Cultural Transformation Essay

“A Change is Gonna’ come”: The Attempts of the Populace and the Popular to Transform Politics and Culture through Popular Music

Introduction

This essay will be a brief foray into the ways in which popular music artists and audiences have pushed for political and cultural change. The essay will discuss certain happenings and people within popular music which and who (respectively) have pushed for a different world. This essay is not set out to argue that any of these concepts and/or ideals have done anything to change Western politics or culture or, in fact, that they ever fully could (such juvenile arguments are best left in Sixth Form common rooms), but it will be a commentary and a description of certain significant elements, song lyrics and audience reactions which tried to push for transformation.

This essay will give a brief overview of three significant elements within the medium of popular music which have attempted to push a transformation agenda (c.2500 words is nowhere near enough of a limit to properly comment on any more than three, still the essay will provide brief rather than in-depth analysis of said elements), they are, namely, the importance of the political consciousness in the lyric to Sam Cooke’s 1964 hit A Change is Gonna’ Come; the political aspirations of Joe Strummer, frontman of The Clash and later Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros and subsequently the response of his audience; and the dichotomy of Eminem: part base humour spouting misogynist and homophobe, part serious social and political lyrical activist and the response from the media and fans alike to his preaching and actions.

Sam Cooke: The Changing Man

Once upon a time the soul artist Sam Cooke gave the world a statement to mull over which can be seen as a pre-cursor to many a later pop star’s efforts to change the world. That message, given during the 1960s’ Civil Rights Movement in the USA, was “It’s been a long, long time coming, but I know a change is gonna’[sic] come”.[i] By spouting this idealist message to the world Cooke was, in part, pleading for a change to the racial disharmony in the USA and, in part, giving a defiant statement of intent on behalf of African Americans across the USA. Cooke’s statement actually said much more than this, but we shall work with the two aforementioned ideas as a template for now. Whether he knew it  at the time or not, Cooke was acting as an influence to many who preceded him, giving them an idea that the popular music lyric could be used as more than just a tool for demonstrating one’s love for a spouse or desired lover. By using his voice to address the socio-political state of his nation, Cooke was telling other artists that they too could do more than rhyme ‘maybe’ and ‘baby’ to fit within three and a half minutes of pop Though this may not have been his intent, it was certainly a consequence of his actions. Sam Cooke was not the first or only person to do this. Woody Guthrie had done it in numerous songs before him, Bob Dylan did it at around the same time as he did and Morrissey did it after him. Cooke’s actions, however, must be seen as vital to popular music lyricism. One such man who would have taken inspiration from Cooke was a young man born John Graham Mellor, who became better known to the World as Joe Strummer.

Joe Strummer: Social Commentator

Joe Strummer often talked about the effect the radicalisms of the 1960s had on his world-view, speaking of his “coming-of-age” in 1968.[ii] In 1976 Joe Strummer was playing in a pub rock band named The 101ers[iii] when he “saw the future”[iv] [paraphrase] in the form of punk rockers The Sex Pistols. Strummer was then approached by Bernie Rhodes (eventual manager of The Clash)[v] to join a new outfit he was managing called, rather ill-advisedly, London SS. To cut a rather long and heavily mythologised story short, Strummer joined and so became The Clash, originally consisting of Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, Terry Chimes and Keith Levene (who would soon leave and end up in the post-punk outfit Public Image Limited with John Lydon). Bernie Rhodes, having been heavily influenced by the 1968 student riots in Paris, told Strummer that he must write about what is around him and comment on the world, telling him to “write about what’s important”.[vi] The upshot of this inspirational pep-talk (as with many stories around The Clash, one must take it all with a pinch of salt due to the revolutionary fervour the band’s members have built around themselves) was that Strummer decided to write a bunch of song lyrics centring around such stream-of-consciousness issues as political landscapes (see 1977 from the album The Clash), the problems facing young, working and lower-middle class men and women in Britain in the mid-1970s (see Career Opportunities from the album The Clash) and insurgency riots on the streets of Britain (see White Riot from The Clash) which would make up the backbone of the band’s eponymous first album. This collection of initial ‘punk rock with social conscience’ lyrics would lay the template for all of Strummer’s future lyrics where he would go on to challenge the vacuous, right-wing world of advertising (see Koka Kola from the band’s third LP London Calling); Armageddon through the horror of nuclear warfare (see London Calling’s title track); and racial resentment throughout Britain (see Something About England from the fourth Clash album Sandinista) amongst other things.

