Narratives from Beyond the UK Reggae Bassline

The System is Sound

William 'Lez' Henry, Matthew Worley, William 'Lez' Henry, Matthew Worley

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030551605
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030551612
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book explores the history of reggae in modern Britain from the time it emerged as a cultural force in the 1970s. As basslines from Jamaica reverberated across the Atlantic, so they were received and transmitted by the UK's Afro-Caribbean community. From roots to lovers' rock, from deejays harnessing the dancehall crowd to dub poets reporting back from the socio-economic front line, British reggae soundtracked the inner-city experience of black youth. In time, reggae's influence permeated the wider culture, informing the sounds and the language of popular music whilst also retaining a connection to the street-level sound systems, clubs and centres that provided space to create, protest and innovate. This book is therefore a testament to struggle and ingenuity, a collection of essays tracing reggae's importance to both the culture and the politics of late twentieth and early twenty-first century Britain.

© The Author(s) 2021

W. Henry, M. Worley (eds.)Narratives from Beyond the UK Reggae BasslinePalgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Musichttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55161-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Narratives from the Bassline

William ‘Lez’ Henry¹ and Matthew Worley²

(1)

School of Human and Social Sciences, University of West London, London, UK

(2)

University of Reading, Reading, UK

William ‘Lez’ Henry

Email: [email protected]

Matthew Worley (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

British reggae emerged as a cultural force in the 1970s. As the heavy basslines from Jamaica reverberated across the Atlantic, they were received and transmitted nationwide by the UK’s Afro-Caribbean community. There was a pre-history, of course. Through the 1950s into the 1960s, as communities formed around those who travelled to Britain from the Caribbean for work and a new life, so blues parties and fledgling sound systems—not to mention underground clubs and record shops, ramshackle studios and record labels run on shoestring budgets—served to provide an infrastructure. The reception was often hostile, with racism rife and prejudices fused to colonialist psyches. But the frequencies and mutating styles of reggae pervaded both the cultural and the urban panoramas of Britain’s cities in the post-war period, soundtracking the struggles and pleasures of everyday life. It was in the 1970s, however, that British reggae found its own voice and forged its own sounds, reflecting in the process the socio-cultural and political transformations underway as the faultlines of post-war ‘consensus’ succumbed to the tenets of Thatcherism.

Numerous authors have pointed to the importance of black music with regard to issues of black identity formation.¹ Yet, despite Jon Stratton and Nabeel Zuberi’s important introduction to Black Popular Music in Britain (2014), relatively little is known about how these identities were/are produced and communicated in the UK context.² Similarly, the role of the reggae sound system, ‘the medium of the reggae message’ (Gutzmore), has rarely been subjected to detailed analysis, despite its ubiquity within the black community.³ So while histories of reggae exist, this book looks to explore beyond the music and towards reggae’s influence on and in Britain more generally. It asks how reggae shaped and continues to shape the cultural landscape; how reggae communicated and enabled; how reggae’s sound transformed musical spaces and places. The aim is to draw together academic and practitioner expertise to consider the diverse influence and underlying values of reggae sound system/bassline culture through to drum ‘n’ bass and grime.

Lloyd Bradley’s Bass Culture: When Reggae was King (2000) is rightly regarded as the first major account of the history of reggae. Therein, he traces the culture’s origins in Jamaica and describes how it ‘conquered the world’.⁴ The book provides many insights into the biographies of reggae luminaries and details their involvement in transmitting the culture to the UK. Crucially, too, he relates the genesis of reggae culture to the wider history of Jamaica. However, while British reggae is featured, Bradley’s study ends during the 1980s heyday.⁵ This will be uniquely expanded upon here, providing a ‘way in’ both to the history and the academic study of British reggae, as well as giving voice to notable practitioners. It will affirm the music’s central place in modern British culture by featuring a diverse range of contributors, necessarily serving to broaden discussion around reggae’s form, purpose and potency.

To do this, The System is Sound will journey from roots to lovers’ rock; from deejays harnessing the dancehall crowd to dub poets reporting back from the socio-economic frontline; from the church hall to the dancehall through gospel reggae; from ragga to jungle to grime. In demonstrating how British reggae soundtracked the inner-city experience of black youth, the collection reveals how the music has morphed and melded to reshape the cultural terrain of the UK, in particular offering disenfranchised and disaffected youth an alternative platform to voice their concerns. Our suggestion is that reggae’s influence continues to permeate, informing the sounds and the language of popular music while also retaining a connection to the street-level sound systems, clubs and community centres that opened-up the space to create, protest and innovate. The System is Sound is therefore a testament to struggle and ingenuity. Accordingly, the role that reggae music played and plays in the formation of expressive urban spaces, in which alternative black social, cultural and political views are aired and disseminated, will be presented in myriad ways.

The book begins with Paul Gilroy’s ruminations on how we may think about and understand reggae across time and space. He locates reggae’s ‘counterhistory’ and reflects as to how this can be maintained through the shifting forces of socio-economic and technological change. Lez Henry and Les Back then take us on a journey through the reggae-infused landscape of south east London, revisiting spaces and places to evoke memories and historical resonances, particularly in the form of lovers’ rock; a uniquely British genre of reggae. Martin Glynn and Tim Wells both provide personal accounts of their experience as poets. Where Glynn uses his poetry to explore himself and his lived experience, Wells looks at how poetry provided points of connection that transcended skin colour. For Lucy Robinson, it is the life and death of Smiley Culture that offers a means to understand the politics and legacies of the 1980s, revealing how the racism of the past serves too often to reiterate the racism of the present.

