants adhere to the aesthetics of the Floridian surf subculture and valorize the character of the beach community as a whole. The music that prevails in Cocoa Beach reflects the state of mind of the Floridian surf subculture that participants qualify as positive and fun. Even though other genres are included in this surf music, a majority of surfers incorporate reggae in their surf music in a movement that goes beyond principles of collective consent and toward a collaborative effort. For one interviewee, surf music “has some sort of element of rock’n’roll, and then some sort of element of reggae . . . where it’s slower, and just associated to those things, the sunshine, the beach, the water, things like that” (September 10, 2016). Once they have overtaken their acquired knowledge of the canon that constitutes historical surf music, Cocoa Beach surfers assign to reggae the capacities to best represent their lifestyle and the beach lifestyle based on their fun and positive approach to surfing. These surfers are aware that reggae is specifically prominent in the south and central regions of Florida, which are closer to the Caribbeans. For Bart Kelley, “You can go up north on the beach and they don’t want a red, yellow, green anything.” In this joint interview, shaper Ricky Carroll agrees: “They don’t identify with the culture for some reason. The surfers here 45

identify with the whole Caribbean culture, whereas up there [between Tallahassee and Jacksonville], it’s foreign to them” (June 13, 2017).

The reggae colors Bart Kelley refers to are displayed during concerts and festivals in the Cocoa Beach area.

These symbols become relatable to surfers who have developed a hybrid identity founded on the multiple cultural identities that have shaped Florida and that constitute the surf community. Surfers have modified surf music in a process of hybridization matching their experience of the lifestyle that they share with their beach community: A musical text that is not a literal quotation can only be understood as participation in a genre if that genre is capable of being quoted outside of, or beyond, the initial context in which it was created, and if that genre is legible to addressees beyond the initial audience for the genre. (Brackett 2016: 13) The surfing community engages in musicking by annexing musics that weren’t conceived as surf music. Reggae is not the original soundtrack of the surf lifestyle but today, it is inscribed in one of its manifestations as it is used by surfers in a form of aesthetic crossover, a concept envisaged here as the transgression of sociocultural categories induced by mixing different musical genres with different ethnicities, social statuses, and societies16. In Florida, the crossover happens as reggae is appended to surfing rather than rock or punk so that surf music can no longer be exclusively assigned to the historical canons.

The surfanization of Cocoa Beach

16 I derived the aesthetic crossover from the concept of musical crossover which consists in mixing various genres of music (Brackett, 2016: 281).

46

Beyond isolated concerts and festivals, the conveyance of the surf lifestyle through surf/reggae music in the Cocoa Beach area is a continuous process. Numerous local surf businesses rely on music validated regionally to promote a surf lifestyle associated to the surf town. Paradoxically, this music played in the public space generates an aesthetic of proximity substantiated in a form of intimist musicking (notably during the Sonny’s Porch concerts hosted

by Sun Bum—see videos). Music then, is used as a platform that contributes to mark local identities and local economies by singularly promoting what I call surfanization.

In its social function, surf music’s implementation highlights the ways in which the urban setting is used in the construction of a sense of collective aesthetic identity. Whether music is played in surf shops or in surfers’ favorite restaurants, technology is used to amplify the sounds so that surfers take possession of the public space through their music while sharing it with others. Even though these musics are not all Florida-made, they are perfectly integrated into the feel of the town. Borrowing from Regev’s (2013) observations, it is possible to say that there is “[a] sense of locality [of Floridaness that] is efficiently integrated with the global sounds of [surf music] to create one culturally coherent soundscape” (159). The inclusion of the global into the local and the interconnectedness of the local into the composition of the global is what Robertson (1995) coined glocalization (31). Surf music constitutes a glocal soundscape made of stylistic sub-units that anyone can be familiar with (there is no need to be a surfer to recognize rock or reggae). As a result of the movements and hybridization of cultures highlighted by the interviewees, the construction of a glocal musical scene in the urban

space has given people the ability to belong to the local and the global at once. The combination of these specific sounds representing Caribbean aesthetics, local popular music, and traditional surf music styles creates the soundscape of Cocoa Beach. Thus, music has become instrumental in the singularization of surfers’ ethno-aesthetic signatures. The co-optation of new elements has allowed city dwellers (surfers and non-surfers) to engage in social interactions in their own reality and to articulate a sense of membership through the sonic reorganization of the town. What conveys its aesthetic identity to the surf town is the repetition of certain musical patterns or musical dimensions that have become cultural because of the sense of memory they have built in association to this specific urban setting.

In conclusion, the members of a social or cultural group have different ways of engaging in the musical act and even if their interpretation differs from the intentions of the artist, it is coherent in its erroneous conception. This is what enables reggae music to become surf music and to cohere a singular surfing community. In the Cocoa Beach area, concerts sponsored by local DJs and surf businesses offer surfers a safe space to articulate their sense of their lifestyle with non-surfers since both groups take part in the concerts for similar reasons (aesthetic, cultural, and social pleasure) in a crossover validated by all. These events allow the expression of emotions linked to the surf lifestyle and thus allow the realization of identity potentialities of social individuals. In these cultural spaces, surfers are able to share their lifestyle on a reggae frequency with anyone willing to engage positively with one or several aspects of their subculture.

Bibliography

Barjolin-Smith, A. (2018). Ethno-esthétique du surf en Floride: Impact des liens entre surf et musique sur les marquages identitaires (Doctoral thesis). University Paul Valéry, Montpellier 3.

Bénard, N. (2009). Les mythologies hard rock et métal : bricolage identitaire ou récit original ? Sociétés, 104 (2), 65. https:// doi.org/10.3917/soc.104.0065 Blair, J. (1978). The illustrated discography of surf music, 1959-1965. Riverside, CA: J. Bee Productions.

Blair, J. (2015). Southern California surf music, 1960-1966. Charleston: Arcadia Publishing.

Brackett, D. (2016). Categorizing sound: Genre and twentieth-century popular music. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Crowley, K. (2011). Surf beat: Rock’n’roll’s forgotten revolution. New York: Backbeat Book.

Delange, J. (1967). Arts et peuples de l’Afrique noire (2006 ed.). Saint-Amand: Gallimard.

Galisson, R. (1993). Les palimpsestes verbaux : des révélateurs culturels remarquables, mais peu remarqués. Repères, 8(1), 41–62. https://doi.org/10.3406/reper.1993.2091 Guilbault, J. (2010). Politics through pleasure. Party music in Trinidad. In R. Elliott & E. G. Smith (Eds.), Music traditions, cultures, and contexts (pp. 279–294). Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

London, J. (1911). The cruise of the Snark. New York: The MacMillan Company.

Regev, M. (2013). Pop-rock music: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in Late Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Small, C. (1998). Musicking: The meaning of performing and listening. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

Sun Bum. (n.d.). Sonny’s Porch [Blog]. Retrieved from http://sonnysporch.com

Discography (radio stations)

Endless Summer Radio by Ricky Carroll Surfboards: Surf, skate, reggae. (2018). Retrieved September 30, 2018, from http:// endlesssummerradio.com/ [Anchored by Bart Kelley].

Kulcha Shok Musik Radio. (2018). Retrieved September 30, 2018, from http://kulchashok.com/radio/ [Kulcha Shok Musik is Lance-O’s music label].

Anne Barjolin-Smith is a doctoral candidate in American Studies at the University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, France. She engages in research within the field of cultural anthropology of lifestyle sports. Her scholarly interests include representation and identity theories, music and lifestyle sports, the hybridization of cultures within the American context. She is affiliated to EMMA (Études Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone—English Speaking World Studies at Montpellier). Snowboarding and surfing have taken her around the world and she now lives in Florida where she studies the relationships between surfing and musicking. anne.fle.esl@gmail.com

Videography

Rootfire. (2017). Save The Date: Nov. 10-12, 2017 * Rootfire At The Park * Cocoa, FL [YouTube]. Retrieved from https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPF3qoLPBjA Prana Music Group. (2016). Iration | Rootfire at the Park 2016 -Cocoa, Florida [YouTube]. Retrieved from https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=rPQ8BlRHxIk Sun Bum. (2013). Collie Buddz on Sonny’s Porch / “Come Around” [YouTube]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=4KIZb7EYXgg Sun Bum. (2016). Mike Love on Sonny’s Porch / “Children Of The Heart” [YouTube]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=ilpkghWWwn8 The Sober Goat. (2017). Slightly Stoopid - Riverfront Park, Cocoa FL 06/25/2017 [YouTube]. Retrieved from https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=0N5P6WNE8lk 47

WITH THANKS TO HARRY NICHOLS A (very personal) cockney history of reggae Tony Cordell

So, who is Harry Nichols?

Well, he lived just around the corner from me when I was growing up in Hackney back in the 1960s, and although we never went to the same junior school, we did meet up and became friends when we both attended the same karate class in nearby Stoke Newington. The then eight-year-old Harold and his family lived five minutes from me in one of those big old houses where every floor had a different family living on it, probably paying ludicrous rents to some dodgy geezer landlord.

I can’t remember how many storeys there were, but all the houses in that part of Amhurst Road were enormous. Well, they seemed that way to me, as an eight-year-old East London urchin. My family lived on the third floor of Kingsdown House in the nearby Downs Estate, a typical inner-city council estate that had been built by the old London County Council, the forerunner to the Greater London Council that Maggie abolished years later. Our flat was overlooking Hackney Downs and, at the time, the flat seemed massive. It was the sort of flat,

48

though, that seemed sometimes like a prison, with two small bedrooms. But for the first time in their lives, my parents had an inside bathroom and a proper kitchen, no more scullery like the old downstairs flat they’d had in Bethnal Green.

On Harold’s eighth birthday, in the summer of 1966, he invited me and some other karate kids to his party and it was there that I heard a new sound that changed my perception of music forever.

Harold’s parents had come to England in the late 1950s from the West Indies. I wasn’t sure then which country they came from, and it didn’t matter either, although now when I think things through it was obviously Jamaica. But, wherever they were from they brought with them a love of ska and this was the first time I had ever heard that sound. It was completely unlike anything I’d ever heard before as all I’d been brought up on until then was the kind of music that mother would listen to: the Beatles or Elvis bleedin’ Presley. I’m convinced she only liked Presley because he was born in the same week as her in 1935. There was also a fateful day when mum and dad

went round to a neighbour’s flat along the balcony and she heard Frank Ifield for the first time… yodelling all the way for the next few months! Dad, however, was a country music fan so, again, ska was something he was never likely to have listened to. And I had to suffer Jim Reeves!

All through the evening of Harry’s birthday party there was the sound of ska playing away as Mr Nichols was in charge of his treasured radiogram, and this sound became hypnotic.

It was one of those great old radiograms where you could pile eight records on top of each other and they’d play one-by-one. By the last one or two records they would always be whirring, which obviously meant they were warped, but we had one exactly the same at home so thought nothing of it.

This ska sound was a whole new musical experience, and even at that young innocent age I knew I was hearing something special.

I liked it instantly and became hooked. I couldn’t tell you the names of any of the artists or tracks, but I was humming tunes all the time afterwards. The next month it was my eighth birthday and when I was asked what I wanted as a present I answered that I wanted a record of the music that I heard at Harry’s party. This was never going to happen as, I realised in later years, there was a hint of racism in both my parents’ attitudes and although on the surface they were friendly to my friend’s family, I’m fairly sure they never took to them. Sadly and shamefully I can’t think of any

reason other than the obvious.

Think how they must have felt years later when I set up home with an adorable mixed-race woman, although by this time mater and pater had long since gone their separate ways and I left home at a young age – more about that later.

I continued to enjoy ska and went round to Harry’s house any time I could. His family always made me feel welcome and they were also grateful for the fact that I helped their son with his maths, which he was crap at and I excelled in. At the age of eleven, Harry and I ended up in the same secondary school, Hackney Downs, and also in the same class. We also both supported Tottenham. Hackney Downs was a great old school which had once been a grammar and was the beneficiary of funds from the worshipful Company of Grocers who had set up the school in the late 1800s to provide free education for the offspring of people in the grocery trade. This was a typical act shown by many of the Worshipful Companies, or Livery Guild Companies of the City of London. To my knowledge, the only people of any note who had been educated at the school were Harold Pinter, Eric Bristow and David East.

David was a particular hero of mine because he went on to become wicket keeper for Essex County Cricket Club, for whom I, the fast bowler, went on to have an unsuccessful trial, a trial that was something of a pivotal moment in my life.

Back then, the district of Hackney was a relatively high crime area, burglaries, violence and, yes, even several murders, but I’m sure in traditional east

end manner they all loved their mother! I first witnessed a murder at a very young age, about thirteen, and strangely whenever I think back to it it’s not the horror of what happened (a shooting with screaming, loads of blood, etc) but more the fact that there was loud music playing… reggae! Our school was also a bit of a crime area and it all culminated in a visit from the local boys in blue who gave the whole school a bit of a talking to, and a serious warning – which in them days we took very seriously as we knew they’d get nasty if they wanted. But they did make some good suggestions and they managed to get funding sorted out for a school social club to be established. Quite naturally, it soon became simply a music club where we’d all sit around, listen to music, and have a chat, or a fight over football, especially if we’d just ‘done’ the other mob from North London (as I said earlier I’m a Tottenham fan and all the school was either Tottenham or Ar**nal).

By the time I was around thirteen or fourteen, ours was the class that seemed to lead the way in terms of music. Even though many of us had started to enjoy the local legendary band T.Rex (Marc Bolan was from Stoke Newington), it was still ska and reggae that ruled and we had many wonderful early evenings listening to the great sounds. By this time my family had split up and I was still in the council flat with my dad and my older brother. The fact that neither of them liked my music made me like it even more, partly to be stroppy but mainly because I really did like it. Every evening after school, I would spend a

couple of hours with friends and music, then head home and get some grub ready for when dad got home, and then I’d sit myself down with a book and some music. There was the classic case of when my dad got home and his first words were ‘are you listening to that effing reggie music again?’ I had to explain that it was reggae, not reggie. Reggie by now was safely locked up, as was Ronnie!

Dad’s response was to call me ‘a piss-taking little bleeder’. John Keats, eat your heart out!

Things went from bad to worse at home, and I had to do something about it. In the end, with evening after evening of squabbles, I’d just had enough and buggered off. I was fourteen with no idea where I was going, but I just couldn’t stay there any longer. I won’t go into details but my dad had some unsavoury friends and there was always some sort of dodgy dealing going on, or something being planned. Whenever something was being organised, I was politely asked to leave the room even though I knew something very un-kosher was happening.

Just for the record, everything was either legal or not. If it was illegal it was dodgy, if it was legal it was kosher! It was nothing religious, just our way of talking. By this time (at fourteen) I was working weekends on my uncle’s stall in Kingsland Road market selling dodgy tom (‘tomfoolery’ - jewellery) and it earned me a couple of quid a week for which I was very grateful. It meant I could pay my way a little bit and I made good use of it. I kept on turning up at school so no-one there ever asked any questions.

