Can't Stop Won't Stop by Jeff Chang Read Free Book Online

entertainment available to the downtown sufferers and strivers. The sound systems championed the people’s choice long before commercial radio, and as independence approached, they moved from playing mostly American rhythm-and-blues to homegrown ska, rock steady, and finally, reggae.
    The fiercely competitive sound systems—including Duke Reid’s Trojan, Coxsone Dodd’s Downbeat the Ruler, Prince Buster’s Voice of the People, King Edwards the Giant, and Tom the Great Sebastian—fought for audiences; some of them even sent thugs to shoot up their rivals’ dances and destroy theirequipment in fits of anger or desperation. 7 More usually, they distinguished themselves from each other with “specials,” records that no other sound system had, songs that mashed up their competitors and drew away their audiences. They even sometimes “clashed” live in the same hall or yard, song for song, “dub fi dub.”
    Early on, selectors made frequent trips to America to secure obscure exclusives. As the Jamaican music industry expanded during the sixties, sound systems began to record local artists’ songs onto exclusive acetates or “dubplates.” 8 In 1967, a sound system head affiliated with Duke Reid named Ruddy Redwood stumbled onto Jamaican music’s next great innovation.
    One afternoon Redwood was cutting dubplates when engineer Byron Smith forgot to pan up the vocals on The Paragons’ hit, “On the Beach.” Redwood took the uncorrected acetate to the dance that night anyway, and mixing between the vocal and the dub, sent the crowd into a frenzy during his midnight set. Rather than apologize for his mistake the next day, Redwood emphasized to Reid that the vocal-less riddim could be used as a B-side on the commercial release of the singles. Reid, for his part, realized he could cut his costs by half or more. One studio session could now produce multiple “versions.” 9 A single band session with a harmony trio could be recycled as a DJ version for a rapper to rock
patwa
rhymes over, and a dub version in which the mixing engineer himself became the central performer—experimenting with levels, equalization and effects to alter the feel of the riddim, and break free of the constraints of the standard song.
    Dub’s birth was accidental, its spread was fueled by economics, and it would become a diagram for hip-hop music. A space had been pried open for the break, for possibility. And, quickly, noise came up from the streets to fill the space—yard-centric toasts, sufferer moans, analog echoes—the sounds of people’s histories,
dub histories
, versions not represented in the official version. As musical competition was overshadowed by violent political competition, dub became the sound of a rapidly fragmenting nation—troubling, strange, tragic, wise slow-motion portraits of social collapse.
Roots and Culture
    Every Jamaican politician knew what every Jamaican musician knew—the sound systems were crucial to their success. During the seventies, the fight for politicaldominance between the conservative Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and leftist People’s National Party (PNP) seemed inevitably to turn on the mood of the people in the dance. All any prime minister had to do to gauge the winds was to listen closely to the week’s 45 rpm single releases; they were like political polls set to melody and riddim.
    The message was becoming decidedly roots and radical. In the fall of 1968, the JLP-led government had banned Black-power literature and icons like the pan-Africanist leader Walter Rodney from the University of the West Indies campus, then violently crushed the political riots that ensued across the city. But this did not stop the electorate from moving hard left. Intellectuals high on Malcolm X, socialists stricken by Castro, middle-class strivers impatient for price stability, poor strugglers facing dim prospects, even