Yes selector

How Jamaican sound systems have impacted music.

A few weeks ago I took a look at how reggae influenced punk music, which you can check out here. This post is about Jamaican sound system culture and its outsized impact on music.

This week's playlist features some dubplates, dub and deejay cuts for your listening pleasure.

Catch you on the flip side

Like many club DJs, I gravitated towards playing out alternate “dubs” or “versions” of disco, house or techno tracks found on the B Side of dance records. These were stripped down versions of the original track that removed a lot of the vocals and placed an emphasis on the rhythmic components of a song with effects such as echo and reverb. 

Dubs, versions, edits and remixes are made for pretty much every single aimed at the dance floor.

And they all have their roots in Jamaican sound systems.

Sound system dubplates

Sound systems were first popularized in Kingston in the 1940s and consisted of a crew with a truck and all the gear necessary to hold a street party including a generator, turntables, a large set of speakers and of course vinyl records. 

Sound systems were very competitive, and success depended primarily on their ability to play new and exclusive music. At first, this meant bringing in the latest R&B records from the U.S. but as R&B’s popularity waned stateside, this led to sound systems releasing their own records featuring tracks made by local musicians.  This brought about a musical evolution from Jamaican flavoured R&B to uniquely Jamaican music forms such as ska. 

In the late 1960s and early to mid 1970s, the hyper competitive nature of sound systems and their desire for original music resulted in special versions of songs being pressed for a specific sound system or party. These one-offs were cut onto 10” acetate records and were called dubplates, or dubs for short. 

Sound systems in the 1970’s

Sound engineer King Tubby is commonly acknowledged as the first to create and use dubplates. He would take the original song and strip away the vocals, while emphasizing the drums and bass, adding echo and reverb to the mix. This style of music of course would evolve into dub music, named for the dubplates on which it was first pressed.

 

The Rise of the deejay and the birth of hip hop 

Unlike current DJs who select and play records, sound systems took on a team approach. The selector would choose the record to play, the operator would play the records, and the deejay would get on the mic and toast or talk in half sung boasts and rhymes.

The role of the deejay was made possible due to the popularity of dubs and versions which stripped away a song's vocals and made space for the deejay to do their thing.

While deejays and toasting are an obvious predecessor to rapping, this isn’t Jamaica’s only influence on hip hop.

These are the breaks

Clive Campbell, better known as DJ Kool Herc emigrated from Jamaica to the Bronx, where he would go on to set up a sound system in the early ’70s. Playing funk tracks, Herc would isolate and extend the instrumental portion of the record which emphasized the drum beat by quickly cutting between two copies of a song over two turntables. Herc called this "The Merry-Go-Round.” This technique of isolating and extending a song’s break became, along with rap, another pillar of hip hop music.

There’s still plenty more to talk about when looking at Jamaica’s influence on popular music culture, so stay tuned for Part Three.

Thanks for reading and listening.

-Sandy