I was able to stay with friends

49

a few nights here and there and somehow I got through to sixteen when I left school. These couple of years were when my love affair with music was at its greatest, and most of the people I knew (most of my friends) were also very much reggae people, so whenever I stayed at a friend’s place I was always listening to the same sort of sounds. Music became my escape. Reggae was at this time becoming far more commercial, but I was lucky being able to hear more of the roots music, more of the original ska sounds. Because of my circle of friends and this music, life was bearable.

At this time, I also started going to gigs and enjoying some of the local bands that were being formed. Some were outstanding and they were as good as the recorded sound, even better because they were real and not manufactured sounding. Some, though, were really rough and once in a while would be booed off stage, which nearly always ended up in fights. A really good venue was the Four Aces club right by Dalston Junction. On the nights when there was no live music on, the place was simply a local bar, and because of dodgy dealings going on there at the time (probably no more than anywhere else) the place was regularly raided by the bill. The fact that a number of the clientele were black also made them a target for the police, much more than other similar places in the borough.

Through this snapshot of my life, it is clear that reggae, and the people that I shared this music with, formed a stabilising element for someone who had a somewhat unstable family

50

background, lived in one of London’s less favourable districts and had a liking for music out of the ordinary. Since I first discovered it, my love of music has been the constant in my life: to this day I’m still a reggae fan, I still listen to ska all the time and these days I’m into people such as Eek-A-Mouse who speaks to the audience as if he’s having a chat. I first ‘discovered’ his music in 1982 at Chat’s Palace in Hackney (a great venue for new artists to get their first experience of live performing).

Along with the likes of Yellowman and the geezer with the dodgy lyrics, Max Romeo, these are the people who still influence my musical tastes.

Music is the constant in my life, when people I should have

been able to rely on have let me down badly, when circumstances haven’t been good, music has always been there. And it’s thanks to my old friend Harry Nichols and his eighth birthday party that my love of ska and reggae goes on.

Tony Cordell is employed by a Birmingham-based university in a student support role. Tony’s background is almost entirely in the public sector as he was previously employed in local government for many years and (certainly in his earlier days) he was a highly active trades unionist, fighting for workers’ rights and for social justice. He organised many public campaigns and encouraged thousands of people out onto the streets in support of ambulance workers and nurses, and he led a successful campaign to fight the closure of a wing of the historic St Bartholomew’s Hospital in the City of London – a campaign supported by local MPs Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn.

Tony Cordell was born and raised in the East End of London and moved to Birmingham in 2012 for a variety of personal reasons. At the age of sixteen, an unsuccessful trial to play professional cricket led him to make career choices which resulted in him moving into administrative and finance roles and eventually into the public sector.

His long-held belief in social justice and equality of opportunity for all helped him develop his socialist views and led to his trades union activities.

Tony has a love of travelling and enjoys experiencing different cultures and it is this love of all things different that ultimately led to his love of reggae and his other passion – cooking.

51

One Love: One 45/One LP is a facet of the

internationally acclaimed One LP portrait photography series, a project that reveals the powerful ‘one shot’ properties of the 45 RPM single and full reggae LP. The project explores the inspirational qualities of recordings and the impact they have on people’s lives.

Each portrait features the subject holding a reggae 45 or LP that is of fundamental importance to them. The photograph is accompanied by a short interview that explores the meaning and value of the selected vinyl.

The One LP Project began in 2010 as a response to conversations with musicians about their relationship with the work of other artists encountered via recordings. In particular, the conversations focused on the albums that had moved the subjects profoundly.

As a conversation is of course transient – usually committed only to memory – I was eager to find a format that would adequately document my interactions with the artists.

The premiere One LP Project exhibition was hosted by the ARChive of Contemporary Music in New York.

52

William Ellis

“British photographer William Ellis is perhaps best known for his impeccable photos of jazz musicians.

Now his One LP Project comes to New York. Truly cool interactive exhibits like this don’t come around too often” Time Out New York “Music is the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret.”

The Critic as Artist, Oscar Wilde (1881) Music can be studied down to its smallest component though throughout centuries of research, its essence remains as elusive as its effect is tangible. Perhaps more poetically, One LP – and now One 45 – has come to represent a journey into another’s soul: the recording that each person selects is a part of them; their past, present and future.

The portraits were made during the Reggae Innovation and Sound System Culture, an event that was conceived by Birmingham City University and the University of West Indies, and hosted by the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire on the 4th April 2018.

My own introduction to and connection with reggae came about in the late 1970s, when like many people I was given an insight into another world by Bob

Marley and The Wailers. In fact, at that time, reggae was a largely unacknowledged and unknown universe of music in much of the UK and Europe (outside of Caribbean communities, at least).

Marley’s lyrical poetry and sophisticated imagery – coupled with the inventiveness and musicianship of his peerless band – combined to express an irresistible, clear and positive vision of how life should be lived with love, equality and respect for all.

As a bassist myself, I was entranced – as I still am – by the playing of Aston “Family Man” Barrett, the fulcrum of the band with his melodic diamond-cut timing and impeccable feel. The music was cradled in the almost unbearably beautiful harmonies of the I Threes, who ladled warmth and comfort over the bitter truths of Marley’s political statements. Their voices celestial and crystalline shone like hope in the dark.

I was fortunate enough to see Marley twice, the first concert was in Manchester at the Hard Rock on July 20th 1975 when I was 18 years old, the second almost 5 years to the day on July 12th 1980 at Deeside Leisure Centre, Wales. This latter gig sadly proved to be one of his last performances.

They live on in my memory. Bob, his work and influence, up there with his spiritual brothers and sisters: Billie, Dylan, Jimi, Joni, Miles, Nina and Prince.

William Ellis was born in Liverpool in 1957 and

is an internationally acclaimed music photographer whose contribution to the culture was recognised by the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City when he was invited to produce the Inaugural International Exhibition in 2005, and where he returned in 2008 to present his work in the “Jazz in Black and White: Bebop and Beyond” exhibit.

William’s photographs are exhibited at international festivals and galleries in the UK and throughout the world and are in the permanent collection of The National Portrait Gallery, London, The ARChive of Contemporary Music, New York and The American Jazz Museum, Kansas City. His images have also been used as part of the JAM (Jazz Appreciation Month) Outreach program in the United States, initiated by the Smithsonian Institution.

William acts as a visiting lecturer at Birmingham City University and was invited to present a major One LP Project exhibition for Rhythm Changes: Jazz Utopia conference, hosted by BCU in 2016.

QR - Full interviews from portraits overleaf onelp.org

Exhibitions 2018/19 Birmingham

‘One 45 - Northern Soul’: Birmingham City University, Parkside Building

Kingston

One LP/45 Reggae: 6th Global Reggae Conference 2019 - Reggae Innovation and Sound System Culture 11: Institute of Caribbean Studies, Mona Campus, Kingston, Jamaica. A University of the West Indies and Birmingham City University partnership event.

London

100 One LPs: Cadogan Hall, 5 Sloane Terrace, Belgravia - during the EFG London Jazz Festival.

Miles and Beyond: Jazz Photographs by William Ellis: The Omnibus Theatre, 1 Clapham Common North Side - during the EFG London Jazz Festival.

Los Angeles

For One Night Only: Jazz photographs by Bob Barry and William Ellis, Mr Musichead Head Gallery, 7420 Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, CA

New York

101 One LPs: The ARChive of Contemporary Music, 54 White Street, Tribeca, NYC william-ellis.com

Photographs and One Love/45/LP logo © William Ellis.

All Rights Reserved

53

Jah9 “So, the album I have chosen is Scientist Rids The World Of The Evil Curse Of The Vampires. When I listened to that record and it was early in my exposure to instrumental dub and it made a profound impact on me because I didn't even know the songs that were being dubbed, but I got so into the music of it. It was very inspiring for me as a poet because of how the music was treated. It was almost like it wasn't even music, it was like it was creating an environment and it was telling a story. So, separate from what the original songs were, I thought it was incredibly powerful what Scientist was able to do by creating a whole new narrative with sound. And it inspired me as a producer and as a songwriter. It is music that gave me space because it emptied out so much it gave me space to put my words in. So actually, [I] wrote a lot of music, a lot of poetry, listening to that music. And it's something I always go back to and it's something I use in my yoga practice: it's sonic healing.�

54

Sebastian Davies “It’s 'Prophesy' by Fabian on the Tribesman label. It's a 12" 45 and for me it's really special because it's an original press, it's a limited edition of this tune. Produced by Lloyd Coxsone in 1977 but it's still the hardest tune I have. When the bass comes in, every time, it always blows everyone's mind. I have a nice little story about this. I select on a sound system back in the Netherlands called Backattack and at our last dance we had to have the system raised a little bit so the SubScoops were really like at head level.

We hadn't introduced the sub bass until this song and when we did apparently it blew a girl’s hat off.

Everyone was saying, ‘Oh my god someone's hats flying around!’ I don't know if it's true, but it’s quite a nice story.”

55

Rusty Rebel “This is 'Civilisation' by the Classics and it's a Lee Perry production. It's not on the original label that it was on, but the fact that it's been repressed that's fine by me. It's actually got a picture of Lee Perry on the sleeve, which is really nice. 'Civilisation' is basically saying that we need more civilisation, we need more unity, we need more love, we need to look after one another. It's as simple as that. We need to be acting like we are civilised people and to stop the back biting, the fussing and the fighting. So, that to me replicates what reggae music is about: it's about peace.�

56

Kokumo “It's Legalize It, a 1976 album by Peter Tosh. With him sitting in a field of ganja. It was so important, in terms of the visuals, at the time [because] ganja was associated with Rasta and persecution of Rastafarians for the use of ganja in Jamaica: Peter Tosh was one of the main protagonists for legalising it. So, that album for me kind of epitomises the revolutionary stance that Peter took, not just in his music, but in his persona as somebody who stood up for equal rights and justice.�

57

Stephi “So it's Jah9, since she's here today, and it's New Name. I chose this album because when it came out, in about 2013, it was like inspiration. It was new, it was with the times, a new name – Rastafari – bringing the realisation of Rastafari back into the community, back into life by a young artist.”

58

Christafari “The LP is John Holt’s Sings For I. It's an old album and he used the full Philharmonic Orchestra to play reggae music. It was the first time it had ever been done and this was in the era of the seventies when there was a lot of good music out there. The artistic work on the front portrayed Rasta in a more positive light, rather than the negative light of the persecutions that they went through in the sixties.”

59

Sound System Outernational Perspectives

Goldsmiths, University of London 60

S

ound System Outernational (SSO) is a practice-research collective of MA and PhD students and staff based in Goldsmiths, in New Cross, London. We investigate theories and practices in sound system culture with the notion that research and practitioner discussion can provide meaningful contributions to this culture.

We approach sound system culture as a system of experience, knowledge and practice: a method and positionality as well as an object of study.

Our main collective activity to date has been organising symposia which bring together sound system researchers, practitioners and audiences for discussion, working to build a physical “third space” for people to gather and

from the established musical culture of Jamaica (Bradley 2001: 36). As the street technology of sound systems proliferated across the island, rivalries developed amongst operators for the most powerful stacks and the most original selection of music (ibid).

The early sound systems largely played Black American R&B, often sent by emigrant relatives or, as rivalries intensified, by envoys sent to New Orleans or New York for the specific purpose of hunting down new music (Katz 2012: 16).

Eventually, sound system operators determined to outshine their rivals started to commission and record original music, laying the foundations for a Jamaican popular music industry in the context of radical movements for decolonisaton (see Sylvia Wynter’s comments in Scott 2000). The sonic techniques and political forms developed in Jamaican dancehalls and studios during these crucial decades of political contestation and social change continue to reverberate across the world.

The “outernational” of Sound System Outernationl is a word from the Rastafarian practice of altering the syllables to convey the speaker’s

meet each other, building networks and exchanging idea [...] what the space of the dancehall session aims to provide through the sound of the phonographic reproduction. In the Rastafarian nomenclature the events would be considered as a “groundation” at which we were “reasoning.” In one sense this was our aim for the symposium: to create a shared space that is achieved at the best dancehall session and at the best academic conference. [D’Aquino et al 2017: 168] Sound system culture has, of course, offered a space to dance, dream, think and struggle from its very inception. Hedley Jones – Jamaican former RAF electronics engineer, typesetter and trade unionist – built the first sound systems in the early 1950s. Building on the skills he developed setting up transistor radios or record players in rum shops and grocery stores, Hedley’s innovation brought recorded music to a popular audience excluded

AN INTRODUCTION

Vincent Moystad & Oana Pârvan Ed. Julian Henriques, June Reid, Corey Gilmore Togher, Nala Xaba

intended meaning.1 Rather than being a relationship between distinct national entities, outernational suggests a positioning beyond the national, an outer space, not a space between.

Outernational recalls the Relation of Edouard Glissant, a 1 Dedicated becomes livicated, as such a commitment should be lived actively: it is never ded. Oppression becomes downpression, as a person is kept down by their oppressors. The practice both arranges words in a distinct cosmological ordering that emphasizes the word as performative utterance, but also destabilises concepts by reimagining their etymologies, opening them up to new interpretations and analyses. See Chevannes 1994.

61

complex tangle of relationships perhaps best approached through its poetics (Glissant 2010: 138). Sound system culture was an integral part of Jamaican and Caribbean popular culture in Britain.

It also provides a framework for a distinct Black and radical art and literature (Chambers 2017: 116). Its idioms of dance, lyrical prowess, political militance, and sonic experimentation would also come to shape wider British popular music, inspiring a dizzying array of cultural forms (Sullivan 2014).

Sound system culture in Jamaica itself has given rise to dancehall music, a sound and aesthetic that is increasingly influential in art and global popular music (Moystad 2018).

Sound systems patterned on Jamaican practices have also proliferated, constituting a global scene in complicated communication with Jamaica and the Jamaican diaspora. As Marvin D Sterling argues in respect to Japan, Jamaican musical forms can be effectively deployed by people elsewhere, whether for sonic joy or the articulation of emancipatory politics. However, their encounter with Jamaican culture is always shaped by the context of a neo-colonial capitalism2 (Sterling 2010: 244). Other scholars have emphasised sound system culture as a technological response to concrete political junctures, as in the work of Louis Chude-Sokei (2016) and Julian Henriques (2011).

There are now thousands of such encounters across the world – in Brazil, India, Italy, Japan and South Africa, to name but few – with an attendant blossoming of sonic and political responses to this problem (see, for example, Manfredi 2011).

The sound system world today is a complex and often contradictory interplay of sonic techniques, economic transactions, heavy lifting, delicate tuning, temporalities, geographical locations, cultural imaginaries, and social conflict.

2 We recall Stuart Hall’s comments in Creolite and the Process of Creolisation: the vernacular or indigenous ‘ground’ which emerges out of this collision of cultures is a distinctive space – the ‘colonial’ – which makes a whole project of literary expression and creative cultural practices possible – ‘the good side’, if you like, of creolization and the essence of the argument about créolité. But there is always also ‘the bad side’: questions of cultural domination and hegemony, of appropriation and expropriation, conditions of subalternity and enforced obligation, the sense of a brutal rupture with the past, of ‘the world which has been lost’, and a regime founded on racism and institutionalized violence (Hall 2015: 16).