One reason Joe Strummer was so equipped to communicate with the populace and push for social and political revolution was because he was, primarily, the lyricist within the framework of The Clash. Strummer was one half of a song-writing partnership with Mick Jones - whose main duties within the pairing were arranging song structures and overseeing melodic and rhythmic needs within the songs. When communicating a political, social, romantic or generally emotional or abstract message, bands often look to their lyricist. Though it is fair to say that one can denote emotion through sonic tools such as melody, harmony or even rhythm (think minor chords denoting sadder, more melancholic emotions), the written word is arguably what does it explicitly. Where Strummer played slashed, stab-like guitar chords to bring a timbral fire and presence to the band’s catalogue, it could feasibly be argued that the way in which he used his words for social attack always held more weight with the general music-buying public. One can see that argument justified in a moniker ascribed to the band, where their fans labelled their heroes as “The Only Band That Matters”.[vii] Such direct sloganeering, it could be reasoned, came about as a direct result of Strummer’s sloganistic language in his lyrics acting as influence on his admirers. If one thinks about lyrics such as “In 1977, there’s knives in West 11”, a nod to the criminalisation of the Notting Hill area where Strummer resided (see 1977 from The Clash); and “London calling to the faraway towns” a play on the BBC World Service transmission statement to occupied countries during World War 2 of “this is London calling, this is London calling” (see London Calling from the album of the same name) to call out a statement of defiance in the face of nuclear war, one can see why the fans  were so interested in allegorical sloganeering to convey their message. If it was good enough for Joe Strummer, their ‘demi-God-like hero’, it was good enough for them, the fans.

Eminem: “Let’s Get Down to Business”

Sloganistic language has been a vital part of the development of the popular music lyric. When pushing for that all important goal of political and cultural transformation many a lyricist has used different ‘puns’, ‘catchy buzz-lines’ and ‘shock tactics’ to lure in the populace. These three examples of sloganeering tactics may well lead one to think of a certain blonde-haired, foul mouthed, but ultimately talented young man. If the image one is led to is that of Johnny Rotten (John Lydon), then one may well be showing one’s age. Nostalgia has settled in on punk rock and all of the connotations now shown through the fish-eye lens of modern media streams are of youth rebellion and exciting, pulsing, heart-racing exhilaration. No longer is Johnny Rotten labelled as vile. One such man whom one may also look to in this regard is Marshall Mathers III of Detroit, Michigan, USA, better known as Eminem. Eminem, much like Rotten, is now starting to enjoy a freer time of it all due to the initial furore over the vulgarity in his lyrics now having subsided and the current press streams just admiring him for his talent and his overall message.

Eminem burst on to the popular music scene in 1999 with his debut hit My Name Is. Heavy MTV and radio coverage of the track in ’99[viii] subsequently led to a star being born. The song had lyrical content which energised the youth in the West and disgusted their parents. So it was, then, that Eminem was the new divisive figure between the youth and the mature. He proclaimed in My Name Is that “God sent me to piss the World off”[ix], which prompted music writer Garry Mulholland to write in his book This is Uncool: The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk and Disco that “it had been 25 years since he sent the last one”[x] in reference to the aforementioned Rotten. With the LP released on the back of the single (The Slim Shady LP) Eminem set his lyrical stall out. The album contains lyrics which detail misogyny, homophobia, a hatred of his parents, lewdness, drug-taking and much, much more to get the backs of the right wing press up. The album caused much outrage amongst middle- America and, alas, a ‘Mommy protest’ to the lyrical content of this album and its successor The Marshall Mathers LP. Eminem notes, in a rather sarcastic tone, in his 2002 song Cleaning Out My Closet from the album The Eminem Show “Picket signs for my wicked rhymes”[xi] in a nod to this particular incident. This very protest took place outside the Staples Centre in Los Angeles on February 21^st, 2001. Eminem was performing his hit song Stan that evening with Elton John (the openly gay singer-songwriter). The National Organisation for Women (NOW) were picketing against the sexism and violence in the lyrics in Eminem’s songs. NOW’s members were clearly aggrieved, but had debatably missed a point. Art sometimes has to be provocative so as to keep pushing boundaries. If people like Eminem did not exist then the “standardisation”[xii] theories which Theodor Adorno ascribed to popular music in his 1941 essay On Popular Music could only withstand to be true of today’s pop. This audience push for political and cultural change was arguably hindering the progress of future liberalism. Song lyrics only exist as language and if anybody decides to take that language and turn it into action then it becomes their actualisation rather than the words of the provocateur that commit the crime.

“The Nostalgia Factory of Popular Music”: A Conclusion

All of this tumult gave Eminem a pedestal. His fame grew to a perhaps unprecedented level for a rapper. He was the name on everybody’s lips. In his second album Eminem had started to move toward more socio-political comment in songs such as Stan – where he details the psychosis and mental instability of a deranged and obsessed fan - and Amityville – where he details the socio-economic problems in his home city of Detroit – and began to move away from being base for the sake of being base. By his third album he was tackling such subjects as the U.S. Army (see Square Dance) and the 911 atrocities (see My Dad’s Gone Crazy) and by his fourth album Encore he was tackling George Bush’s reign as the US President (see Mosh). At the time of releasing his third album Eminem was being lauded as some kind of lyrical genius by ‘baby-boomer’ journalists who had once vilified him [paraphrase].[xiii] Suddenly middle-America had accepted him.

