Now, to start the dub riddims.Īlso, listen along to our dub essentials and dub-influenced favorites in this Spotify playlist. The roots and influence of dub cover a pretty massive range, and it’s a fairly daunting task to try to cover it all, but we’re breaking it up into three separate sections, covering different eras, movements and evolutionary periods. ![]() And that eventually led down the path to new burgeoning techniques in electronic music, with acts like The Orb, Leftfield, Goldie and Massive Attack taking the roots of dub and molding them into new, innovative shapes. Artists like The Police, The Clash, UB40, The Slits, Grace Jones (herself Jamaican born) and numerous others began to fuse pop and punk music with dub flourishes. A year later Keith Hudson released Pick A Dub, which deepened consciousness of dub, while Tubby, The Upsetters, Augustus Pablo and Prince Far I all eventually built up pretty sizable catalogs of dubplates and albums.īy the late ’70s, dub was still fairly obscure on a commercial scale (outside of Jamaica and, to a certain extent, the UK), but many artists in punk, post-punk and new wave began to incorporate elements of dub in their music, from its rhythms and production techniques to the prevalence of melodica, which was popularized by Augustus Pablo. Errol Thompson produced what is commonly considered the first true dub album, Derrick Hariott’s The Undertaker. But soon after some of the dub experiments in clubs began to catch on, artists began to compose entire albums of original material mixed in a dub style, starting with reggae rhythms and crafting a new sonic spectrum on top of them. In dub’s earliest incarnations in Jamaica, genre architects like Lee “Scratch” Perry and King Tubby were early innovators of production in dub, working with existing tracks by picking the vocals and instrumentals apart and crafting new Frankenstein’s monsters out of once-familiar tunes. Or, if you prefer, “versions.” But from that blueprint, dub expanded into an even wider range of stylistic outgrowth and evolution. Initially taking existing rhythm tracks and applying other layers of instrumentation or vocals (sometimes “toasting” as in dancehall, which was a precursor to rapping as we know it today), dub began very literally as a genre of remixes. So let’s get to the important question: What is dub? Named for the simple act of “dubbing” over recorded sound. ![]() Yet when considering the influence of dub, a reggae subgenre more or less responsible for inventing the remix, heavily influencing hip-hop, and forming a basis for ambient, jungle/drum & bass and dubstep, it’s both wonder and shame it’s remained primarily an underground concern. That’s not necessarily surprising - the success rate of cross-cultural breakthroughs in popular music tends to be low, and frequently relegated to novelty status. ![]() Yet despite the efforts of massive rock acts like The Police, The Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton drawing greater attention to roots reggae, the vast expanse of reggae music generally went unnoticed outside of its country of origin. He certainly wasn’t the only artist to have entered the public consciousness outside of the birthplace of reggae - Peter Tosh, Jimmy Cliff and Toots & the Maytals (not to mention third-wave ska) each established themselves on a global scale, if not quite to the level of Marley. Yet the influence and success of Marley’s music, outside of his own country, was something of an anomaly for reggae music. ![]() For this, we can thank Bob Marley, an artist whose iconic status made him an equivalent Bob Dylan, John Lennon or Elvis Presley within the annals of reggae music. For a brief period of time, in the 1970s and ’80s, Jamaican music crashed the American and British mainstream.
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