62

This collection of texts emerges from SSO #4, Strictly Vinyl, our most recent symposium in collaboration with the Let’s Go Yorkshire photo exhibition, Let’s Play Vinyl, in January 2018.

A unique intersection of practical workshops, performances and debates – both unraveling oral histories and unpacking theories – has enlivened the academic space quite literally, as our own sound system was showering the Stuart Hall building with its warm reggae flows.

It was obvious that the previous years had sedimented a considerable groundation for the community of participants to expand. And it did so to such an unexpected extent, that it pushed us to experiment with thoughts and terms that could help us transmit the reverberations and energy released by the encounters of those days. One such term is sonic engagement, which we will try to play with in the following paragraphs.

Alongside the over 400 participants to the events, this symposium has been actively organized with the utmost dedication and love by a team of ten students of the Postcolonial Theory module alongside their tutor. This fortuitous team was coming from all corners of the world: the UK, but also Chile, Tunisia, South Africa, China, Turkey, Italy and Romania. Some of them hadn’t been familiar with the ramifications of the sound system culture. Most of them had never formulated any critical reflection on their interactions with sound systems.

In fact, this speaks to the main feature of the phenomenon we are here choosing to call sonic engagement. Namely that it is based on a form of knowledge that is deeply embodied, visceral (yet that goes way beyond the viscerae). This type of knowledge short circuits rationalizing reductions of the experience that constitutes it. In this sense, the sonic engagement that we’ve witnessed is based on what we could call vibrational knowledge. In fact, what it connects are the deep physical and emotional effects of the vibrations of the music (peace, joy, excitement, trance) to the collective construction of the dancehall or listening session (often associated to feelings of home, community, familiarity, mutual trust, collaboration and acceptance). In this sense, the sounds present at the event – the omnipresent sound system in the hall, the Gregory Isaacs listening sessions, the final dancehall, the party organised weeks after the event – have contributed to setting an environment for community building that wasn’t, as it commonly happens in universities, monopolized by intellectual speculation. The sounds renegotiated the terrain of speculation, rather inviting to get lost into dub improvisations (performed live by Dub

Morphologies) and experience hearing with the entire body. Moreover, panels such as the one that hosted the UK women-led sound systems were able to fire up the audience sharing stories about struggles that so many different participants were able to relate to and be inspired by.

squats. Damian Marley instructing us how to move synchronized during countless anti-racist marches across the country. Italian reggae blossoming like it had always existed in Italy, with Africa Unite, Sud Sound System, Alborosie and Brusco filling our bedrooms and the students’ parties. The first time I went to a dub night in Bologna all I remember is the excitement of all We have described these aspects – that many of us keep my comrades for the new genre and my guts bursting discussing – in order to at least attempt to sketch what with sounds. The unease and wondering for the first the event was like for those of us who had never before time if those stacks weren’t too high. In what way was been directly involved in sound system practices. How that ticklish echo connected to Sister Nancy’s flirty it educated us in political lessons we didn’t know about and reassuring horns, I wondered. Fast forward eleven and the infinite listening and knowing capacities of our years, and, now an immigrant in London, my body had entire bodies. learned to grasp different lengths of the dub experience.

Here’s how I captured Jah Shaka’s dub session in my So far, we’ve argued the phenomenon of sonic diary: engagement to hold an introspective dimension (one made of the impact of reggae/dancehall/dub vibrations 15 December 2017 on one’s body and mind) and one associated to the If I close my eyes, I am convinced that there is nobody social, collective dimension of experiencing music around me, that the music envelops me alone. Yet if I open together, able to establish a temporary community my eyes I see a highly populated womb. I look around marked by unity and mutual enhancement. It is from and I smile, as if I were altered by some endorphins-inthis second dimension that a third level of the sonic ducing substance. It feels a bit as if I were looking at the engagement is made possible. This third level is the others through water, my ears numbed. The air is thick. one of potential, imaginary, open-ended projections. It This is just one example of how the sound system can regards all of the interactions that could be articulated from that second level of mutual enhancement, able to be incorporated, of how it regards psycho-physical dispositions (warmth, coquetry, bursting guts, ticklish reach out and expand the community of all those who echoes, confidence, happiness, wholesomeness), make the sound possible: from the people who build and carry a sound system, to the people who listen to it alongside the reassurance that derives from temporarily sharing a sense of kinship and synchronized action, and produce the sounds that animates it. whether choreographic or lyrical. This memory (and often the prospect) of kinship is what substantially Using a symbol dear to the Rastafarians, we could strengthens the bonds around sound systems, in ways argue that the sonic engagement we’re describing is that are hardly rationalized or verbalized. This partially similar to a tree. The deep vibrational effect its root; explains how different workers of the university have the collective dimension reaching out like branches magically materialized and supported us in the most and the potential expansion as its flowers, promises of critical moments or how an international team was fruits to come. Yet at the same time we must imagine able to transform itself into a sound system crew. This these three aspects as simultaneous and interlaced; a is testimony to a collective knowledge practice based constant cycle able to re-invent itself breeding a wide on doing collaboratively, fueled by the power with diversity of flowers. In order to ground this metaphor and show why it addresses some of the synergies we’ve rather than the power on. In this practice hierarchies are overshadowed by everyone’s particular contribution to experienced on this occasion, we’ll exemplify how the afore-mentioned collective sense of kinship, which each dimension unfolded during the event. is enhanced by every single person who was invested in it: from the organisers to the performers, from the The first two dimensions are indispensably personal panelists to the audience.This brings us to the last and intertwined. They belong to a particular body’s dimension of our sonic engagement, to the generative memory and – simultaneously – speak about the force of imagination. To what was made possible by communities that the body has been a part of. So, for the shared sense of kinship brought into being by the instance for me (Oana), reggae sounds are distantly event’s synergies, which gave us courage to think into dug into my childhood; Bob & the Wailers cassettes accompanying the quiet family road trips in my native existence ways to extend and re-invent the community we felt part of. country, Romania, before I knew a word of English.

Later, as a young immigrant in Italy, it was the anthems The first open-ended extension we felt as an urgency of Sister Nancy and Anthony B that made me and my girlfriends buzz and bounce at the dancehalls in smoky was the intergenerational one. In a period in which 63

youth music subcultures are increasingly stigmatized in London, we felt the need to recognize the value of the work of the local young performers, while sharing with them the powerful resonance tool of the sound system. On the 30th of June the members of the Lewisham-based sound system, Unit137, shared their knowledge during a workshop that involved 6 local young people interested in improving their music writing skills. In less than an hour the participants, aged 14 to 16, wrote an original song and performed it, showing us how sharing music practices can enrich the dialogue between generations in an historical moment in which listening to the young people is more important than ever before. As one of the young participants put it: ‘we were able to express ourselves for ourselves without boundaries and we worked together.’

Later that day, four local performers aged 16 to 19 performed their music on the stage of The Stretch (Goldsmiths’ Student Union bar) for the first time with a sound system and received professional feedback that improved their performance skills. Three of the young artists eventually performed alongside the sound system crew on stage at the Lewisham People’s Day, on the 7th of July. This small event was the fruit of countless informal conversations happened during the Strictly Vinyl days about the necessity to reach out for the younger music practitioners and make more space for them in our university. In this sense, we’ve aimed to transform the university into the fertile terrain of encounter for students, local young talents and music professionals, in ways that has benefitted all.

The young people mainly wrote and performed RnB, afrobeat, grime or hip hop, and it became clear that the sound system ecology of skills, ethos, community, sounds worked as a tool of connection and mutual enhancement.

It is in this sense that sonic engagement addresses the many cathartic resonances that this event has brought into existence. On the one side, it is rooted in the physical effects of sound, on the other side it is connected to the reassurance of kinship and mutual enhancement, and finally, this embodied and practical sense of being part of a harmonized community opens up unpredictable ways of re-investing and expanding the legacies of sound system culture.

Each of the pieces that follow in this section of Riffs Vol. 2 Issue 2 have been written by an SSO member – staff and BA and MA students – active in organising the symposium, writing from a wide variety of perspectives and shifting in scale, tone, and frequency. We have tried to write in a manner commensurate to our experiences.

64 Rather than an exhaustive empirical description, the

writing collected here represents a textual archive of the feelings and thoughts of participants, as well as a range of theorisations of our practice as a collective.

For staff and students alike, engaging with the events as part of the SSO has provided a stimulus for thinking about sound system culture, wider societal issues and the place of the university within this, and the ways in which we write about our insights. Rather than merely a standalone activity, these events have become central to our pedagogical and research practices.

Brian D’Aquino’s piece, Rewinding the Tape of History: King Tubby and the Audiopolitics of Echo, explores the echo, one of dub music’s most distinctive features, as a sonic image around which to form alternate conceptualisations of the historical.

Nayress Ben Gaga’s text, Sound Systems and the Bending of Space: Funambulism from Fanon to Albert Einstein, imagines the sound system as an object of great affective density, generating a gravitational space which we fall into, a field that exceeds and overflows its immediately perceptible dimensions. Drawing on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Fanon’s writings on the circle of dance, Nayress proposes to read the sound system dance as a uniquely expansive space generating affective fields and orbital paths through which bodies move and subjects are reconfigured.

The symposium’s location in South-East London features prominently in the pieces. If south-east London is a periphery to be policed and “regenerated” from the perspective of property developers and the state, it is also one of the great metropolises of the outernational geographies of sound system culture, with a long history of popular mobilisation. As a research collective, we see this as crucial point of encounter with our neighbours.

Claudia Nardini’s piece, From Italian Dancehalls to South East London. An Epiphanic Journey through Sounds and Systems, reads the SSO symposia an attempt to actualise, however partially, a different relationship between the university and the rest of the neighborhood. Claudia proposes building on popular culture, knowledge, and technique as well as the practices of critical intervention and collective research developed by the tradition of Cultural Studies to reimagine the university as a site of resistance and conviviality.

Pablo De La Cruz’ piece, Noisy Echoes reflects on the parallel between sound technologies developed in Chile within the Thrash scene and the ones constantly reinvented by the Caribbean diaspora within dub.

Practices of noise, silence and echo are read against the backdrop of the two countries’ histories of oppressions

and resistance.

Margariata Iriarte’s, Sharing Science reads the sound system as an alternative pedagogic practice developed by Black people in a hostile environment, drawing comparisons to the supplementary schooling movement. For Margarita, sound system culture and the supplementary schools both provide spaces for social articulations of self along different line than those set out by dominant cultural formation.

Bibliography

Bradley, Lloyd., 2001. Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King. London: Penguin UK. Chambers, Eddie, 2017. Roots and Culture: Cultural Politics in the Making of Black Britain. Oxford: Blackwells.

Chevannes, Barry, 1994. Rastafari: Roots and Ideology.

Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Chude-Sokei, Louis, 2016. The Sound of Culture.

Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Vincent Møystad is a PhD candidate active in the Sound System Outernational network based at Goldsmiths, University of London. Moystad’s research and practice centres cultural studies and social history, with an emphasis on social movements, radical pedagogy, and vernacular cosmopolitanism. In addition to academic work, Moystad has a background in activism and sound systems.

Oana Pârvan is a Romanian researcher who has studied Philosophy and Semiotics in Bologna, Italy.

She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she currently works as an Assistant Lecturer. She is also a member of the research and practice network Sound System Outernational and takes interest in music cultures such as grime and dancehall. Her work was published on Anglistica AION: An Interdisciplinary Journal, darkmatter: in the ruins of imperial culture and MetaMute.

D’Aquino, Brian; Henriques, Julian F. and Vidigal, Leo. 2017. A Popular Culture Research Methodology: Sound System Outernational. Volume Journal, 13(2), pp. 163-175.

Glissant, Edouard, 2010. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Hall Stuart, in Rodríguez, Encarnación Gutiérrez and Tate, Shirley Anne, ed. 2015. Creolizing Europe.

Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Henriques, Julian. 2011. Sonic Bodies. London: Continuum International.

Katz, David. 2012. Solid Foundation: An Oral History of Reggae. 2nd annotated edition edition. London: Jawbone.

Manfredi, Tommaso, 2011. Dai Caraibi al Salento: Nascita, Evoluzione, e Identita del Reggae in Puglia.

Edizioni Goodfellas.

Moystad, Vincent. Sound System Aesthetics in Contemporary Art. Interactions, Volume 9 Issue 1, April 2018.

Images (in order of appearance)

Sound System Outernational #4, Strictly Vinyl, January 2018. Photograph by Margarita Irriarte Carrasco.

Sound System Outernational #4, Strictly Vinyl, January 2018. Photograph by Margarita Irriarte Carrasco.

Scott, David. The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter. Small Axe, 8, 2000.

Sterling, M., 2010. Babylon East: Performing Dancehall, Roots Reggae, and Rastafari in Japan.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

65

Rewinding the Tape of History: King Tubby and the Audiopolitics of Echo

Brian D’aquino Translated by Oana Pârvan

Fast Forward.

Kingston 1974.

King Tubby’s Studio is a small-sized bungalow on Drommilly Avenue, in the heart of the infamous Waterhouse ghetto. King Tubby, nee Osbourne Ruddock, is an electronic engineer who has made a name for himself as a builder of hand-wired transformers able to stabilize the uncertain voltage of Jamaica’s electricity network. The studio holds rather frugal equipment: a four-track tape recorder and an MCI mixing board; a spring reverb unit and a tape delay; a machine to cut the outcome of the mixing process to acetate plate straight away. One thing makes this studio unique in Kingston’s vibrant musical scene: it doesn’t provide a recording booth for the musicians. Despite that, this is the most requested studio in Kingston today. King Tubby masters a new science of sound: and that’s what will arguably

66

make his place the most influential studio in the history of the island. At King Tubby’s a piece of music is split in its essential components, and recomposed according to the inspiration of the moment. Bass, drums, guitars and keys, vocals: four tracks to fit in the limited possibilities of the MCI board. Fingers run fast over the faders; whole melodies and single chords appear and disappear in unforeseen ways. Faders run fast under the fingers; vocals are broken, words are fragmented. Echoes and reverbs fill in the void, floating on a rhythmic foundation of drum and bass more intense than ever before. A new storyline unfolds from the smooth alternation of presence and absence, a sound weft both rarefied and unpredictable.

The body becomes machine; and in the process of becoming it finds a new logic. The faders are the fingers

themselves, and together they move at the same speed of thought. It’s dub: and King Tubby is the dub originator.

The echo of Tubby’s black science of sound reverberates far beyond the studio. Amplified by the huge sound system sets, it resonates throughout the dark night of Kingston. It eventually departs from the island of Jamaica, travelling throughout space and time. Pricking up our ears we may still be able to hear it.