All of this brings this essay to a point: once the artist (in this case Eminem) has been around long enough to let the dust settle on his/her controversy, the wider audience and press (in this case middle-America and the right wing press) let nostalgia kick in and embrace this new-found (to them) maverick. This is this essay’s and, in fact, this writer’s fundamental response to being asked to explain the ways in which popular music artists and audiences push for political and cultural transformation. This process is something which I will call “the nostalgia factory of popular music.”

As renegades have come and gone in the popular music industry, much of the mainstream, big-selling pop has stayed the same. Whether it is Sam Cooke pleading for a change in ideals in a country where he is singled out by his race or it is Joe Strummer commenting on the political agendas of Western governments or it is Eminem discussing the true indignation of young males across America, lots of the big selling popular music has come out of Tin Pan Alley-esque ‘factories of art’ where ‘boy-meets-girl’ archetypes are pushed through into the lyric itself. While Cooke was asking for that change his peers over at Motown were still churning out hits such as Baby Love and Sweetest Feeling. A few years after the break-up of The Clash came Stock, Aitken and Waterman and their brand of sickly-sweet romance-tinged sequencer pop. Alongside Eminem and his boundary pushing lyrics were stars such as Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera feeding the masses the bubble-gum pop they so clearly craved. All of this leads the essay to a closing note: pop lyricists have pushed boundaries in attempts to transform the political and cultural landscape, but all in all racism still unfortunately exists, Western governments still fight needless wars and the right-wing press can still control the masses and make them believe that a pop star is vile just for being provocative. Though they may have tried for transformation in the political and cultural spheres, the fact is that they haven’t even changed the music industry really. One can only try.

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[i] Cooke, Sam; A Change Gonna Come; RCA Victor; 1964.

[ii] Temple, Julien cited Strummer Joe; The Future is Unwritten (Documentary Film); Vertigo Films; 2007.

[iii] Salewiecz, Chris; Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer (p. 153); Harper Collins UK; 2007.

[iv] Gilbert, Pat cited Strummer, Joe (paraphrase); Passion is a Fashion: The Real Story of The Clash; Aurum Publishers; 2004.

[v] Salewiecz, Chris; Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer (p. 155); Harper Collins UK; 2007.

[vi] Salewiecz, Chris; Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer (p. 167); Harper Collins UK; 2007.

[vii] Gilbert, Pat cited Strummer, Joe (paraphrase); Passion is a Fashion: The Real Story of The Clash; Aurum Publishers; 2004.

[viii] Bouazza, Anthony; Whatever You Say I Am: The Life and Times of Eminem (P.38); Corgi Publishers UK; 2004.

[ix] Eminem; My Name Is (Single); Interscope Records; 1999.

[x] Mulholland, Garry; This is Uncool: The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk and Disco; Cassell Illustrated; 2004.

[xi] Eminem; Cleaning Out My Closet (Single); Interscope Records; 2002.

[xii] Adorno, Theodor; On Popular Music; Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, New York: Institute of Social Research; 1941.

[xiii] Bouazza, Anthony (paraphrase); Whatever You Say I Am: The Life and Times of Eminem (P.132 - 134); Corgi Publishers UK; 2004.

Essay on the Popular Music Canon

The Greatest of All Time… Ever: Are the Music Press Setting Up a Pop Music Canon Through Opinion Polls?

 “What are the origins of the English canon? The answer to this question is deceptively simple: Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton achieved decisive status in the mid-eighteenth century, the moment when the terms of their reception were set for years to come.”[i]

Jonathon Brody Kramnick (assistant professor of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick); The Making of the English Canon.

“All men by nature desire knowledge.”

Aristotle.

Abstract

The thesis questions for the following essay are: Why do the music press play God with the idea of the best popular music available to us via opinion polls? Has a canon been set up by the music industry’s gate keepers for us to adhere to in a fashion akin to that in literature? The point of the following essay is to try and provide coherent and balanced answers to these questions. The essay will look at evidence from polls and balance that with sociological reasoning and commentary to provide a commentary on music press opinion polls.

Introduction

This essay will discuss music press “Greatest of All Time” polls and whether their existence is creating a canon in popular music akin to that which is in literature. Examples of these polls will be analysed and problematized as will the very notion of a pop music canon itself. This essay will be an exploration into a fad in music journalism, which comes directly from our basic human need to organise the world around us so as to make better sense of it. Is our interest in what is ‘the greatest’ derived from our need to know what has happened and what that caused (the very definition of history?)? Does a canon only come about because, as Aristotle said, “all men by nature desire knowledge”? By listing what the best music is, are the music press feeding their own egos and underlining their status as “gatekeepers of music” (or musical knowledge) by creating these polls?

