Bob Marley

Bob Marley wasn’t the first or (arguably) the best, but he brought the gospel of reggae out of the tiny, poor country of Jamaica and, more than anyone else, helped it to become a worldwide phenomenon and a voice for social change.

Reggae was born from ska, Jamaica’s first homegrown attempt at popular music. Ska grew from Jamaicans’ fascination with the forbidden music of New Orleans that, during the 1950s, would drift across the waters and into transistor radios on clear nights, subverting the official, dry, BBC-style programming that was being produced on one of the last of the British Empire’s colonies. Jamaican musicians would try to emulate the jazzy rhythms of New Orleans bands, but always got it wrong, and ska was born, with its strongly accented off-beats (mm-CHA, mm-CHA, mm-CHA, mm-CHA).

Eventually, this gave way to the slower and more rhythmic “rock steady” (which was, in the words of the time, “better for rubbin’ up a daughter on the dance floor”). This slowing down of tempo and over-emphasis on rhythmic elements eventually blossomed into reggae, with its emphasis on bass and drum interplay and its predominate rhythmic accent on the third beat of the phrase, instead of the more conventional two and four beats (“backbeat”) that exemplifies rock ‘n’ roll. Reggae turns pop music on its head, emphasizing all the “wrong” beats and instruments. In a rock band, the bass traditionally plays a subdued rhythmic part while the guitar gets the lead. In reggae, the bass is the main musical motivator and the guitar is almost always reduced to a rhythmic fill, scratching out the chords (“changa”) and providing a skeletal framework for the bass and drums to flesh out. The rhythms are sparse and syncopated and deceptively complicated as opposed to the straight four-on-the-floor rhythms of traditional Western pop, made by historically rhythmically handicapped musicians trying to stay together (which they inherited from their classical forefathers. Big orchestral works demand fairly simple and steady pulses so that large groups of musicians can articulate complex vertical chords in synch – complex polyrhythms tend to break down if too many people try to play them). Reggae is a classic example of less is more, and it leaves enough holes in the arrangements for you to fill in the rest of the rhythm yourself.

Reggae had a few early stars – notably Jimmy Cliff, a talented musician and the star of Perry Henzel’s film The Harder They Come, which opened the world’s ears to reggae, but Marley was the man who was able to deliver reggae to the masses. Marley added social commentary to the reggae canon, which previously consisted largely of boasts about the singer’s sexual conquests or the power and funkiness of a particular “sound system” (mobile DJ). But Marley’s greatest stroke of luck may have been hooking up with Chris Blackwell, the head of a small record label on Jamaica (Island Records) that had a good distribution deal in England and offices in New York. When he put Marley’s groovy, socially aware reggae out, it struck a chord (it struck a changa) with the empowered youth that was busy trying to change the world with free love, drugs, and music. The bubble of 60s optimism had popped (it was a pretty short period between the Summer of Love and Altamont) and disenchanted youth were looking for another buzz. Reggae’s glorification of Rastafarianism (which translated across the oceans as a reason to smoke lots of pot) and its mellow, head-nodding rhythms coupled with lyrics about social injustice was just the tonic that millions of burned-out, acid-washed hippies needed, and Marley exploded, helped in England by the hordes of homesick West Indians eager to hear a bit of the old country.

This isn’t to say that Marley’s popularity isn’t at all based on his talent. He’s a wonderful singer and wrote great, infectious songs, one of his best being the party happy (and not particularly socially conscious) Jammin’. Jammin’ includes all the musical trademarks of reggae: a slow, loping beat, heavy emphasis on the bass, syncopated polyrhythms, and scratchy rhythm guitars, not to mention obtuse religious references. Matt would occasionally play the chords for this in Lonesome Pie rehearsals while I shouted out my own version of the lyrics, changing Jammin’ into Pajamas (“Pajamas. I want to wear them with you. Pajamas. I hope you like pajamas too.”).

In the '70s, lower class British white kids were exposed to reggae because of where they lived and took to it, and many early British punk bands, most notably The Clash, championed the sound and sensibilities of reggae. Even punk’s most commercial band, Blondie, had a great fondness for reggae. Their first international hit, Heart of Glass, was originally arranged as a reggae tune, but producer Mike Chapman convinced them the public wasn’t ready for reggae and that a straight disco beat was the way to go and his intuition provided the band with its first international hit (and, to some, its death knell as a viable punk outfit). It wasn’t until years later, on their real swan song Autoamerican (I don’t count The Hunter (and nobody else does either) and I know they’re back together, but they’re more a novelty than a viable musical force these days), that Blondie released a relatively straight reading of a minor reggae (okay, it was really soca and not reggae, but most Americans – myself included – couldn’t tell the difference at the time) hit, The Tide is High, which was, ironically, their biggest hit from that album – and their last real hit as a group (sorry about that sentence).