On the Echo of Creation While providing another possible version of the common “scientific myth” of the world’s origin, Louis Chude-Sokei (1997) claims that the result of the Big Bang was nothing but the echo of that original noise, a mere propagation of soundwaves in the infinite space-time of the universe. The biblical story offers a fairly similar outline when imagining the origin of creation: it all started with silence, and the world had only begun with the sound of the word uttered by God. Regardless of their verisimilitude, and despite the fact that scientists have recently argued that the Big Bang was actually a rather silent event, the two main Western narratives on the origin of the world seem to unexpectedly converge on indicating sound as the primary force; that which has breathed life into the universe, as that which has switched on the circuit of history as we know it. It would then be reasonable to assume silence as the opposite - absence of sound sounds like absence of life. Therefore, building a bridge between the two opposite sides of sound/life and silence/death, the echo may be claimed to be an intimate expression of “the experience of life, the source of narrative and a pattern for history” (Chude-Sokei 1997).

But what are the wider implication of accounting for the echo as a pattern for history?

In acoustic physics, the echo is the auditory effect of the sound waves returning towards the source after having encountered an obstacle on their path. If they reach the source with a delay longer than the tenth of a second, then we can truly speak of echo. If the delay is beneath the tenth of a second, the phenomenon will be catalogued as reverb. As everything which is related to sound, the echo is then first and foremost movement: basically a return movement, often unexpected and astonishing. But the notion of return doesn’t exhaust the complexity of the movements of the echo. On their return journey, the sound waves are influenced by the physical features of the surfaces that they encounter, as by those of the medium that they are propagated through. The echo is, therefore, a complex movement, made of propagation and resonances, reflection and refractions. In its course, it gets charged with the effects of its contingent reality. In this sense, the echo stifles, carries, and accumulates. Its materiality is heterogeneous, porous, impure. The echo tarnishes both

its surroundings and itself. When applied to history and its narrative, it may provide a method to problematize the cause-effect relation, which solidifies the order of the events, while separating this order from the vector of progress. It may then challenge the notion itself of history as a linear formation. The echo may then challenge the notion itself of linearity of history. But, for this method to be effective, it must be emancipated from one of its most intrinsic features: ephemerality.

On the Creation of the Echo The echo is probably the most distinctive feature of dub.

And it is in the dub music produced at King Tubby’s Studio that the experimentation with the technical possibilities of the tape echo reaches its creative apex.

While turning a rather simple machine into an aesthetic trademark and a fundamental operative strategy, King Tubby emancipates the status of the echo from being a mere ephemerous repetition and imitation of the real.

He, thus, reveals the echo’s potential as a means for the production of another possible reality.

Our thoughts, here, cannot but go to the nymph, and to her unfortunate destiny. Echo seems unable to rework the fragments of other people’s speech, which the anger of Hera condemns her to eternally repeat, into some kind of new reality. She thus remains a prisoner to her punishment: complementary, but forever incomplete.

The end is, thus, inescapable. When she reunites with the earth, Echo does nothing else than ultimately actualizing her own submissive role. The earth is the epitome of reality; and, while uniting with it to become the voice that answers the wayfarers, the nymph accepts the last, desperate possibility to reunite with that which she had been previously separated from. Echo’s mistake, if one might call it such, lies in the perseverance to play by rules that will forever see her lose, therefore passively accepting her predictable defeat.

This is precisely what happens at King Tubby’s: the table is overthrown, the rules are rewritten. The echo of the myth doesn’t reach the ears of the dubmaster; that’s probably why he’s able to apply an exquisitely technical method. Here the practice stretches out the limits of thought. More than that: the practice renders the thought its own consequence – only provided that the latter is able to move fast enough. The structural limit of the echo is precisely the one incarnated by the body of the ill-fated nymph, with her progressive decay. The echo repeats, only to then quickly fade away, thus losing its ontological battle with the real. By sending the echo back into that same machine by which it is generated, return upon return, feedback over feedback, King Tubby emancipates

67

the echo from any residual dependency upon the real.

Once the umbilical cord that ties the echo to its sonic origin is severed, the first has acquired that very same status of the latter. Its materiality is now the materiality of sound itself; it no longer requires any further justification.

And, by the way, this newly acquired materiality is the same one shared by the other elements of the mix - the only one that holds any relevance. Once it is translated into electric impulses, the sound of a music instrument ceases having anything to do with the actual instrument that has generated it. Semiotics aside, they now inhabit two totally different worlds.

(1985, 147), it could be argued that dub music carries repetition into the age of composition, the last modality in the evolution of the social organization of music, as one that holds an “unstable and open” conception of history. As a matter of fact, the echo keeps the past alive way beyond its physical limit. Time boundaries are rendered increasingly fuzzy; the margins dissipated.

It’s worth interrogating ourselves then, in which way the Waterhouse studio collects and relays - conveniently amplified, hyper-realistically saturated - the echo of history. At the same time, the interrogation touches upon the status of the small island of Jamaica, location of a collective sonic intelligence which has been able to rewrite the rules of modern music production. But what are the boundaries of modernity then?

Echoes of a Remote Past

With his use of the tape echo, as well as of the spring reverb and of the equalizer, King Tubby dives his hands in that sonorous matter, that should constitute, according to Jean-Francois Lyotard (2009), the main interest of the musical research once we’ve overcome the threshold of modernity. Alternatively, drawing from Jaques Attali

68

According to Michael Veal (2007, 198-200), the echo holds a privileged relation with the cognitive function of memory and with the remembrance of the past. Within this understanding, it’s possible to connect the radical use of the echo in dub music with the wider cultural context of Jamaica in the seventies. During those years the island was animated by a homegrown articulation of the Black liberation narrative, structured around the watchwords of Panafricanism, Garveysm and the return to Africa, which spread both within and beyond the national borders. It can be easily claimed that the popularity of Rastafarianism across the routes of black diaspora at this stage has been primarily driven by reggae music. Yet in the same way, as Paul Gilroy (1987, 187-191; 1993, 100) has argued, it can be claimed that dub music – reggae’s mysterious counterpart – held the evocative force which has sustained the imaginary of the movement in its global reverberation. However, thought of in terms of sonic picture of the past and memory switch, the echo is subjected to a certain degree of structural ambiguity. It is not necessarily a faithful image of the past; in fact, it always subtends a margin of approximation. The echo corresponds entirely to the past only when the latter adheres to the dream; in that small time-space between sleep and vigil, when the boundaries of that which is real and that which is imaginary become porous. It is precisely here that the echo may sustain the materialization of a past marked by definitely fuzzy historical boundaries, as the one evoked by Rastafarianism.

The echo is, indeed, the sound of something that doesn’t exist, or – at least - doesn’t exist anymore. A ghost sound, or the sound of a ghost. Yet it exists, insofar as our senses experience it: we hear it with our ears, we see it through the VU meters of the mixing desk. In this sense, the echo forces the frame which contains the experience of the real to bend, by introducing the uncertainty of fiction in the space-time continuum. On the axis of space

it dilates, producing an enhanced, fictitious dimension – and this is precisely the reason of its employment in music production. On the axis of time, the echo interrupts the dogma of consequentiality that supports the official historical narrative, opening towards the complexity of an oblique temporality. It subverts the linearity of time as Chronos to open up towards time as Kairos - the master of the event, the lord of the opportunity. The Italian language tends to express the power of the echo mainly as a force that brings the subject back to the past. In this

from the space-time of the official history. In other words, it is exactly because of this lingering between reality and fiction, that it allows to create a breach in the solidity of the archive by means of the battering ram of desire.

Echo’s history is both the mystery of a rewritable past and the prophecy of a future yet to be written.

sense it’s a sound that ambushes, snatches and carries the listener elsewhere, in the manner described by Kodwo Eshun (1997). But, through the tape manipulation, King Tubby’s feedback loop generates a push that is both equal and opposite, as it materializes the past into the present. Yet this act of materialization will never be the exact copy of the past - rather a watercolour painting, drawn by memory in the pouring rain. The analogical process is a profoundly dramatic one: it requires contact, it implies decay, and it holds no guarantee over result nor reversibility. The past survives grabbed onto the volume knob as a castaway onto the shipwreck. Yet by recognizing this element of fiction there is no intention to signal a limit of the echo’s potential, rather to assign it a certain excess of power to it. That’s the reason why, when assumed as a method of re-production of the historical narrative, the echo can actually provide a line of flight

wraps up onto the coils. This lively overlapping of past and present, real and imagined, could bring to mind the heterotopy, thought of as a counter-space of history, in Michel Foucault’s evocative description. Yet it would be ungenerous to attempt to force the radical sound practice of dub within the Western theory canon. At King Tubby’s the theory is cut straight to acetate plate, a one-off copy. By producing the conditions for both the creative appropriation of the past and its return into the present, the tape echo is, indeed, articulated as an audiopolitical technology. And, conceived as such, it resists its integration within a necessarily progressive ideological frame. What the echo produces is just noise: a degradation of the original signal, and an interruption in the organization of the system. A space within the sound that can, potentially, become a space for thought.

However, this space requires our involvement in order

A complex and stratified space-time continuum reverberates throughout King Tubby’s dubs: reality and fiction adhere to one another as the magnetic tape

69

to be mobilized as such. In other words, the tape echo provides us with a trace, certainly not the solution. More generally, politics is to be sought for not within the audio-machine, but in the way the wiring has been done.

perception of the future in terms of a space towards which we move, is based on its implicit visualization. In this sense, rethinking history in terms of the paradigm of the echo imposes a shift in the perspective - an alternative modality of connection, or wiring - which relies on Echoes of a Remote Future challenging the primacy of sight as the organizing Despite the evocative undertone of the expression echo principle of experience. The echo as method suggests chamber, rather recurring in the dub idiom, technically a mode of conceiving the historical time such that the the tape echo is a tape delay. This definition in fact only future no longer necessarily appears as an image, much considers the echo from the perspective of the source: that less as a pipe dream. The future of the tape echo is rather

which generates the original sound and receives the return movement thereof, with its typical delay. Yet, as claimed so far, the return doesn’t exhaust the complexities of the movements of the echo. It’s therefore worth considering in detail the implications of the concept of delay as a synecdoche of the echo, and the further impact of such implications on the adoption of the echo as a pattern for history.

The delay refers to an erroneous positioning within time and space. It implies the existence of a frame, and the failed adherence to it. When applied to the historical time, the delay expresses the exit from the frame of progress, usually intended as the gradual movement of the present towards the future through a series of predetermined stages. Here, technological advancement constitutes a fundamental guideline. This conception of the historical time, articulated within the common

70

a specific mode of functioning of the social machine that produces the real, of which bodies and technology are the main inner workings. According to this paradigm, the future doesn’t move towards us, nor do we move in its direction. It’s not an arrival point, but rather something that wraps around us, that invades us. The future unfolded by the tape echo is nothing but sound vibrations enveloping the dancer’s body during a night out in downtown Kingston. Breaking ties with the visual conception of historical time allows us to liberate delay from the yoke of progress, thus rendering it a method of producing a qualitatively different temporality.

The adoption of the echo as a paradigm for history through the radical sound practice of dub pioneered at King Tubby’s Studio therefore induces us to rethink the convergence between future, progress and technology, beyond the parameters imposed by a Western culture

eager to overlap its boundaries upon the ones of modernity. Only to the ears of the source does the echo sound as delay. In the same way, it is only from the perspective of the West that progress is irradiated from its centre towards the outside, with a characteristic, gradual decay. Whether there is indeed a technological delay at King Tubby’s Studio, expressed by the quality and quantity of the equipment available, this is turned into a strategy, in accordance with the local habitus: in Jamaica, “every spoil is a style.” By collecting the

alleged delay of the postcolonial space in order to send it back, feedback over feedback, King Tubby and the other Jamaican practitioners of the black sonic science of dub have rewritten the boundaries of modernity by the means of the echo machine. The tape delay becomes the drive of revolutionary expressive forms, propagated on a planetary scale through unpredictable interactions between the human body and sound technologies. As the focal point of a widespread formal and technical experimentation, it is thus necessary to rethink Jamaica in the seventies as one of the most influential sonic laboratories of modernity. This also means to open up our understanding of technology beyond “the white boxes of computer technology,” so as to include “the black boxes of modern street technology,” in Samuel R. Delany’s incisive definition. After all, as Alexander Weheliye (2005) claims, popular music represents the main arena

where the Black diaspora connects itself to the global techno-informational flows. In other words, it is precisely in the music production, articulated through a particular modality of technological appropriation, that the Black subject builds his/her own body into a crucial machine within the techno-cultural apparatus of future production.

In this case, as Julian Henriques (2014) writes, overturning the Hegelian expression, “where Africa leads, the world follows.”

Furthermore, the works of King Tubby and that of the other Jamaican sound wizards pushes us to update the conception of reggae as a music genre necessarily tied to the dogma of the authenticity, imbued with nostalgia and ultimately driven by a conservatory ethos. The genre’s canvas of utmost importance, the 7’’ single vinyl, reveals how the obsession for “the roots,” yet very present in the lyrics, is just one side of the coin. On the other side of the coin, those same roots turn into electric and signal cables, into springs and magnetic tapes, able to trace the multiple routes of a sonic diaspora solidly grounded in the future.

If too delayed or too in advance in relation to modernity timeframe, it depends uniquely on the direction in which the tape is played.

71

Bibliography Attali, J. Noise. The Political Economy of Music, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis-London 1985.

Chude-Sokei, Dr. Satan’s Echo Chamber. Reggae, Technology and the Diaspora Process, International Reggae Studies Centre (Print), Kingston 1997.

Dery, M.“Black to the Future. Interviews with Samuel Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose” in Dery, M. (ed.)

Flame Wars. The Discourse of Cyberculture, Duke University Press, Durham N. C. 1994, pp. 179-222.

Eshun, K. “Abducted by Audio” in Abstract Culture Swarm 3, 1997 http://www.ccru.net/swarm3/3_abducted. htm Foucault, M. UtopieEterotopie (edited by A. Moscati) Cronopio, Napoli 2006.

Gilroy, P. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. Hutchinson, London 1987.

Gilroy, P. The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness. Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1993.

Henriques, J. “Dread Bodies. Doubles, Echoes and the Skins of Sound” in Small Axe 18 (2 44) 2014, pp.

191-201.

Lyotard, J. F. “Music and Postmodernity”, in New Formations 66, Spring 2009.

Veal, M. Dub. Soundscapes & Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown 2007.

Weheliye, A. Phonographies. Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity, Duke University Press, Durham-London 2005.

Images (in order of appearance) Dub Side of the Moon, Napoli, Davide Adamo Capra Records Studio, Valencia, Baodub 25th Toys Studio, Lyon, Brian D'Aquino Ital Soup Studio London, Petah Sunday 25th Toys Studio, Lyon, Brian D'Aquino

Brian D'Aquino holds a PhD in International Studies by University of Naples L'Orientale, where he is a member of CSPG (Centre for Postcolonial and Gender Studies) and TRU (Technoculture Research Unit), His research interests include black music, popular culture, sound and politics. He's a founding member of Sound System Outernational, and he has been running the Bababoom Hi Fi sound system since 2004.