The sound system has oft-been seen as a male domain. Lynda Rosenior-Patten and June Reid, otherwise known as Nzinga Sound, help reset the narrative by recalling their own contribution to reggae culture, noting in the process how other women have similarly blazed a trail. From a different perspective, Kenny Monrose digs into collections of cassette tapes, asserting their value as ‘vectors of cultural transmission’. By so doing, he underlines the importance of cassettes as an archival resource from which we can recover reggae’s cultural and political engagement. More broadly, Lisa Palmer’s analysis of Peoples Community Radio Link (PCRL) allows us to move beyond any London-centric view of British reggae’s dissemination. Hailing from Birmingham, PCRL created—despite state opposition and regional recalcitrance—an alternative cultural space to both transmit music and negotiate resistance within the black community.

The regional perspective beyond London is further explored in subsequent chapters. Tom Kew navigates the performance geography of Nottingham’s blues parties, taking us into the rooms and spaces that reshaped the city’s culture while also sustaining its reputation for rebellion. Peter Jachimiak returns to Birmingham via Bristol, journeying around the cities’ record shops to chart the musical networks that nurtured vibrant local cultures. Melissa Chemam, meanwhile, makes the case for reggae’s centrality to Bristol’s reputation as a creative fulcrum, feeding into and mutating the city’s rock and hip hop cultures to innovative effect.

Reggae’s influence may be located in other ways. Joy White traverses the lines that connect reggae to grime sonically, socially and spatially. Like reggae, grime is disruptive and emancipatory; it forges and occupies communal spaces, following on from the example of blues dances and dancehall. But reggae also has a spiritual dimension. To this end, Carl Tracey looks at the relationship between Christianity and bassline culture through the prism of the Gospel sound system, while Robert Beckford uses reggae theomusicology, which is Rastafari inspired, to mediate the disconnect between black theology and gospel music.

Much more could be added. A subsequent volume might extend our geographical reach to other British cities—to Leeds or Huddersfield, Manchester or Liverpool, Edinburgh or Glasgow—where sound system culture was also informative. Investigation of reggae’s influence beyond black communities could be extended. If the ‘punky-reggae party’ and post-punk experiments with dub in the late 1970s and early 1980s are relatively well-known, then less attention has been paid to reggae’s influence within Asian communities or to such musical spaces as festivals or raves. More, as always, could be said about class. Likewise, a focus on reggae’s material culture would allow record labels—be they Trojan, Greensleeves or On-U Sound—to come to the fore, as well as papers (Echoes), fanzines (Small Axe) and films (Babylon). Methodologically, comparative analysis might be applied; oral testimony brought more to the fore.

As it is, we hope that analysing/presenting music from these novel perspectives will give rise to new observational and theoretical information on the ways by which syncretised and hybridised cultural forms impact on music lovers in the UK and beyond. Moreover, the chapters in this book invite you to experience the unlocking of intergenerational and cross-cultural social memories that provide practical mechanisms to cope with multiple (and ever-present) forms of social, cultural and political hardship. Indeed, unlocking these social memories creates pathways for us to explore ‘popular racism and racial exclusion’ (Back), while experiencing racialised identity formations and musical affiliations across time and space.⁶ This is due to the UK being a nodal point in a multicultural system of c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Narratives from the Bassline
• 2. Vexed History: Time and the Waning of Heart-I-Cal Philosophy
• 3. Reggae Culture as Local Knowledge: Mapping the Beats on South East London Streets
• 4. A Who Seh? Reflections of a Lost and Found Dub Poet
• 5. ‘What a Devilment a Englan!’ Dub Poets and Ranters
• 6. Smiley Culture: A Hybrid Voice for the Commonwealth
• 7. The Story of Nzinga Soundz and the Women’s Voice in Sound System Culture
• 8. Sound-Tapes and Soundscapes: Lo-Fi Cassette Recordings as Vectors of Cultural Transmission
• 9. ‘Dem a Call Us Pirates, Dem a Call Us Illegal Broadcasters!’: ‘Pirates’ Anthem’, PCRL and the Struggle for Black Free Radio in Birmingham
• 10. Rebel Music in the Rebel City: The Performance Geography of the Nottingham ‘Blues Party’, 1957–1987
• 11. ‘Curious Roots & Crafts’: Record Shops and Record Labels Amid the British Reggae Diaspora
• 12. From Sound Systems to Disc Jockeys, from Local Bands to Major Success: On Bristol’s Crucial Role in Integrating Reggae and Jamaican Music in British Culture
• 13. Growing Up Under the Influence: A Sonic Genealogy of Grime
• 14. Sound Systems and the Christian Deviation
• 15. Handsworth Revolution: Reggae Theomusicology, Gospel Borderlands and Delinking Black British Contemporary Gospel Music from Colonial Christianity
• Back Matter