Bob Marley’s popularity grew during the 1970s, and then he did the one thing that goes farther towards cementing your status as a legend than anything else. He died “tragically” young in 1981 at just 36 years old. I put tragically in quotation marks because, while it may have been tragic to his friends and family, it crystallized his career and made a musical martyr out of him. Like Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Kurt Cobain, Bob Marley is forever frozen as a youthful rebel, exempt from the ravages of time and changing public tastes. Somewhere out there, Bob Marley will always be jammin’.

I like ska, and I like reggae, but what I really like – the legacy that Jamaica has really left the modern world – is the weird and wonderful world of dub.

Dub is a product of the studio, a product of technology. It is taking the tools used for building a house and instead, using them to dig a hole. It is musical deconstruction on a visceral level. Dub wasn’t so much created as discovered. In pulling apart multi-track recordings to correct errant beats or stray musical effluvia, the fringe producers of a fringe music in a fringe country discovered a certain fascinating structure underneath the recording. By taking away the ornamentation and leaving just the beat, they were stripping music down to its heart. Not its head, with frilly melodies and literate words, but to the heart that drove the machine.

In the late 1960s, reggae producers in Jamaica started making alternate versions of popular songs without the vocals for dance clubs so the people in the club could sing the words themselves. This quickly led to somebody "toasting", or talking in rhymes, over these instrumental versions and the seeds of rap were sown. These "versions" became a place for producers to experiment with wacky studio effects – saturating a track in deep pools of echo and slicing and dicing it together in unusual ways and trying to out-do each other with sonic wizardry. All on pathetically primitive equipment. But what they lacked in equipment, they more than made up for in ingenuity

Dub was a refocusing, like taking a magnifying glass to a butterfly’s wings and zooming in closer and closer until the patterns shift and the point of reference disappears and new unseen patterns emerge. Dub strips tracks of all the elements that are generally considered important. The melody is twisted and broken apart into small fragments or discarded entirely. The words, which may have been the entire point and motivating factor of the song originally, are shredded and mutilated and repeated in tiny fragments or also thrown on the trash heap as being irrelevant. What emerges is the rhythm. The beat, the beat, the beat. The interplay of the drums and the bass. The space between the notes becomes more important than the notes themselves. It is the hidden music, the secret language of the studio. It is stripping off the flesh and guts of a song and burning it down to its bones. Then taking those bones and using them to build a new animal, a fearsome Frankenstein that stumbles and lurches with its own life and skewed beauty.

There’s something apocalyptic about dub and its focus of form over content. Rhythms ricochet and collide, swelling and subsiding. At times so thin that you can hear the air through them, at other times so thick that its like breathing cement. Layers appear and disappear on the sonic sea, mirages of possible musics shimmering in the ever-unreachable distance. Chaos, destruction, deconstruction. The human disappears into the machine, but neither of them takes over. It’s the ultimate science fiction music – not the brave new world of shiny-surfaced plastic music that boldly take us to our platonic ideal and comforts us with a well-ordered future where machines serve and protect, but the dark, dank sweaty world where the human and the mechanical are intertwined so completely that to try to pull them apart would be a double suicide. The world of dub is a world of biology and technology melting together. In the utopian world of Star Trek, dub is the Borg. And resistance is futile. Dub is bionics, cutting open living flesh to discover a tangle of wires underneath, finding a beating heart at the center of a computer - the ghost in the machine. It is the Matrix.

In the dub laboratory, sounds are piled on and then stripped away. Over and over again the tapestry is woven and unraveled. The last thread becomes the first and so on and so on. This process could go on forever and sometimes it seems like it’s only the producer’s need to sleep or eat that allows some of these mixes to seep out of the studio. The world of dub is the world through the looking glass. That which is revered in our world is reviled in the world of dub. Support personnel become stars, the mixing board is spun around and the artist becomes the raw material for a new art. The mind shuts down and the body takes over. The only logic that dub requires is the logic of the beat, the logic of the feet. If it rocks, it rules. No matter that the fragments bursting in air over the booming bottom of the bassline make no sense, they are not there to be comprehended, argued or understood. If the beat is good, then all else is forgiven.

Once you have been abducted by the sonic antimatter of dub, all music glistens with a winking knowledge of that which curls and flexes underneath. To those dub warriors who deconstruct our recorded history and recombine it in new ways to tell new stories, all music is fair game, and no recorded sound ever seems the same again. Although the virus started in Jamaica and enveloped reggae first, it has now spread to all other genres all over the world. Jazz, rock, soul, country, and classical music have all been shredded in the giant merciless maw of the mighty dub.