72

Sound Systems and the Bending of Space: Funambulism from Fanon to Albert Einstein Nayress Ben Gaga

Although I had little tangible proof of it except my own observations, it was evident to me that this attraction had more to it than simple curiosity. What if beyond the tangible measurable spatial dimension we evolve in, there was an equivalent dimension of “affect”, made of affective/emotional energy. Let’s call it the Affective field. If we suppose that this field has I volunteered to be part of the planning team of the Sound System Outernational events held at Goldsmiths an organized systematic behaviour around “affective objects”, as does the spacetime field around massive University of London. Little did I know that my first encounter with the mysterious world of Sound Systems objects, the natural attraction towards the Sound would impact me to this extent. Until that point, Sound System I observed would be equivalent to gravity.

Systems were a commodity for me as a jazz singer. An Have you ever wondered what gravity is? equipment necessary to hold a concert or a reception, nothing more. I couldn’t be more mistaken. On the first Isaac Newton described gravity as a force that drives objects towards each other (making them orbit each conference day, I spent a considerable amount of my time observing the “conversation” between people and other) and he quantified that force with his three laws of motion. Although revolutionary, Newton’s laws of the Sound System. I have always been fascinated by the way individuals approach objects and in that event, motion explained the behaviour of gravity as a force but gave little insight into its nature or provenance. my attention was drawn, for the first time, to how individuals and objects affect space and are affected by We had to wait until 1916 to have a more accurate definition on the nature of gravity. Albert Einstein’s it. general theory of relativity (drawn from his theory of special relativity, 1905) established that the mass of One of the patterns I picked up on during the three an object (planet Earth for example) bends the fabric days of the conference, was a pattern of people’s of spacetime causing all the surrounding (sufficiently motion in space. When someone enters a space, they close) objects to gravitate towards it. are usually most eager to reproduce some common patterns of motion in that space, and being familiar Thus, for Einstein, gravity is not a force; instead, it is with the hall we were in, I knew the usual pattern inextricably linked with distortions of the geometry of of movement inside it. But in the Sound System space and time. In other terms, the gravitational objects conference I was surprised to observe a new pattern are not attracted by a force, they are simply following being born. People who entered that space and would usually be heading towards their destination (theatres, or falling into the natural curving of spacetime. resting area, computers) were following a distorted To visualise this phenomenon (impossible to represent path and were almost always driven towards the Sound System (even before it was wired). They would fully in 2D as it is multi-dimensional) imagine a perfectly flat, smooth and even fabric: spacetime. Now walkaround it, study its details, ask questions about imagine how this fabric would be bent by the pressure it. And when the music was on, they would gravitate of a massive object placed on it; how any nearby towards it, as if feeding on its invisible energy. Like spherical object placed in motion on that same fabric sunflowers seek the sun almost everyone would seek would be naturally driven towards this massive object, that speaking wooden box, even from a distance, or if it is of greater mass attract it. The second ball will you would see them from above, heads turned to the naturally fall into the curvature created on the fabric by holy structure. I call that spectacle of awe and natural the first ball. That is how gravity works in Einstein’s attraction “pilgrimage to the Sound System”. theory. Therefore, when we fall from a height, we

“It is absolutely possible that beyond what our senses perceive, hide unsuspected worlds.”

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

73

are actually falling in the curvature of spacetime, and to reach the exact “texture”, the exact configuration when planets orbit a sun, they are simply rolling on the of that “inner self” of the Sound System, the owner edge of that curve. invests time, money and energy into talking to that wooden box and making it talk. When that true voice Applying Einstein’s understanding of gravity to the is reached, it is priceless, it takes the experience of affective force or the affective attraction between the encounter with the Sound System to another level. (affectively charged) objects, we can consider that The same happens when we meet or read or listen to people and objects’ affective energy has a similar someone who has found their inner self (and there impact on the affective field as mass on spacetime. are very few of them), we walk out of that encounter The greater that energetical charge, the bigger the changed, deeply impacted. bending of the fabric of that “affective field” and the stronger the attraction (the fall) in the curve created by You can also see the Sound System’s soul in its the object. Therefore, in the case of the Sound System character, its temperament. It can be docile and make Event, the attraction observed can thus be explained its owner’s task as easy as a calmly flowing river, it as such: people’s trajectory in the observed space was can get capricious the next day and refuse to work for diverted by the curve, created by the Sound System in no apparent reason making everyone panic and try the the affective field. Their own affect was “falling” in most unlikely configurations (it actually happened to this now deformed space, as the Moon falls endlessly us once and we had to try a very strange cable switch in the curve of spacetime made by Earth. And that that made no sense but solved the problem). It can take invisible dynamic of energies interacting seems to the ages. It can get tired and show signs of surrender. Some uninformed eye as an unusual behaviour of the visitors. of its pieces can give up and it needs “surgery” and Ironically, it ends up affecting the physical space as it some “implants”, some new organs. changes the motion of people inside it and affects the energy they produce.

Therefore, Sound Systems are living beings, made alive by the “musicking” process. The hands, time, emotions, A question then arises from this analogy: what gives intentions, paths, and souls of all the people who are six wooden boxes, stacked on top of each other and involved in their creation, use or consumption create fed with electric circuits and wires, the power (the a flow of energy that goes through them and blows necessary affective energy) to curve the affective field, life into their wooden structure. The more aged and and create a gravitational force around it? To answer experienced a sound system gets, the more “affectively that question, I need to first explain something else I charged” it becomes, as do people. And then, whenever learned about Sound Systems in that conference: they it is displayed in a space, itself affectively charged, they are living creatures. react to each other. Then people join that cosmic dance and they are themselves affected by the Sound System.

First, the Sound System has a body; it has a shape, a It is a healing dance. A ritual of recovery. colour, and a texture. It sits on its subwoofer or bass speaker, which is there to hold the beat and give you Through the four days of the conference, I watched the anchor that will hold you to the ground, while the them walking to that holy wooden structure as one centre speakers will tell you a story of melody, words, walks to the altar of a deity, carrying their “cross”, as and silences, lifting you a few centimetres from Earth. if in a pilgrimage of grace. When they reached that Then the top, the dreamer head of the Sound System, affective curve it created all around, they started to takes it from there, giving you high pitched notes and orbit. melodies that will talk to your subconscious, as most of the time you will forget it is there, and make you go An image comes to my mind: that of a godlike potter even further up, head in the clouds. When it is done and his turntable. People come and sit on its wooden with you, you will open your eyes to your feet sinking spinning wheel with their messy fabric and heavy a few inches into the ground and your head touching weight. Then the sound system makes them spin, it puts the sky. its hands (its frequencies, its vibrations) on their tired clay and makes them whole again.

Second, the Sound System has a soul. You can see its soul in its voice. And I do not mean the sound of the I am no exception to this journey of recovery. music you plug in, I mean its own true voice that some Something happened to me in that experience. A part sound artists spend years looking for. Every Sound of me started healing when encountering the Sound System has its own set of perfect frequencies, and System. I witnessed that strong, highly charged,

74

presence, changing a normally neutral space - that I cross several times a week without any mutual impact into a warm healing bubble.

While watching the Sound System “containing” people that came to it for redemption, I couldn’t help but recall Frantz Fanon’s circle of dance.

In the Wretched of the Earth, Fanon exposes an extremely violent and hostile space where the colonized people are dispossessed to the bone. They were subjugated, stripped of everything necessary to their unity, sanity and progression. Essentially, they had no proper space where they could be themselves, practice their culture and social dynamic, heal, or even feel safe and out of reach from the smashing hand of the invader. The only safe space where the natives were free, was the circle of dance. A traditional African gathering around artistic expression, free dance and movement, music and cathartic theatre. This mobile,

occasional space, in which walls were the bodies of the wretched of the earth, was bigger than its observable surface as the affective mass (energy) of the bodies that form it is great enough to bend the affective field (same phenomenon observed with the Sound System) creating a curve that generates an “affective space” greater than the physical apparent space.

That circle of dance Fanon talks about was akin to the potter’s wheel for the wretched, a place they would march to, in order to put their pieces back together.

As I sat on the stairs in the hall and observed people marching to the Sound System, I could almost see Frantz Fanon sitting and from a distance watching the dancing bodies gravitate towards that magic space and thinking: “there is more to this than it seems”.

Nayress Ben Gaga, a Tunisian Scholar, is an MA student in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths and the Project Assistant for The United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Security Sector Reform Project. A member of the Goldsmiths Jazz Society, she is also a jazz singer.

Instagram: @nayress

75

From Italian Dancehalls to South London An epiphanic Journey through Sounds and Systems Claudia Nardini As it often happens, experiences are made of connections and revelations. It also happens that we transform ourselves during the process of connecting and revealing.

This is the way in which I would recall my experience with the Sound System Outernational conference.

In fact, I would call it an epiphany that revealed what I had been waiting so long to see. During the four-day event, I had the chance to expand my knowledge about the Sound System culture and empirically access practices that I had only read about in books or heard about through other people’s stories. Academically speaking, these alone would be great achievements. However, for those who seek to understand, and get their hands dirty in what is called practice, it is not enough. The conference, in a way, has bridged my theoretical background and placed it, geographically and politically, on a path that I am keen to continue. A continuing epiphany that is encapsulated in a commitment that I give to myself and that I aim to achieve collectively. The experience of SSO4 animated the theory and took it to the edge by questioning what we can do today with theoretical frames developed yesterday. Here is the deep sense of what I mean by “epiphany”. The major point is grounded on the fact that Goldsmiths has welcomed forms of cultural expression that have been hidden for a long time such as the Sound System Culture.

Furthermore, by doing so it has also opened a space in which we can question the political and social issues of our times. In this sense, I will consider as a case study the knife crime wave that concerns part of London youth and the implication this has in relation to the legacy of British colonialism and institutionalized racism. In analysing this, I will recall my Italian political background among the project of Cultural Studies and finally my everyday life as a Londoner.

This is when I link the moment of the epiphany to a political commitment for the future. I will try, then, to explain in these few pages what I felt, what I learned and – most importantly – describe the route that has been opened in front of me. It is a journey and it begins in a specific space. It has a positionality, but it

76

moves. It starts far away and it aims to go further.

Let’s begin.

Sound System Outernational was an absolutely astonishing experience. My colleagues and I helped out throughout the four-day-event in different ways.

We carried the actual Sound System and we learned how it is built, how it works and the practical skills that are required to make it sound ‘right’. This enabled me to see, live and listen to the stories of all the people who are part of the Sound System community.

However, as I have already mentioned, the journey begun years ago, in a small town in Italy. There, I discovered Cultural Studies and the brilliant mind of Stuart Hall.

What I enjoyed most when I discovered the project of Cultural Studies was its intersections with popular culture, critical theory, and its consideration for different forms of knowledge. Cultural Studies has taught me the relevance of cultural practices, of their claims and of what they fulfil, while pushing me to ask questions and explore issues and problems that characterise the world we live in. A world that should be acted on. Now. Keeping this in mind is helpful for the following steps of this journey.

I moved to London years ago, not for the tourist attractions but for the culture of ‘cut and mix’ that I had found in books and in the academic literature (such as Dick Hebdige, Tony Jefferson, Paul Gilroy and of course Stuart Hall) and for the desire to expand my knowledge with practical experiences.

Unfortunately, I soon realised how arduous it was to find authentic Sound System Culture in a city where gentrification and homologation are everyday concerns. Goldsmiths has opened a space where these cultural practices can not only be supported, but can also be shared with the entire community. The university’s geographic position, and its history, have made it possible for academics and practitioners to meet. The institution’s geographic position is a key feature and I will return to this later. The rooms of the

University became the space in which alternative ways of knowledge were exchanged. And more. The space revealed dialogues, experiences and lives. Encounters and exchanges were at the heart of the conference.

I really enjoyed the session dedicated to women in Sound System Culture. It was amazing to listen to their stories: how the first encounter with the Sound System mostly happened in the family environment; how the influences of different traditions mingled in original outcomes and different ways of expression.

However, the most interesting part was absolutely the one about the struggle of being a woman in the Sound System Culture. Sista Culcha explained to the audience how she chose her first stage name, which was ‘Contrary’, describing how the choice was designed to “counteract” the negative images of women in music and Sound System. It was, for her, a way to challenge the objectified image of women. This is because being a woman is a challenge in itself.

Flashback and connections.

This takes me back in time to when I was a student in Italy. Back to one of the most important books in my academic career, Resistance Through Rituals (1976) edited by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson. I was impressed by the role of women in subcultures particularly as they were, and often are marginalised in male-dominated environments. Sista Culcha and the other amazing panels of this session found their way to resist the assumption of Sound System being a practice centred around men. Likewise, the following session was dedicated to women in Sound System around Europe and their struggles. This reminded me of my own cultural background. It is at that specific moment that my past came across the present. Lives, connections and stories converged. I never thought I would be able to see different practices as part of a continuum. The whole experience brought me back to my roots, to what I had already lived and seen ‘back in the day’: to processes and practices that I had never seen with critical eyes. To use Paul Gilroy’s (1993) expression, I would call it a journey from routes to roots and routes again. At that time, I had a blurry idea of what a Sound System was. Most of the parties I was involved in were part of political festivals or squats. Occupied spaces in the name of the re-appropriation that were aimed at creating a network of social and political activities. I was already surrounded by a politicised environment or, more accurately, involved in activist groups. However, the Sound System was mostly associated with leisure.

A shared experience. I probably didn’t realize this until I got the chance to listen to the amazing stories from people I met at the SSO Conference. Back in

my sunny days in Italy, a Sound System night was just a dance night. It took me time to conceptualize what I had seen in those days. It certainly helped me to understand the experiences I have lived and the stories of the people I have listened to since I started my new life as a Londoner. Which is precisely when I re-thought about those sounds and voices.

For instance, I reconsidered the heterogeneous world of Italian culture and the value of its diversity.

The cultural differences and influences that my home country has and incorporates became more visible. The disparate dialects and languages. Also, the different claims that its communities articulate, depending on their particular stories and the relation to their territories. Everything was already laid out.

It was “there”, in front of me. I just needed to capture it. I just needed to understand the universality of the experience. In a sense, the conference enabled me to analyse today with a critical approach what I have lived in the past. This has also led me to create connections between lives and experiences that I would have otherwise rarely intersected. Furthermore, this new vision opened space, causing me to ask myself what the next step will be. That is why I would like to interpret this like a journey, which does not aim to ever end. As already mentioned, this is a path that continually grows and expands.

It is now that the epiphany unfolds and gives meaning to the purpose of the conferences that Goldsmiths has hosted over the last four years. In the exact moment in which the theory has taken shape, as an epiphany, is when it becomes a commitment for the future.

This realisation creates an intersection between the activist experience from back in the day and the intellectual adventure that I enjoyed after coming into contact with Cultural Studies. This intersection poses a question. More than one to be honest. What is the outcome of this event? How can we apply these voices and take them into our everyday life?

I should have probably mentioned before that I am not a musician. I am not even a technician of sound.