This essay will ask whether the music press ‘play God’ with the idea of the best popular music available to us via these opinion polls? Are the men and women in the know giving the populace a view into which they feel they (respectively) must subscribe? Or are they simply protecting the worth of music which needs protecting so that future generations can enjoy it? Are the press, in fact, merely providing the populace with a historical document? As with all discourses there are many answers to these questions and the point of this essay is to bring these together and, through research, provide some sort of balanced commentary on music polls and the concept of a popular music canon themselves rather than a value judgement.

The Literary Canon

The canon has been a much debated (oft maligned in recent times) concept in literature over the years, but its fundamental point is surely to give people an organised list of books which have received acclaim and are considered by most to be ‘great’, is it not? Can anything this mass mediated be this pure? At the point of verging on Marxism, the answer is probably no. However, the canon does have its uses. Where does one look when deciding they want to enlighten themselves and read some great literature? Surely the canon is a very good place to start for the beginner and, obviously, for scholarly curriculums. When deciding what the youth should read, something so general and, let’s face it, genial as the canon does help one see what is considered by the likes of Harvard University academics (Harvard has a canonical list called The Harvard Classics) to be classic, timeless and, most importantly, essential. Is this, in itself, essentialist though?

Canonical Essentialism

Essentialism, in philosophy, is seen as the need by any one entity to possess certain characteristics for which any entity of that kind must possess[ii]. If one looks through examples of these music press polls, one can clearly define characteristics for albums or songs which grant them what I will call ‘canonical essentialism’: classic rock or power pop timbral qualities fused with hook-laden sections and clear influence from higher-brow (than is usual in, say, the bubblegum pop of Britney Spears) lyrical sources such as literature, politics and/or science to name a few. Think of the space race lyrical aspirations of David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (a constant performer in these polls) or the ‘nostalgic, cockney dance-hall timbral sound of The Kinks’ Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (another staple of these polls) and one can see the need for ‘classic rock with quirks’ characteristics in these polls’, and subsequently their creators’, judgements on ‘greatness’.

So, with this in mind, if we look at which albums appear in the top ten the most in three different polls, which are namely The Observer Music Monthly’s Top 100 British Albums; Rolling Stone magazine 500 Greatest Albums of All Time; and Channel 4’s The 100 Greatest Albums of All Time, we can see the aforementioned argument of ‘classic rock with quirks’ sensibility is necessary as a major criterion to be considered truly timeless. Two albums appear across the board in the top tens of these three polls, they are The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Revolver albums. Here we see the ‘canonical essentialism’ of ‘classic rock with quirks’ in its purest form. We are looking at two mid-1960s, psychedelic albums which connote nostalgic whimsy and a feeling of a time so heavily romanticised in modern media streams. Above all though, we are looking at albums which sonically denote a quirky, sometimes Asian, sometimes English, sometimes American timbral feel which have achieved ‘classic’ status due to the length of time that passed between their release (1960s) and the release of the polls (2000s) in which they are credited with ‘greatness’. The other albums of note in these polls are The Clash’s London Calling, The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street and, quelle surprise, The Beatles’ eponymous record better known as The White Album, all of which appear twice in the top tens of the three polls looked at. One can see the criteria once again: must be classic rock, must have intellectual musical and lyrical influence and will preferably have culturally divisive characters fronting the operation.[iii] [iv] [v]

The ‘pop music canon’ then, it could be argued, is a concept which operates on bias towards 1960s/70s classic rock. The chance for elements of gangsta’ rap, bubblegum pop and modern R&B to enter the fray is, clearly by result, limited. In fact, if we look at certain highly regarded and influential genres such as Jazz, Blues and Gospel we see that, in the results of the three polls just discussed, they are not regarded as being as great as 1960s/70s classic rock or guitar-led music from the 1980s and ‘90s. However, if we look at a bigger compendium of albums or songs which is listed in chronological order rather than by ‘importance’ or ‘order of greatness’ we can see otherwise. The books 1001 Albums You Must Hear before You Die and its sister book 1001 Songs You Must Hear before You Die give us a far more eclectic list to extrapolate music from to form a popular music canon. Entries in the 1001 Albums… list include such works as New York rapper Nas’ Illmatic, jazz supremo Count Basie’s The Atomic Mr. Basie and former Mickey Mouse Clubber Britney Spears’ …Baby, One More Time. Entries in the 1001 Songs… book include Edith Piaf’s 1946 hit La Vie en Rose, rap duo Eric B and Rakim’s 1988 hit  Follow the Leader and self-proclaimed thug 2Pac’s 1995 ode to his mother Dear Mama. It could be reasoned that, with a higher number of places to fill with albums or songs, Robert Dimery, general editor of these books, had more room to accept some slightly more leftfield artists to shine through (in this sense the term leftfield is used canonically so rather than musically – Britney Spears and 2Pac, for instance, are particularly mainstream artists with songs generally in 4/4 time, with melodic simplicity a focal point rather than odd scale manipulation and irregular meters). Maybe, as is the case with these two books, if one doesn’t have to list from, say, 100^th best to best it is easier to include more material considered to be lower-brow or some less populous material. Maybe all of this bring this essay to a point: if one does not make it explicit that the album that wins a poll or is consistently placed highly in polls is treated with God-like adoration, popular music can continue to thrive as it should: as music for the populace. Rather than drawing up the petty divisions that Theodor Adorno thought so necessary during popular music’s formative years as an art form, labelling certain styles as low-brow and poor and labelling others as high-brow and serious[vi], the way we can credit works of note is to simply give them credit without some kind of valuation on where they be placed in a ‘greatness’ chart.[vii] [viii]

