Cut n' Mix

I've been reading Dick Hebdige's Cut n' Mix: Culture, Identity, and Caribbean Music this week. It's a very readable work, at the intersection of popular music writing and scholarly theory. For those who want to trace the historical evolution of reggae but don't have time nor wherewithal to tackle nearly 600 pages of Lloyd Bradley's This is Reggae Music (I've never read it, though I hear it's of the highest quality), Hebdige's book is a great place to start. Though I still haven't read the book's final chapter, "Club Mix: Breaking for the Border", I thought it would be a good idea to do a mid-read recap of five things I learned from Cut n' Mix.


1. Just before calypso became popular in Trinidad in the 40s and 50s, band members would compete during Carnival by engaging in stick-fighting. After white authorities feared riots and cracked down on the ritual, stick-fighting morphed into musical competitions between the bands themselves. Traditional stick-fighting continues today and is a fun celebration of the island's history.

2. Hebdige traces the evolution of Jamaican popular music, generally, as: Rastafarian drum music, ska, rocksteady, reggae, dub. As the music changed, the bass became increasingly pronounced. Hebdige describes the music as becoming more "sticky". I like that phrase. Never thought of reggae that way before.

3. Jamaican music, from ska and beyond, was influenced in part by American r&b. Jamaican musicians first heard the sounds of Fats Domino and Louis Jordan when black American soldiers were stationed there during World Word II. In fact, the first music that "sound system" DJs used at street parties came not from Jamaican artists, but from imported American singles. The early ska recordings in the 1950s and the growth of the Jamaican music industry came from the competition among these DJs. They needed to innovate their playlists.

4. To make Bob Marley's Catch a Fire more palatable to American listeners, Chris Blackwell turned down the bass, upped Marley's vocals in the mix, and added more electric guitar solos.

5. British Two Tone music of the late 70s was partially an anti-racist response to segregation and inequality in England. I knew the Specials and other groups of that era were interracial, but I had no idea how important (and controversial) this was until reading Hebdige's second chapter, "Dub Version: Rise and Fall of Two Tone". The music was simultaneously a reaffirmation of the African and West Indies influence on British music and culture and a "fuck you" to Margaret Thatcher social policy. Black and white checkerboard... quite significant!