I am interested in the political claims that music and the culture connected to it expresses. In particular, I seek to understand the ways in which music can act on society and how the academic world can support these claims. I think music and politics make a pretty good team. After all, it was the English subcultures that led me to “meet” the intellectual project of Cultural Studies. And how mysterious is it that in order to pursue that project, Stuart Hall had first encountered the magnificent thoughts of the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci? It might sound odd, but, as an Italian, finding out about this amazing encounter between Gramsci and Hall, made me feel less lonely.

77

“Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” as Gramsci said.

Over the last few months, the media have focused their attention on youth crime in the English capital.

More than sixty people have died in 2018. We are The optimism, in this case, is linked to the fact that overwhelmed every day with numbers and statistics. the university can become a platform. A space – a A high percentage of the dead are black teenagers: political one – in which different realities cannot only young men excluded and marginalised by the express what a culture was, but also what a culture system who seek achievement and find themselves can and will be. For this, we probably need different experiencing violence. This phenomenon points to voices and different sounds. We need to address the the ongoing public disinvestment in youth and social claims in accordance with the conjuncture of the time services. It seems as though the tools to address we live in now. this scenario are lacking. Furthermore, music is too often blamed, rather than seen (and listened to) as a Being conjunctural. Antonio Gramsci taught me vehicle of expression. It is imperative to promote a in the first place the urgency to be conjunctural, to platform that listens to the voices (and music) of the observe popular culture and to analyse how it unfolds disenfranchised. As Blacker Dread explained in an as a playground for the interaction between different interview at BBC Breakfast: “it starts from education. agents, with different degrees of power. Stuart Hall [..] if you are constantly told you are not good, you continued asking questions about conjunctures. I are not good, you start to believe so. So, if you are come from a political background which is influenced told you can, you can, you start to believe it” (BBC

by Gramsci’s thought, yet sometimes it seems like Breakfast, 2018). While we ask ourselves what brings all the people who talk about him, forget his habit those young teens to waste their lives, we should also understand how of problematizing deep-rooted this issue social phenomena, is. I do believe that of taking nothing we cannot deal with for granted. Gramsci the problem of social gives us the means to exclusion and crime formulate questions, without engaging to interrogate the with the problems conjuncture. This connected to the legacy act of continuously of colonialism. The questioning was institutionalised racism something that I had that these teenagers forgotten for a long meet every day should time. The notion that Image credit: Giovanni Nardini also be denounced. By nothing is guaranteed and that our duty is to keep facing these big issues, we can try to work together, problematizing. For this, I claim, we need different as a universal community, to solve the problem. It voices. requires effort. And it is here that the University can become a useful tool.

In a country where social exclusion is a common phenomenon, to open up cultural spaces of It is here that I would like to transform my statement co-habitation is an ethical imperative. These places into a collective one. Because this is how we all felt: must allow different communities - researchers and a community, which created a collective voice and practitioners, community members and foreigners claim. That is why I would like to talk on behalf of - to share their interest or affection, as the Sound this community made of students, professors and System Outernational conference made possible for practitioners. We believe that it is necessary to open the sound system community. the University to all those who are currently excluded The central point of my claim rests on the belief that the University, alongside the academics who are part of it, cannot be separated from what is happening in society. This applies mostly to the fact that Goldsmiths hosts different courses based on Cultural Studies. As mentioned before, all the axes lead us to re-imagine the active role of academics.

78

from it. As part of the academic world and, mostly, as a Student in Postcolonial Culture and Global Policy, I sought to connect the legacy of colonialism, the politics of race and class to these issues. We need to break with a specific system of thought and with narratives that aim to keep a part of the population marginalised or, even worse, depict it as unavoidable.

It is necessary to fight against this narrative. Like the

Sound System culture did, in a way, at the time of its emergence and throughout its history of diasporic ramifications. We want to make a collective claim. We want to use education and create out of it a chance and a call for a better society. This is how I sought to connect my Italian political background, my interest in Cultural Studies and the reality that I face in my everyday life as a Londoner.

However, conventional education is not what we should look at. As exemplified by the knowledge practices of the sound system culture, what we are interested in is education that emerges from below. This involves the contribution of everyone.

That builds speakers and plugs cables in order to increase the volume of the sound – but also that of the claim. Everyone deserves the opportunity to achieve happiness and live and work for the good of the community. Opening the University in a country where quality education is inaccessible or denied to a large amount of the population, is an imperative that the academic world cannot ignore. In this sense, the academic world needs what Gramsci calls Intellettuali organici, the Organic Intellectuals. Or, in this case, the Diasporic Intellectuals, if we consider, following in the footsteps of Stuart Hall (2017), the idea that Diaspora functions as a space of enquiry. And more.

If we imagine the University as a platform, we can then believe in the encounter of different realities and experiences. Is the repressive action of police the right way to resolve the crisis of hope that much of working-class London youth is torn by? Could it, instead, be solved with a new, open, decolonised narrative? The university can emerge as the space of this struggle. Or better, as one of the spaces of this struggle. This is the exact moment by which the journey embraces the claim and fights for its resolution. It is the essence of the journey itself. It is what has been always there and what it will always be.

It can concern different realities according with their specific necessities. However, the claim remains the same. If music is a vehicle, it is necessary to make its voice resonate. To speak with the youth community, listen to their voices (and music) and fight the construct that categorises them as hopeless.

The geographic position of Goldsmiths, in South East London, is strategic for this. Furthermore, the connection with the population of the neighbourhood is essential. Communication with different realities is a tool that the university should use if we want to change even a small piece of the world we live in. We do not have in mind a

redemptive idea of the University. Neither do we understand it as a way to save marginalised souls.

We want to see the university as an open stage where people can exchange experiences and think together a different way of living side by side. We understand it as an accessible place (a physical building, an idea, a community) where everyone can bring their own knowledge and share it with the community. In the community.

The Sound System Outernational Conference has unveiled and welcomed a space that for so long has been hidden. It has also created a community that commits to continue in this direction. To produce connections, engage with people and create alternative solutions to this society. During the 70’s, the Sound System culture empowered an entire generation in the UK. It fought against racism and exposed historical injustices, while supporting an open and hybrid community. Enhancing these types of interventions can help us to work together and face the challenges of our times.

I am grateful to have had the chance to be part of the Sound System Outernational Conference. I never thought I would assist Sound System practitioners and learn how to connect cables, or have the patience to create the perfect sound. I never thought I would have the opportunity to bridge theory and practice, and, using the knowledge gathered, to pose questions relating to the everyday issues that society faces. It has been an astonishing experience, which has made me feel closer to my colleagues, but mostly, it has enabled me to continue this adventure marked by the intersection between political practice, cultural theory and social and political urgencies. A path has been paved and it is our duty to keep going in this direction. While writing these pages I ask myself if the confused description of this journey makes sense to the readers. I am wondering if it is possible to unravel in the right way, if there is one, the feeling and the hope that this event has brought to me. I continually question my positionality and the right to speak, from my Italian-immigrant-point of view.

However, in this journey I have met special souls from the most distant parts of the world and all with completely different backgrounds. We walked and worked together to give our humble contribution for a better society.

This, for me, is the real aim of my academic career: the intersection of theory and practice, and the willingness to use it in my everyday life.

“Optimism of the will.”

79

References BBC Breakfast, 2018 (11 March), available at https://www.facebook.com/bbcbreakfast/ videos/2052986068048854/UzpfSTE0MzQ3NDYxMjY6MTAyMTcwODcyODU4NDEwMTc/?q=Claudia%20BBc%20breakfast (accessed on 04 November 2018) Contributions from the panellists of SSO Conference 2018 can be found at https://www.facebook.com/ Sound-System-Outernational-740364419397765/ (accessed on 05 November 2018) Gilroy, P. 1993. The Black Atlantic.London: Verso.

Gramsci, A. 1975. Quaderni del carcere. Edizione critica a cura dell’Istituto Gramsci. Torino: Einaudi.

Hall, S. and Jefferson T. 1976. Resistance through Rituals. Youth subcultures in post-war Britain. Abingdon: Routledge.

Hall, S. Ed. by Bill Shwarz. 2017. Familiar Stranger: a life between two Islands. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Claudia Nardini studied History at University of Pisa (Italy) and she is currently a MA Student in Postcolonial Culture and Global Policy at Goldsmiths University, London. Back in the day in Italy, she was part of a political collective that also ran a cultural organisation. Their work focused on practices of inclusion, re-appropriation of spaces and project with young. She has lived in London since 2014. She currently works at the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton. Her interests concern cultural and political practices of identity, subcultures, and music. Claudia aims to work in the learning sector with a role that supports the decolonization of education.

80

Noisy Echoes

Pablo De La Cruz

Incluso el silencio que se produce entre cada canto es también un eslabón de esa malla, un signo, un momento del mensaje que la naturaleza se dice a sí misma.

Even the silence that occurs between each chant Is also a link in that mesh, a sign, a moment of the message that nature says to itself.

Wounds

Wounds and scars are a map of the history of a body.

These wounds shape us, they traumatize us, they heal us. There are visible wounds, some people talk from their wounds, they talk about their wounds, they say, “look, this scar was a knife”, “this other was a rifle”, “this one was a gun”. The Irish rebel song tells you, “this is my home and I will not stop fighting until it becomes mine again”; black rappers in the US say “they kill one of us every 28 hours, so Fuck tha Police”; Victor Jara in La Nueva Canción Chilena tells you, “the enemy is the oligarch, the imperialist, your hunger is their fault, his wealth is exploitation”; the Rastaman say, “Babylon has stolen you from your original land, they oppressed you, so, get up, stand up”. But there are less visible wounds, hidden, they run underground, like background noises, invisible in their persistence, something goes wrong but you do not know exactly what it is, you try to focus your anxiety but you don’t know what to focus it on. And then suddenly the noise stops, and you understand the reason for your pain, it becomes present when you realize his absence, his meaning emerges from his disappearance. Certain messages, certain badly healed wounds, do not explicitly express their origin, they reveal themselves only as decomposition, as transition, as recoding of the meaningless present that only in the future might be properly tuned into (Burroughs and Gysin 1979).

Juan Luis Martínez

for both territories deformed by the European invasion, reshaping the original culture with the process of colonialism and then post-colonialism. A good image to represent this is the Catholic churches built on top of Aztec temples: they were built using the same bricks from the destroyed temples. The great rupture of the historical continuum caused by the slave trade, “a historical trauma characterized by forced erasures of cultural memory, and disruptions in linear conceptions of history and human progress” (Veal 2007: 204) and the destruction of the original cultures of America during the European invasion, could be placed as the first and great historical traumas that these two musical expressions carry. Both cultures burden in their origin the disappearance of the original culture and the imposition of new paradigms and models, new languages that demand the extinction of the original language, new generations are born in fictitious landscapes, artificial sets where it is impossible to feel complete, uprooted imaginaries (the oppressor inside the oppressed) that automatically position you below, always incomplete, fragmented, deceived.

But in certain historical moments these fragmented discourses become whole. In a type of archaeological sublimation they find the missing pieces and remember what is its origin. In the case of Jamaica in its African roots and its Rastafari spirituality that africanises white Catholicism. The Count Ossie's drums reflecting Centred in two countries, Jamaica and Chile, and two Africa's echo in new nation beat, the new music, Ska. Marley, in Manley words, recrossing the Middle sound expressions, Dub and Thrash Metal, crossed Passage, “He who knows his past can believe that by two narratives: silence and noise. Two music the future is the territory of hope”1: Roots. Tubby expressions where noise and silence communicate something missing, quiet but meaningful, and you have drowned the vocals, the text, subtraction, erasure, to look for its meaning and origin in historical trauma, decomposition: Dub. Following the same path in disappearance and silence, in the catalyst power of towards the historical origin, Chile turns to the peasant folklore and the South American rhythms, mestizo noise

Trauma

Jamaica and Chile share similar stories: European conquest, slavery, colonization, industrialization, urbanization and globalization (Veal 2007: 26). With small variations in dates and masters, the same dérive

1

“Did Bob Marley redeem this identity by re-crossing the Middle Passage and re-entering the Kingdom of his past?(…)

Faith begins with an acceptance of the possibility of continuity.

If you cannot survey a continuity into your own past, you cannot believe in a continuity into your own future. Marley had that faith.” (Reggae International, p.12)

81

mix between the Amerindian cultures and the music brought by the Spaniards. Musicians such as Violeta Parra, Margot Loyola or Hector Pavez delve into the anthropological investigation and historical rescue of the folkloric tradition. Saving, recording, becoming memory agents. In that dig, in that trip to the centre, to the peasant, to the peasant feeding the labourer needs of factories and mines, in that deepening it's inevitable to find the wounds, the misery and the exploitation.

The rescue of memory exposes, dissects the social body evidencing the disease and its causes.

At the late 60s and the beginning of the 70s, these forces mentioned in the previous paragraph were politically channelled by Democratic Socialism. In Jamaica, the People's National Party candidate Michael Manley was elected Prime Minister in the 1972 elections, ten years since achieved political independence from Britain. Ten years in which the Black Power and Rastafarianism, Marxism and Socialism expressed the disagreement of the working-class, peasant, students and unemployed against the oligarchy inherited from the British colonization and the increasingly strong and repressive control by the US. “We are with the West” Alexander Bustamante, Prime Minister (1962-67) and businessman, had previously proclaimed (Harsch 1981).

The oligarchies of the Americas have never stopped being with the West. Finally, Manley arrived in power and began reforms aimed at redistributing wealth and achieving independence over foreign control.

of September 1973 there was a coup d'etat, a very abrupt one, forever transforming the morphology of the country. Although in Jamaica the process was less abrupt, foreign intervention generated a climate of political violence, both through the US and due to the influence of the British colonial legacy. Armed gangs were formed to support one or another political party.

This "tribal" warfare from the ghettos evolved into pure violence, “detached itself from political ideals and became self-sustaining, a type of random violence born of social frustration” (Veal 2007: 206).

Lost

Disappearance does not only mean losing substance, its complexity lies in the permanence of a “deep memory and the presence of what refuses resolution.”

Disappearance brings afloat the “experiences of loss, fragmentation, and even death” (LaBelle 2018: 42).

Disappearance activates mechanisms that move through the dark areas of consciousness. We must look for alternative mechanisms to the reason to dialogue with the unspeakable. The result of filling the violent erasures goes into the logic of noise, in the degradation of information. In the noise as denial, as the image of what is not.