What the 1001 Songs… and 1001 Albums… books give is a canonical notion more analogous to that of the Harvard Classics and Great Books lists in literature than the press listings of numbers 1 to 100 or 500. By listing a series of classics without putting listed value on their worth, these books give just that and help develop something that may be argued as more beneficial to curriculums and people who may be unaware of which music exactly is considered by many to have achieved ‘classic’ or ‘great’ status.

Does the Pop Music Canon Exist?

The notion of a popular music canon is not an explicitly good or bad thing. The concept itself does exist and, to answer one of the thesis questions for this essay, it has in some part been set up by the music press, but consumers of popular music have also been involved. The populace has, by subscribing to these views, also helped arrange a consensus of good and great albums, songs and artists. The music press has arguably played a bigger part and, in fact, the popular music industry as a whole. Just take a look at institutions such as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an institution in which members are inducted due to services to ‘great rock and roll’. Look at magazines such as Classic Rock or Mojo, publications which, on the face of it, appear to market nostalgia as ‘greatness’. In fact, take a look at the term ‘classic rock’ itself. The classification of classic has derived from the historical placing of the music, sure, but not all rock from the 1960s, for instance, is grouped under the classic rock umbrella. Artists such as The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Cream, The Kinks and The Who are now labelled under this moniker, but artists which sold less in their heyday such as The Stooges or The Velvet Underground or certain more novelty acts such as The Monkees are labelled as garage rock or, simply, pop respectively. Why? That word nostalgia rears its head once more. Modern media streams such as television, radio and internet blogs and so on provide the populace with an image of the mid-1960s as a revolutionary time and a point in which pop-culture and subsequently the art produced in conjunction with this became ‘serious’(a) to echo Adorno. No longer were lyricists talking of love for their cutie-pie, they were now commenting on the Vietnam War. Andy Warhol was giving us a damning indictment on consumerism through pop-art images of consumer products and ‘art-as-marketing’ rather than Eucharistic paintings or river views. The problem with this, of course, is that it is far too easy to believe all of this. Though the 1960s was a particularly revolutionary time both culturally and musically, it is unfair to suggest, as is often the case in modern media, that it was the most significant. The 1960s was a time of change for music, fashion, art and general liberalism yes, but strides were still made thereafter, in the decades that followed and before, in those that preceded, to improve upon this. As Jonathon Brody Kramnick said of the English canon in the abovementioned quote, so too has the moment come for the terms of The Beatles, Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones etc.’s reception been set for years to come.

Gatekeepers Playing God?

The simple answer to the other thesis question is to call it a justification of a job. The fundamental reason behind the music press “gatekeepers of music” ‘playing God’ with the idea of what the best available popular music to us is so as to both justify and retain their position in the world as the gatekeepers. If the press were not able to come up with lists of the ‘classics’ or the ‘greats’, one might question what it is they are critiquing exactly. As it is these polls and the subsequent canon they form are useful to the populace for points of reference and useful to the press to keep their all-seeing, all-knowing position defensible. They are also useful to the artists listed as they help cement their name in the history of an art form and surely do no harm to their record sales and tour grossing.

Conclusion

Markets reflect people’s thoughts apparently. If we then correlate sales to ‘greatness’ in that case, The people of the United Kingdom of Great Britain believe that The Beatles are the greatest, most revered and most classic band of all time. Looking at music press opinion polls’ results, this would seem to be a fair comment. The popular music canon undoubtedly exists, if only as a concept, but there are concrete canonical lists held in high esteem, such as Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, which are analogous to the Great Books lists in literature to cement the idea of a popular music canon. The popular music canon shows that an art form once labelled by an elitist German Marxist as “non-serious music”(b) has developed its own in-house elitism and now has propelled The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and The Clash to the dizzy heights of seriousness while scowling down at Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, The Backstreet Boys, Take That and Justin Bieber: “You are not to be taken seriously!” Are the gatekeepers of music now comparable to the Frankfurt School men who so undermined the popular music model.