The generations that grew up during the military dictatorship were moulded in a mixture of noise and silence. What happens, for example, with the Thrash Similarly, in Chile, after a long uprising of the people, Metal that emerged in Chile in the decade of the Salvador Allende was elected president in November 1970, initiating the construction of what would be called 80s, a music born in the USA and Europe, which in Chile developed with great strength becoming one of La Unidad Popular (the Popular Unity), which would imply a series of reforms where the wealth of the country the most productive scenes of the Americas. Music was redistributed, the companies of social interest were that developed basically in the absence of explicit nationalized, and the workers became participants in the discourse, the lyrics were in a language that no one management of these companies. A government where really understood, in English, sung with guttural improving the material conditions of the people, beyond cries that prevented anyone from understanding the lyrics even more, played live in venues with bad the interests of the private and foreign capital was the acoustics, with low quality amplifiers, with low quality main objective. microphones, low quality drums, with teenagers trying to play virtuoso guitar solos having more desire than These two nations were in similar processes of recognizing the value of their own people, a process of technique and with audiences and musicians with a regional character that marked the contingencies of the lot of alcohol and paraguayo (cannabis mixed with mysterious chemicals for purely economic purposes) majority of the countries in the Americas. running through their veins. The format in which the During the 70s and 80s, the US government, in a political music travelled was the cassette, the pirate cassette, the copy of the copy of the copy. In each copy the campaign to reach dominance over the whole region, started what is now known as the Condor Operation. In recording mutated, each recorder added its own Chile, not only the overthrow of the socialist government information, the AM/FM Radio Cassette Recorders was part of the project, but the military implementation were mainly imported from Asia thanks to the new commercial treaties, the incipient new global economic of the neoliberal model. Chile was used as a guinea order acting as a DJ remixing the original with new pig by the Chicago School of Economics. On the 11th information through the electronic pieces and circuits,

82

a whole new global order expressed in microscopic changes within the sound.

Listening to bands like Massacre, Necrosis, Torturer, Carnbonized, and Pentagram, with an aesthetic of death, skeletons, devils, sacrifices, blood, the symbolic description of recent terrors1, this 80s young generation grew in silence, because talking was dangerous.

Nobody wanted to die, nobody wanted to be hungry, nobody wanted to be poor. No one wanted to receive electric shocks at police stations. Intrinsically we all carry the fear, alongside the scarcity, the incompleteness of living on implanted imaginaries. A whole part of the story was erased with blood and supplanted by images of others, the economic bonanza. A whole generation moulded under fear. The military in power. It is difficult to feel safe in front of someone armed and who "only receives orders". When silence means to stay alive, a whole generation is raised under the most violent silence. To embrace the noise is just the natural path.

mixing Dub tracks "full of ghosts". Dark teenagers, with kilometres and years away, dancing in a circle immersed in noise and screams, full of demons. Obscured meaning showing the same wounds, echoes that do not stop to wander. Soundscapes like purgatories. Echoes that meet and resonate generating new cartographies. Cartographies made of sound and time.

Two points on the map that resonate closer than the old maps show.

Bibliography

Burroughs, W. and Gysin, B. (1982). The Third Mind.

Seavers Books: New York Cox, C. and Warner, D (2017). Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. Bloomsbury: London Davis, S. and Simon, P. (Eds) (1983). Reggae International. Thames and Hudson: London Harsch, E. (1981). U.S. Intervention in Jamaica: How Washington Toppled the Manley Government. Pathfinder Press: N.Y. Hope, D. (2006). Inna di Dancehall: Popular Culture and Disappearance, erasure, death. Incomplete stories, the Politics of Identity in Jamaica. University of the West laden with absence. Although Dub was born out of an Indies Press: Kingston. error, although on side A-side there was the presence, King, S. (1998). International Reggae, Democratic complete, without absences, the dubbed 45 rpm single Socialism, and the Secularization of the Rastafarian B-side generated a radical aesthetic paradigm shift, Movement 1972-1980. Popular Music and Society 22, 3: expelled into the future in infinite echoes that never 39-60. cease returning to their origin, to look for the lost, the erased, the absence that becomes present in the very act LaBelle, B. (2018). Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent of disappearing, disappearing in silences, in screaming, Forms of Resistance. Goldsmiths Press: London.

Sanchez. M (2007) Thrash Metal: Del Sonido al in spaces emptied or saturated with chaos. Electronic prosthetics as weapons. Sound and electricity share an Contenido. Origen y Gestaciรณn de una Contracultura (Bachelor Dissertation). Univercidad de Chile. Santiago. abstract nature, apprehensible only by transduction, electrons travelling tortuous ways, looking for the exit Thompson, M and Biddle, I. (Eds) (2013). Sound, Music, between resistances and condensations, between filling Affects: Theorizing Sonic Experience. Bloomsbury: London and emptying, almost ethereal energy amplified and Veal, M. (2007). Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered projected in the air space, moulded by engineers in Songs in Jamaican Reggae. Wesleyan University Press: studios as patchwork products of the planetary clash.

Middletown The imperialist technoscience that seeks to devour everything, control everything, and the Antropofaga (De Andrade, 1928) nature that devours everything, the Pablo De La Cruz studied Fine Art and Sound new race, the new humanity, the clash of the Old World Technology, and failed at the trumpet. Early on, he took with the even older New World. Engineers moulding the path of free improvisation, playing alone or with electrons and projecting them into space into the others, in more or less stable configurations, swapping future, the echoes of Dub continue to recode, the sonic instruments and visions. Nowadays he focuses on starship in which they escaped from chaos and blood, connecting various machines and softwares to channel from death. In its decomposition it leaves scattered the s Sharing Science ound flow. (This bio is full of gaps new worlds, new interpretations and recodifications, in filled by leisure and proletariat labour). their absence generates infinite presences, repetitions, reverberations, it reflects and disappears. pablodelacruzserrat@gmail.com https://ablo.bandcamp.com Taking two points you can deduce the position of a third one. Two points on a map show a third one. Lee Perry

1 Living in fear/Of the menace known/The future unveiled/Shows frozen horror. (Lyrics from Pentagram song Fatal Predictions)

83

Sharing Science Margarita Iriarte

‘Until the lion tells his side of the story, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.’

African Proverb

Three years ago, I took the decision to leave my country. Having a passport from a place lost in the South of the world didn’t make my decision easy, but it was a necessary one. Moving to the UK made me feel alienated sometimes. Not able to express deeply, not able to really connect nor to feel at home. As part of this journey, I eventually landed in Peckham. The mix of different sounds, different smells, different accents made me immediately feel at home. What for some was considered a tough area had for me the South American warmth that I had to leave behind. Warmth that I unfortunately didn't find when I stepped into a university as a student. Due to this search for warmth, I ended up becoming involved in Sound System culture.

Between the 11th and the 14th January of 2018, the fourth edition of the Sound System Outernational symposium happened in the Professor Stuart Hall building of Goldsmiths University of London. I was part of the event as a volunteer assistant organiser.

Of course, this participation did not start on the 11thn or end on the 14th. Just as anything involving sound, it seems that magical forces connect practices and people, surrounding us, waiting for the right moment to interact. In this paper, I will explain how these forces worked on me: some may call these forces chance, others may call them science, science in the Jamaican Patois meaning, that of black magic, used to refer to those forces that sometimes one cannot control. I will describe how these forces, in the shape of a series of small events, led me to investigate the reasons behind the underperformance of students of Afro-Caribbean descent in the contemporary UK context. How this connects with the sound system culture, and how, at the same time, this helped me – an immigrant in the UK – find a place in the vortex of the multicultural.

Beginnings Sound System Outernational (SSO from now on) is an event born from the interest of a group of researchers and practitioners, who approach sound system culture through a practice-as-research methodology, mixing theory, practical skills and performances. From the three previous SSO until now, these events have been created through a process of openness facilitated by the ongoing debate on the popular culture tradition

84

of the sound system. Through different panels, and practitioners of a broad spectrum SSO became an excellent opportunity for dialogue and exchange, as well as a way to challenge existing paradigms on culture not only in the UK but in the global sound system community. The particularly open characteristics of SSO gives recognition and dignity to the vernacular knowledges and practices, transcending the often-opaque walls of the university (the academia) and exchanging different but equally rich types of knowledge. Through this type of practice, vernacular knowledge meets academia, practices that have been historically concentrated within the structures of power, opening up by this a possibility for new knowledges and understandings.

An excellent example of this is the almost magical participation of Jahman 1st.an elderly gentleman who came to attend the sessions but arrived by “mistake” the day before, just when we were setting up Al Finger’s sound system in the atrium of the Stuart Hall building. He sat there and started asking us questions such as when the activities would start and what each of us was doing. He pointed with his cane to each one of us giving directions. In the meantime, we were trying to connect up and later to tune the sound system, and although there were people with experience in sound, no one seemed capable of setting a proper tuning. We were walking back and forth listening and trying to figure out what the problem was, until Jahman 1st sat in front of the controls and started tuning it. In a matter of minutes, it was all solved. It turned out he was a sound man, and he himself had a sound system.

He even played at The Four Aces (a historical club that was documented in a film presented on the second day of activities). So, he was definitely a person with the perfect knowledge to tune the sound. He started giving us lessons on how to do it. “Last on first off” (the amps) is a lesson that I will never forget. With all that knowledge and experience that he could easily share with us, it was a great surprise to hear that this was the first time he had ever set foot inside the University.

Even more of a shock considering he lived for over 30 years in the Lewisham area.

With this in mind, the sessions started. An enriching

set of workshops and lectures allowed us to share and listen to so many stories. In a workshop scheduled during Saturday morning – Gregory Isaacs Listening Session organised by Edwina Peart – people shared different encounters or memories about Gregory Isaacs’ songs. Some very personal experiences touched upon different paradigms of education and the communities’ relation with it. On how some invaluable pieces of knowledge were acquired by listening to music. On how a part of the history that was not told in the officiality of the classrooms could be learned through the music, the lyrics, the sound.

Power by Enhancement By transforming the record player into a musical instrument and by taking the construction of sound systems into their hands, Jamaicans developed and transformed sonic technology and democratised music, sound and the embodiment of the music and the dance.

That tradition travelled all the way to the UK with the West Indian migration becoming an important space of sharing and maintaining Caribbean culture in the UK, but also expanding it as a place of encounter for the Afro Caribbean diaspora worldwide, sharing knowledge and educating communities. Covering the needs that an education historically based on maintaining the hierarchical structures of the dominant Western episteme could not cover.

Unfortunately, this knowledge did not receive institutional recognition. And although progress has been made, the lack of representation of the Black British citizen within the National Curriculum remains.

This lack continues even though black people embody a history of the development of technology, and that through vernacular knowledge and reverse engineering they have revolutionised the way music is produced and experienced. There are common assumptions that tend to dismiss the work that non-western ways of knowing have created and developed.

“It is likely that much of the intimacy between blacks and technology has not been explored due to the all-too-easy assumption that blacks, again, blacks are either in an adversarial relationship to technology or fundamentally opposed to it due to lack of access or differential conceptual and political priorities”(Louis Chude-Sokei 2016: 7).

education. And this is precisely what, as part of the practice-as-research of the SSO, has brought to light.

As a Chilean, those hierarchical and colonial processes are not unfamiliar to me. So, identifying those practices of vindication of communities feels equally as a personal as it does a political task.

This historical lack of acknowledgement, and the fact that we create a place not just to recognise the work and contribution to technology but a place to listen, is what brings to the table declarations such as the one that follows. Practitioners like De Bo General, who ran the Let’s Play Toasting workshop happening on the fourth day of activities said: “[Sound system] is about creating something of our own, where we could be respected. There was nothing for us in school, no one recognised who we were there, there was nothing for us when we came out, sound systems were all there was…”(De Bo General, 13th January 2018) The same day that this conversation happened, a woman from one of the panels offered me a ride home in her car since we were neighbours. While riding, she started asking me about my experience as a newly arrived person in the UK. I told her a few things about myself without really knowing how personal the conversation could become. Through migration we both ended up confessing – me as an immigrant for less than one year in this country, she having been born in Deptford from Jamaican parents – how tired we both were of being asked where we came from all the time.

How weird it was for her, born and raised in South East London, to have to explain over and over again that she is actually from here, when white British people asked her where she came from. She talked about her worries when she realised she was pregnant, and that her son, now an adult, would have to face the same situations that she did as a woman of West Indian descent in a hostile environment like the British context. Moreover, that through the construction of a sound system and her active participation in the sound system culture she was able to construct a sense of community. As someone new in the immigration game, I cannot do more than respect the courage of her black British identity. Not a fixed fetishized one, that looks to standardise the properimmigrant, the proper black in the multicultural game. But an identity that is a dynamic ongoing process of searching and constant evolution, as Stuart Hall (1996), another West Indian immigrant, would say.

These easy assumptions (among others) deeply entangles historical hierarchical factors, placing black culture, black history and communities in the shadows.

The discrimination and disparities that historically Shadowed by what is considered proper: proper knowledge, proper education, ultimately white-western have faced black British individuals generally, and

85

people of West Indies descent in particular, contribute to increase the gap between ethnic groups, leading to several problems that perpetuate a system of inequality.

These systems of inequality are extremely marked in the educational system, and are particularly entangled due to a wider issue relating to the predominance of white teachers in the British education system, itself a product of racial and class-based discrimination at all levels of education. As presented in a report by Runnymede Trust based on surveys to the National Union of Teachers by 2015, only 7.6% of the total teaching workforce in England was from a non-white background, and the disproportionality is most marked at at leadership level. The number is in sharp contrast with the 30% of pupils in state-maintained schools on average. As one school teacher of Caribbean origin mentioned to The Independent: “If the children see SMT [the senior management team] as being all white and the cleaning staff from ethnic minorities, that is all they aspire to be.

Especially if they do not see people around them or members of their families in senior positions.”

(14th April 2017) The lack of teachers of diverse ethnicities produces in the student a distance with the institutions. As presented in a report by UPP Foundation and the Social Market Foundation (2017), it is shown that black students are 50% more likely to drop out of university.

Students cannot identify with their teachers, which also prevents the generation of possible close relationships and a sense of belonging.

With all this in mind, I started wondering how things were where I live, around me and if some of these separations that I could perceive in some experiences, like Jahman 1st who had never been in the University, were maybe related to these issues in education.

Through informal conversations and interviews conducted in my local community, in Peckham, South East London, I could develop an in-depth insight into how the parents of West Indian descent students really feel. When I asked how they felt about the education their children were receiving, a common response was that there was a lack of cultural connection to the curriculum. Although efforts have been made in order to include black history in the National Curriculum, it tends to be always in relation to slave history. As mentioned by Femi Akomolafe (2017) in the online article “Questionable Black History in the British Curriculum”, to centre black history in the dehumanisation suffered during slavery makes it really difficult for youths to feel proud of their identity.

86

“Black history ought to not just be about slavery – the Atlantic slavery only interrupted black history.

Black history includes the achievements of African Empires pre-Atlantic slavery.”(Akomolafe 2017) Through my conversations with neighbours, some people have even claimed that centring black history mainly around history of slavery feels – in their own words – “violent” to them. Also, that representing their community in these terms was demotivating or at least not very appealing to the students and that the majority of the families feel the need to compensate this lack of variety in the curriculum with outside school education on the matter.

Having to search for education outside the classroom resonates with those experiences mentioned during the SSO. How the music plays a part in transmitting a history that has not yet been told completely. Or at least, have not been taught within the official curriculum. In the 1977 song Shackles and Chains by Earl Zero asks: “What about the half, the half that never been told?”