One must remember that to call a popular music canon a good or bad thing would be naïve. To call it gospel, however, would be equally so. As fashions change certain albums or songs will appear in future lists as they have in the past, but the world seems to have made its mind up on the truly classic works of popular music and, somewhere in the top 20 of those future lists, will probably be Sgt. Peppers…, Exile on Main Street and Highway 61 Revisited.

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Bibliography

[i] Kramnick, Jonathon Brody; The Making of the English Canon; PMLA, Vol. 112, No. 5 (p. 1087); Oct., 1997. Any subsequent reference to this material shall be marked next to the quote in number form in brackets e.g. (1).

[ii] Benjamins, John; Motivation in Language: Studies in Honor of Günter Radden (p. 275); University of Leuven / University of Hamburg / University of Duisburg-Essen; 2003.

[iii] Evidence taken from the results of: The Observer Music Monthly’s Top 100 British Albums; The Observer Newpaper UK; 2004.

[iv] Evidence taken from the results of: Rolling Stone Magazine 500 Greatest Albums of All Time; Rolling Stone Magazine, USA; 2003.

[v] Evidence taken from the results of: Channel 4’s The 100 Greatest Albums of All Time; Channel 4 Television,UK; 2004.

[vi] Adorno, Theodor; On Popular Music; Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, New York: Institute of Social Research; 1941. Any subsequent reference to this material shall be marked next to the quote in letter form in brackets e.g. (a).

[vii] Evidence taken from: Dimery, Robert; 1001 Songs You Must Hear before You Die; Cassell Illustrated, UK; 2010.

[viii] Evidence taken from: Dimery, Robert; 1001 Albums You Must Hear before You Die; Cassell Illustrated, UK; 2010.

New Blog!!!!!!!!!!!!

Right, here it is, The Gospel's Little Brother. This blog is a showcase of some of the academic work I've undertaken on Popular Music. Don't forget to check out my main blog @ lukecloherty.blogspot.com. Enjoy!

Essay Written January 2011
From Dub to Dubstep (Echo: From Tubby to Tinie Tempah): The Effect of Jamaican Music on British Music (Echo: and Vice Versa)


If you’ve ever wondered why seven white ‘nutty boys’ from Camden Town sounded so much like Prince Buster and Desmond Dekker, why today’s youth on the streets of London, Manchester and Birmingham speak with such affected Patois accents or why The Clash decided to cover Junior Murvin’s Police and Thieves then hopefully this essay will provide some answers.
The essay will discuss the musical relationship between two countries, namely Great Britain and Jamaica, and the technologies which made all of it possible. It will pry into the political history between the two countries and try to draw up sociological reasons as to why, since the early 1970s, lots of British ‘urban music’ has had a real Jamaican feel to it. This essay will discuss the various techniques employed by certain artists and producers in the genres of Dub, Reggae, Rocksteady, Jungle, U.K. Garage and Dubstep and the technologies used which changed the way the records of these genres sounded. It will discuss the distinct methods of time controlling for a sound, mixing two songs to ‘beat match’ in nightclubs and the way a certain bpm count, vocal timbre or syncopated rhythm denotes a certain genre.

The History Bit: A Brief Look at Some of the Historical Musical Relationship between Britain and Jamaica


In short, this essay will be a brief study and history of British urban music and Jamaican urban music since the early 1970s. From King Tubby right up to Tinie Tempah, there has been direct influence and borrowing back and forth between these two islands…
In the early 1800s the British colony of Jamaica was central to Britain’s slave trade for sugar. Plantations existed all over the island providing Britain with a cost-effective way to produce sugar as the industrial century was starting out. By the 1830s Britain was forced to end the slave trade on sugar plantations amidst morality issues. The British decided to also stop producing sugar on the island altogether around this time and concentrated most of its Jamaican profiteering into the banana trade. Jamaica stayed a British colony until the 1950s. During the first and second world wars Jamaican soldiers stood side by side with the British and Allied Forces against Germany. As soon as Britain granted independence to Jamaica the law lords of Britain also granted asylum to many Jamaican nationals. The influx of Jamaicans into cities across Britain caused racial tension. Many black Jamaicans were looked down upon by white British nationals who had been bred to believe that they were superior to the black Jamaicans. Many Jamaicans moved into the Notting Hill and Brixton areas of London and brought with them their own culture. By the 1970s the streets of Notting Hill and Brixton were awash with the sound of Jamaican music. A young man named Paul Simonon, who would go on to become the bass player for The Clash was growing up in Brixton and Notting Hill intermittently due to his parent’s separation and subsequent residence in Brixton and Notting Hill respectively (mother in Notting Hill, father in Brixton).  The sounds of dub, reggae, ska and rocksteady influenced Simonon heavily and his future band mates Joe Strummer and Mick Jones. (a) Around the time of punk’s year zero in 1976, the big sounds on the streets and the charts were a mixture of prog-rock, AOR, pop and much more. The ideology of punk was to tear down this ‘establishment rock’ and give rock music back to the masses. The days of virtuoso guitarists turning their back on audiences to break into a minute and a half of undulated solo picking were numbered…
Around this time Jamaican music had a voice in Britain. Mega-star Bob Marley was regularly hitting the UK top ten singles chart and the underground sounds of dub and rocksteady were proving to be more than just a flash in the pan. Operating under the name of King Tubby, a man born Osbourne Ruddock is credited with creating this genre and is also credited by Greg Milner in his book Perfecting Sound Forever: The Story of Recorded Music as creating what he calls the “pro-tooling of the world”, put in layperson’s terms Milner is saying that without King Tubby we may not now have all of the digital audio workstations such as Logic, Ableton or Reason without King Tubby’s work.  The following is a short account from Milner’s book on an incident which would shape all future ‘groove-based’ (that is ‘dance’) music forever. [Note: when referring to a ‘deejay’ on the Jamaican scene, Milner is speaking about what we would know to be an ‘emcee’ or a ‘toaster’. When speaking of a ‘sound-system’ he is referring to a dub street party and when speaking of a ‘rhythm’, see ‘song’. The Jamaican music scene has different terminologies for certain roles to Britain’s.]
“One night in Kingston in the late sixties King Tubby’s sound system was in full swing. His deejay, Ewart ‘U-Roy’ Beckford was toasting on a rhythm called Stalag 17. He held the mic in his hand and shouted ‘you are now listening to King Tubby’s Hi-Fi.’
“That’s what he said, but what the crowd heard was ‘Hi Fi-Fi-Fi-Fi-Fi’.Tubby had engineered a slap-back echo by splitting U-Roy’s vocal feed and delaying one of the feeds.
“The crowd erupted. They cheered. They fired shots in the air. Philip Smart, an apprentice engineer at Tubby’s studio who was there that night, remembers people finding Tubby and lifting him up on their shoulders. ‘It was the very first time people in Jamaica had heard delay’, he says. Although nearly everyone had heard it on records ‘nobody knew how to get it in the dance. Tubbs secretly designed that, and nobody knew .After that dance, all the sound systems came by with orders for amplifiers .We couldn’t fill them all. We were building amplifiers for months.’”
The live echo King Tubby created can now be heard through the microphones of emcees at nightclubs across Britain, especially in those holding jungle, UK garage and dubstep nights. Tubby’s influence on British urban dance music has been both undeniable and almost unmatched. His influence on British rock music has been immense also. Tubby’s dub genre, along with music produced by Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and other assorted Jamaican styles was a massive influence on one of the most influential rock bands ever, the aforementioned Clash.
A quick thumb through The Clash’s back catalogue shows a cover version of Armagideon Time by Willie Williams as the B-side to one of the group’s biggest hits London Calling. It also shows a cover of Police and Thieves by Junior Murvin (co-written and produced by Perry) appearing on the band’s eponymous first album and a cover of Pressure Drop by Toots and the Maytals as the B-side to their 1979 single The English Civil War. A quick listen to The Clash’s back catalogue shows self-penned songs by the band including the reggae-punk rock hybrid of the single White Man in the Hammersmith Palais, the dub heavy, syncopated, ‘bass-as-lead-instrument’ aesthetic of Guns of Brixton from their third LP London Calling and their ode to dub, and subsequently the work of King Tubby, One More Dub from their fourth album Sandinista.
The 1970s musical relationship between Britain and Jamaica was not all one way traffic in terms of borrowing. Jamaican music’s biggest star of the day, ever in fact, Bob Marley released Punky Reggae Party in 1977. This release was a response to The Clash’s cover of Murvin’s Police and Thieves it is rumoured. The song lists punk bands in its lyric (The Damned, The Clash, The Jam) and overall has a timbral feel of a rock-reggae song. The syncopation is still there, however, its essence has a rock feeling, especially in the more rasped, rock tinged timbre of Marley’s voice in the song.
Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s Jamaican music was influencing British music heavily and, especially in the case of Bob Marley, the inverse can be argued.