The ways in which the Caribbean community has reacted to the conditions of education within Britain and the role that the sound system played for the creation of community – through the music, through the lyrics, through the meanings that it was transmitting – meant that sound system was a very important outlet of counter-education for the youngers. I was also very important for the transmission of knowledge between different generations, particularly for transmitting knowledges and values to newer generations.

As a result of the lack of connection with teachers, lack of self-worth and systematic oppression, Afro-Caribbean descent students are the ones that historically have shown to have the lowest performance in schools (Strand 2015). These results are both the expression and the cause of the exposure to a greater chain of inequality, which encompasses many more aspects of life. Based on a survey made in 2008 by academics of Warwick University which tracked 15,000 pupils through their education, Afro-Caribbean students are being subjected to institutional racism in English schools which can dramatically undermine their chances of academic success. Low achievement among some black students is made worse because teachers don’t expect them to succeed.

These problems are not new, and have been historically an issue for people of Afro-Caribbean descent in the UK. In 1971, to tackle these problems, Bernard Coard wrote a small book called How the West Indian Child

is made Educationally Sub-normal in the British School System. This book was published by New Beacon for the Caribbean Education and the Community Workers’ Association, a group of West Indian professionals who were advocating for the improvement of the conditions of the West Indians in the UK. It was directed specifically to the parents of West Indian descent, and was part of a campaign against discrimination that black youth experienced in the educational system in Great Britain and explained clearly and in a simple language how students were discriminated and mistreated through institutional racism in schools. Through the constant exposure to biases, pupils developed an inferiority complex. According to Coard the education system shapes roles by maintaining the status quo and preserving social order (1971). He suggested a set of immediate actions in order to transform these structures of hierarchisation.

The response to this book by the black community exceeded expectations. Parents started organising themselves, and ‘Black Supplementary’ schools were formed all around the UK. There were as many as 150 supplementary schools around the country in matter of a few months (Coard 2005).

As described by Mignolo (2011), a decolonial state of society is defined mainly by the questioning of the conditions that led to build and control structures of knowledge: those structures based on racism and patriarchy and justified through religion or Scientific Reason. What does not fit is marginalised. Just as black people are marginalised in the great history of white western history, African history and diasporic processes are left in the margins in this one-way path of the creation of The History and The Knowledge. In the same way when we tend to think about technology of sound, it is easy to dismiss the incredible and pioneering contributions of sound system culture globally.

Concluding thoughts

Sound system dances, the gatherings and the maintaining of the sound culture in the UK played a fundamental role in these communities, and in building a net that connected them and gave them a space in which they could feel validated on their own terms. And with this, a different way of constructing community, and of thinking and knowing through an embodied understanding of processes and of systems.

The photographer Dennis Morris explains in relation to the dances:

"They were a way for people to unwind and for This way of self-organising is what we could call an people to meet and to exchange stories about autopoietic process (Maturana-Varela 1980), a dynamic their week, how they were progressing in England way of cognition that through the creation, production and what was also happening back in Jamaica. and maintenance of a system, is able to maintain itself in The music played was coming from Jamaica, and time. Self-replicating to maintain the community under the music was like a social comment in the same their own terms. Taking care of their people and the way rap music is a social comment on black lives younger generations. But as the dynamism of any living in America. That was the importance of the sound organisation, neither the community nor their identity system, of the music and the records in those are fixed in time. Although living organisms replicate days." (Morris in Cafolla 2015) their environment, as a process in constant construction and evolution, their environment mutates with time, The sound here generated social cohesion. The dances sometimes mixing with other autopoietic forms or organised around it, just as supplementary schools, organisations. were some of the autopoietic mechanisms. Creating a space within what appeared as a rigid closed structure Now, 47 years later, supplementary schools are still of what being British meant. Where there was no such working strong. A question that may naturally arise is, thing as a hierarchy. No such thing as one universal what are they teaching different that works with the history and one unique truth. Not one proper way of students? How different are they from regular schools? being British. As the Jamaican philosopher Sylvia The answer is: not much. In reality, the biggest difference Wynter explains in relation to aesthetics: is that in supplementary schools, professors have higher expectations of their students. The students feel that they “The imperative of Aesthetic 1 is to secure the have a space there, that they are listened to and that they social cohesion of the specific human order of are expected to perform at their best. Also, and equally which it is a function. It aims to produce the important, black studies and black history are taught. All “unitary system of meanings” able to induce the in all, one may say, what pupils found in supplementary altruistic psycho-affective field whose cohering schools was the same thing that young people found in mechanisms serve to integrate each specific mode the sound system culture. A place of their own, a place of ultrasociety or “form of life” (Wynter 1992: 244) to be themselves, a place of resistance outside of the matrix of power and colonisation.

87

Aesthetic 1, the hegemonising one, in place in opposition to Aesthetics 2, the one surged in each place from the below as part of the natural ways of being of the communities. This dominance of Aesthetic 1 generates and maintains the idea of one truth and one development. It is utilised in order to maintain status quo and it makes coexisting with new cognitions look like an impossible deal. In this sense, the necessity of addressing these hierarchies and issues within educational are crucial. As Nia Imara, head of the National Association of Black Supplementary Schools noted in an interview on the subject, there are still many flaws as to how to shorten the gap that separates students of Afro-Caribbean descent from the others and this needs to be addressed:

own history, as I have told mine. Of diaspora and identity, of construction of processes of recognition on their own terms, decolonial ones. Developing a unique way of establishing their dignity on the grounds of an empire that has historically pursued the elimination of this dignity, these cultures and of their value systems.

Bibliography

Akomolafe, F. (2017) “Questionable Black History in the British Curriculum.” National Institute for African Studies http://africanstudies.org.uk/2017/01/14/questionable-black-history-in-the-british-curriculum/

Cafolla, A. (2015). “Capturing the men behind Hackney’s 60s sound systems, interview with Dennis Morris.” Dazed http://www.dazeddigital.com/ “[The government] is not interested in the photography/article/26949/1/capturing-the-people-beadvancement of the black community(...)The main hind-the-sound-systems-of-hackney challenge is the financing. The government is not going to do it so black businesses need to step up Cham, M. ed. (1992). EX-ILES, Essays on Caribbean to the challenge.”(Imara in Duncan 2013) Cinema.Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

The same goes for cultural manifestations like sound system culture. But unlike the old colonialist notion of the monocultural nation, and beyond the essentialised and commodified way of dealing with subaltern subjects (suppressing them under multiculturalist policies), the everyday actions of organisations such as Sound Systems and Saturday Schools offer a pluricultural aim where everyone has a place and a contemporaneity.

Through mechanisms like sound system culture and supplementary schools, communities of West Indian descent in the UK maintain a spirit of unity and tradition that allows them to keep strong, Additionally, despite the adversities they faced historically, the ways and systems of transmission of knowledge allowed sound systems to transform the way in which we perceive and experience music.

88

When these are the imperatives around us, the need to create a counterculture and a counter-education becomes a survival mechanism. The need for acting under the radar. The necessity of building an autopoietic community that through collaboration and reproduction of their self-categories and knowledges are able to maintain their heritage and constantly reinvent themselves. Therefore, the decolonising aim of generating knowledge from the borders, from the dialogue of epistemes, becomes particularly important.

Where the popular and the academic, the locals and the foreigners merge. Interventions in the canonical structures of knowledge like the SSO, gives recognition to the practitioners, performers and aficionados, the ones that through practice and embodiment of this counter-culture and counter-education have told their

Chude-Sokei, L. (2016). The Sound of Culture.

Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press Coard, B. (1971). How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System: The Scandal of the Black Child in Schools in Britain.New Beacon for the Caribbean Education and Community Workers’ Association (CECWA).

Coard, B. (2005). “Why I wrote the 'ESN book'”.

The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/ education/2005/feb/05/schools.uk Demie, F (2005). “Achievement of Black Caribbean pupils: good practice in Lambeth schools”. British Educational Research Journal, Volume 31, Issue 4, pages 481–508, August Demie, F & McLean. C. (2015). “The Underachievement of Black Caribbean Heritage Pupils in Schools”.

Lambeth Local Education Authority (LEA) Report.

Curtis, P. (2008). “Education: Black Caribbean children held back by institutional racism in schools, says study”.The Guardian. https://www.theguardian. com/education/2008/sep/05/raceineducation. raceinschools Du Gay, P & Hall, S. eds. (1996) Questions of Cultural Identity. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

Duncan, N. (2013). “All black children should attend supplementary schools, Interviewed with Dr Kehinde

Andrews”. The Voice http://www.voice-online.co.uk/ article/%E2%80%98all-black-children-should-attend-supplementary-schools%E2%80%99 Gillborn, D. & Mirza, H.S. (2000). Educational Inequality: Mapping Race and Class. OFSTED Report.

Maturana, H & Varela, J. (1972). Autopoiesis and Cognition, The Realization of the Living.Dordecht: D, Reidel Publishing Company.

Mignolo, W. (2011).The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Pells, R. (2017) “Black and ethnic minority teachers face 'invisible glass ceiling' in schools, report warns”.

The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/ news/education/education-news/black-asian-ethnic-minority-teachers-invisible-glass-ceiling-racism-schools-report-runnymeade-nut-a7682026.html

Discography

Earl Zero. (1977). Shackles and Chains [Recorded

by Earl Zero, Mixed by King Tubby’s]. On Freedom Sounds [Vinyl record]. Freedom Sounds Co, Jamaica.

(1977)

Margarita Iriarte studied Fine Art and Aesthetics in Chile and an MA in Culture Industries at Goldsmiths.

Her primary work field has been as curator and cultural manager. She writes poetry and short stories, with publications in Chile and Australia. She also has been involved in the independent music scene as a musician and DJ under the alias Margaret Thrasher. jaleaconyogur@gmail.com

Rampton, A. (1981). West Indian Children in Our Schools. Cmnd 9453, London HMSO. Runnymede Trust (2017) Visible Minorities, Invisible Teachers BME Teachers in the Education System in England.

Strand, S. (2015) Ethnicity, deprivation and educational achievement at age 16 in England: trends over time.Department of Education UK. https://assets. publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/ uploads/attachment_data/file/439867/RR439B-Ethnic_ minorities_and_attainment_the_effects_of_poverty_ annex.pdf.pdf Swann, L. (1985).Education For All: Final Report of The Committee of Inquiry Into The Education Of Children From Ethnic Minority Groups. Cmnd 9453, London.

Wynter, S. (1992). “Rethinking Aesthetics: Notes to a Deciphering Practice”. In Cham, M. ed. (1992).

EX-ILES, Essays on Caribbean Cinema.Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. pp. 237-279.

89

Riffs

Experimental writing on popular music

Riffs: Experimental writing on popular music is an emerging and exciting journal based at and funded by the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR) at Birmingham City University.

Riffs provides a platform for the publication of experimental pieces on popular music and was launched in February 2017. The contributions are made available Open Access through the journal website (www.riffsjournal.org) and a limited edition print run.

Riffs has a strong DIY and experimental ethos. We aim to push the boundaries of popular music research, communication, and publishing. The next step for the editorial board at Riffs is to develop a creative and experimental space for not only publishing finished pieces, but also offering an online forum for thinking through the ways in which we analyse, understand, and communicate.

As one of the largest centres for popular music research, the BCMCR at Birmingham City University offers a wealth of global networks and potential readership. Our editorial team and wider researcher community expand our reach further, with active participation in a range of international research networks to include IASPM, MeCCSA, the Punk Scholars Network, Subcultures Network and the Jazz Research Network.

Beyond academia, Riffs is keen to develop relationships with industry, particularly in Birmingham, through events and collaborations. Through these connections, we aim to develop an international and active readership.

This issue of Riffs was printed by Footprint Workers Co-op.

90

Contributor Guidelines Riffs: Experimental research on Popular Music welcomes pieces from all disciplines and from contributors from academic, industry, or creative backgrounds. Each issue will be based on a prompt, but responses can vary dependent upon the contributor’s interest and experience. As the journal title suggests, we are most interested in pieces that take an experimental approach to the consideration of popular music.

For examples of previous interpretations, please visit our journal website.

All contributions published by Riffs will be considered by the whole editorial panel, and edited by three specialist editors before publication.

Word Limit: 2,000-4,000 (excluding references) Please do not submit full dissertations or theses. All contributions should respond to the prompt and take an experimental approach to undertaking and/or communicating research on popular music. We also welcome shorter written pieces, audio, and visual pieces to include photo essays.

Abstract: Please provide an informal, blog-style abstract (under 300 words) and a profile picture. This abstract will be hosted on our journal website and social media platforms. As ever, links to external websites and the use of images, audio and video clips are also welcome.

Format: Please email submissions as attachments to the editorial contact given below. All articles should be provided as a .doc or .docx file. All images and web-ready audio or video clips should also be emailed as separate files, or through a file-sharing platform such as WeTransfer or Dropbox.

Bio: Please include a short (up to 300 words) bio with your name, institutional affiliation (if appropriate), email address, current research stage within your article, and other useful/interesting information, positioned at the end of your piece.

References: If you refer to other publications within your piece, please list these in a ‘Bibliography’ section at the end. All clear formats of referencing are acceptable. Discographies and weblinks can also be detailed at the end of your contribution.

Submission: Abstracts for our bi-annual prompts should be emailed to info@riffsjournal.org Please note: Riffs shall be entitled to first use of the contribution in all the journal’s different forms, but the author remains the copyright owner and can republish their contribution without seeking the journal’s permission. Riffs reserve the right to decline to publish contributions, if they are submitted after the agreed deadline and without the assigned editor being informed (and agreeing to) a new submission date.

91

ISSN 2513-8537 Vol. 2 Issue 2 December 2018

Riffs

Experimental writing on popular music

Contents Editorial - Simon Jones Rusty Rebel of Rebel Rock Sound System: On inspirations, Birmingham and unity - Cover feature by Ian Davies

Bass Culture and a Very Tangled Englishness - Joe Muggs ‘Who Feels It Knows It’: Re-thinking knowledge, resistance and community through the sub-bass of the reggae sound system - Sebastian Davies “Dis one is for alla the junglists”: From Rebel MC to Conquering Lion and beyond - Matt Grimes Surfing through music: Sharing the surf lifestyle on a reggae frequency - Anne Barjolin-Smith With Thanks to Harry Nichols: A (very personal) cockney history of reggae - Tony Cordell One LP/45: One Love - photo essay by William Ellis

Sound System Outernational Perspectives An Introduction - Vincent Moystad & Oana Pârvan Rewinding the Tape of History: King Tubby and the Audiopolitics of Echo - Brian D’aquino Sound Systems and the Bending of Space: Funambulism from Fanon to Albert Einstein Nayress Ben Gaga From Italian Dancehalls to South East London: An epiphanic Journey through Sounds and Systems Claudia Nardini Noisy Echoes - Pablo De La Cruz Sharing Science - Margarita Iriarte

“Get the frequency up....”

Robbo Dread Riffs is supported and funded by the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Studies, Birmingham School of Media, Birmingham City University.