The Science Bit: A Brief Look at Some of the Technologies Used in Jamaican Dub and Reggae and Those Used in British Dubstep and UK Garage


It could be argued that in the development and production of Jamaican Reggae and Dub two men held the esteem of being the ‘main players’. King Tubby and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry were, in many ways, the originators of dub and reggae production. The production work of these two men created the sounds of dub and reggae.
Perry, as the producer-in-chief of most of Bob Marley’s music as well as that of Junior Murvin and Max Romeo, was behind some of the biggest reggae hits of the 1970s. Working from his back-yard, self-built studio The Black Ark,  Perry employed various techniques and used various technologies to create his echoed, syncopated sound. Perry created many dub plates (dub songs) by employing techniques and methods used originally by King Tubby (more on these in a moment).
King Tubby is the man credited with creating dub. Period. The maverick work he undertook gave the world a new sound. Dub, in the main, comes from taking finished, mixed reggae songs and remixing them, stripping out the vocals and introducing effects like echo and reverb to give the songs a more spaced-out sonic scape.  Dub music was, in the main part, created for Sound Systems. Sound Systems were a form of popular Jamaican street party in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Tubby had his own, well attended, sound system called King Tubby’s Hi-Fi which later became King Tubby’s Sound System. The Sound Systems were vital to dub music’s development. Oft used by the likes of Tubby and Perry as a platform for playing new dub creations, the parties were clearly the pre-cursor to the raves and nightclub nights of the 1990s and 2000s in Britain. Although it is certainly arguable that UK garage and dubstep club nights owe just as much to the Manchester rave scene and Factory Records, the 1970s disco scene in New York and 1980s hip-hop, their roots lie closest to dub and its Sound Systems. From the employment of an emcee (deejay in Jamaica) using spoken word hype slogans over the top of the bass-led repetitive music to the voracious violence and crime(1) at these events one can see just how analogous they are. Without Tubby and his resident deejay U-Roy ‘selecting’ hits and ‘spitting’ or ‘toasting’ respectively, the UK garage and dubstep club scenes of London, Manchester and Birmingham would arguably have never been birthed. By taking out the vocals and using echoes and reverb, making the dub records bass-heavy and rhythm dependent Tubby created dub and, subsequently helped create the bass-heavy, rhythm dependent instrumental sounds of UK garage and dubstep.
In the 1990s there was a buzz around Jamaican influenced club music in London. Jungle music had reached the UK charts in the earlier part of the decade with its fast tempo (generally 174 – 190 bpm), reggae tinged aesthetic and employment of emcees at club nights. By the mid-1990s, however, jungle’s honeymoon was over. Guitar-led Britpop and American Gangsta’ Rap had taken over the whole of Britain leaving the land devoid of any of its own urban music in the charts. UK garage came about amidst this scene and by 1999 and 2000 was starting to dominate the airwaves. Its sound was, rudimentarily, a slightly slowed down jungle (garage was generally recorded at about 138 bpm) with more melodic focus and often sung vocal parts and emcee raps akin to those in US hip-hop. Garage acts such as So Solid Crew and Misteeq hit the top of the UK singles charts with 21 Seconds – So Solid Crew’s hit which gave each emcee a slot of 21 seconds within the framework of the song to say something, anything in a rhythmic flowed pattern – hitting number 1 and All I Want, by Mis Teeq, hitting number 2. UK garage’s, and its successor dubstep’s, hits were generally made on modern-day Digital Audio Workstations such as Cubase, Pro-Tools and Logic where the producers of the records would use in-built drum machine plug-ins and synthesizer settings to create drum loops and bass sounds respectively. Each bass part would more than likely have been made by sequencer technology. How one can come to this conclusion is through listening. Bass parts in garage and dubstep songs play so consistently on-time that one can surmise that they are not played.
The success of UK garage and dubstep over the last 10 years follows a culture in Britain whereby Jamaican influenced dance music has historically been a constant and big hit on the streets of the major English cities, in the nightclubs and raves across the country and also, vitally, in the charts. If one takes a look at the recent success of artists such as Magnetic Man and Chase and Status and the success of So Solid Crew and Mis Teeq at the start of the 21st Century it is easy to draw a correlative line with the success of Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and King Tubby before them. Where people once went to the Hammersmith Palais to dance to Jamaican dub and reggae, now they may be found in the SE1 club dancing to dubstep or jungle or UK garage. As in many aspects of British social and musical movements, not much has changed, but just been given a new name.

Conclusion


The outcome of the studies undertaken from the essay shows that from dub to dubstep, Jamaican and British music have been intrinsically linked. The socio-political ties of the two countries have led to immigration and patriation to quote Canadian Law. Our ex-colonial cousins whom were once forced into slavery by the dreadful regime that was the old British Empire now influence us musically, artistically and socially and thus British cultural outlets can only be the better for it. Technologically, Jamaican music has changed popular music forever with its liberal uses of echoes and reverberation and inventing the popular modern fad of remixing. Without King Tubby we may never have had digital audio workstations or the remix and subsequently may never have had hip-hop from the USA or UK garage, jungle or dubstep from these shores. At the time of writing the popular British rapper Tinie Tempah has been nominated for four Brit Awards, maybe he should dedicate them to Tubby, because without him it is certainly arguable that his songs may never have sounded like they do.
The technological advances made by Jamaican dub have created British dubstep.