War Dubs
University of Auckland (New Zealand)
<http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.02.11>
Dub’s doubling and dispersion of sounds in new moments of recording and performance frustrates the search for a root or origin. So we must tread a fine line between acknowledging the contributions of Jamaican music to the development of other music genres beyond the Caribbean, and accepting that Kingston dub synchronically and diachronically is itself part of, and in some respects beholden to, a network or assemblage of various, distinctive musical practices, forms, technologies and institutions.
One of the most forceful articulations of how we might think about genealogies of music is Jeremy Deller’s artwork The History of the World (1997–2004), which presents a flow diagram that connects Acid House music in the UK in the late 1980s to Brass Band music that sprang from the industrial culture of the mid-nineteenth century. Such a picture might help us to visualize the affinities, threads and traces that run through Jamaican dub and other electronic dance music since its emergence in Kingston studios and sound system culture in the early 1970s.
My interest here is primarily in how a few of dub’s techniques pervade electronic dance music culture and mediate the representations and affects of violent conflict, particularly since 9/11 with the “war on terror”, the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, and the growth in the western hemisphere of surveillance and securitization. My research project is tentatively titled “War is in the Dance”, after a version of Frankie Paul’s 1984 dancehall hit “Worries in the Dance”, backed by the Roots Radics, produced by Henry “Junjo” Lawes at Channel One, and mixed by Sylvan Morris at Dynamic Sound Studio. The linguistic and phonetic slippage between the utterance “worries in the dance” and “war is in the dance” opens up an indeterminate third space for dubwise speculation. As Michael Veal has noted, the “music’s structural uncertainty” also suggests “insecurity” (2011: 256).
Dub’s theatrical sonics of fear and dread inform the way crisis is evoked in many electronic genres. Dub’s intimate relationship with the MIDI age of sequencing is clear on King Tubby’s Special 1973–1976, which collects the engineer’s dubs of tracks produced by Niney the Observer and Bunny “Striker” Lee. In the album’s notes, Steve Barrow writes that the cut “A Rougher Version” “has a keyboard intro which appears to anticipate Acid House music by a decade”.
Even the 2009 YouTube uploader of this song comments that “Tubby and Bunny Lee accidentally invented Techno some 12 years ahead of schedule”. “A Rougher Version” is a 1976 dub of Jackie Edwards’ “Invasion”, itself a cover of Burning Spear’s “The Invasion” from his famous album Marcus Garvey (the version on the dub album Garvey’s Ghost is titled “Black Wa Da-Da”). Here one finds the grand narrative of the Middle Passage in fragments as Tubby foregrounds Edwards’ echoing phrase of “Took us away from Africa in order to steal our culture”. The otherworldliness of the electronic pulse opening the track, the warped high-pitched tones and distorted piano notes are designed for sound system shock and awe. In the documentary Dub Echoes (Bruno Natal, 2008), Steve Barrow reminds us that the dancehall was open air. The dubplates of Tubby’s Hometown Hi-Fi sound would send the sharp treble of amplified cymbals richocheting across city neighborhoods. The bass would vibrate through dancing bodies and rattle buildings. Electronic bleeps, drones, gunshots and police sirens in the dub mixes, or added live in the dance, would reshape the anxieties of an everyday life of police curfews and assassinations into musical entertainment.
The techniques of the sound system remain at the heart of what Linton Kwesi Johnson termed “bass culture” (on his 1980 album of the same title) and they continue to reverberate in the belly of “bass music”, the category applied to several genres today. The war mode is part and parcel of the “sonic dominance” that Julian Henriques (2011) has argued is the raison d’être of sound system practice, ritualized in the sound clash between competing sound system operators. Steve Goodman has drawn attention to the sound system as central to “sonic warfare” with the “almost totalitarian sensuality of bass materialism” activating fear “to be transduced and enjoyed in a popular musical context” (2010: 29).
The Bug (Kevin Martin) has taken on board this aspect of sound system aesthetics. Martin’s Twitter and Facebook feeds often feature reference to the heavyweight sound that will “destroy” live audiences as they take masochistic pleasure in the onslaught of rhythm and power. That loudness and bass effect are supported live and on record by the battle mode of many of his MC collaborators. Daddy Freddy, Riko, Flowdan and Burro Banton channel and modify the Jamaican tradition of booming DJ voices like Cutty Ranks, Bounty Killer and Ninjaman. The Bug’s several collaborations with Warrior Queen have included a tune expressing outrage at the London transport bombings by Islamists on July 7, 2005 (“Dem a Bomb We” from 2005) as well as her transformation into a military cyborg in the video for “Poison Dart”, as giant beetles operate like mobile sound systems in an apocalyptic desert battleground.
Well before the term Afrofuturism had gained much critical momentum, and in the still early days of the Internet, Martin was already sensitive to dub as “a technological agent of transformation,” as he noted in his compilation Macro Dub Infection Volume One (1995), which included expected digital dub like the Disciples and the Rootsman, alongside the more unexpected post-rock group Tortoise, drum ‘n’ bass duo 4 Hero, and a host of other artists from disparate music fields. Martin’s notes present a genealogy to match Jeremy Deller’s flow diagram, with citations from and commentary on Tubby, space pop impressario Joe Meek, avant-garde electronic modernists like George Russell, Tod Dockstader, sound system guru Jah Shaka, jazz composer and band leader Sun Ra, Brian Eno and David Byrne, Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis and his engineer Teo Macero, and cut-up artist William S. Burroughs.
Just as The Bug signifies surveillance, Fefe Talavera and Simon Fowler’s artwork for its releases (e.g. the latter’s At War with Time series) alludes to the iconography of the security state, as well as comic book and sci-fi landscapes of cities under bombing. The Bug’s oeuvre seems apposite in a period when music’s function as a weapon has been a concern for musicians, audiences and scholars (Cusick 2008; Cloonan and Johnson 2013; Pieslak 2009). The expansive catalogue of Muslimgauze (Bryn Jones) uses dub techniques with jarring, often ear-splitting distortion in his obsessive rendition of conflict in the Islamic world. Jones died in 1999, but was such a prolific bedroom producer (in Salford, England) that several labels continue to release “new” material.
Dub’s dread through reverb, echo, Jamaican vocals and most importantly bass frequencies is one of the foundations of dubstep from the early and mid-2000s. Digital Mystikz , Shackleton and Pinch generated cavernous recordings designed for the 12” single format and rumbling intimacy of small clubs, with dub’s high-contrast drum and sub-bass for melancholic affect, suggesting the exhaustion of war by way of the haunting capacities of dub.
This dub ethos is also characterized by a technological fetishism for the snap, crackle and pop of vinyl, and/or the murkiness and hiss of tape. The exemplar of this tendency is the music of Burial which uses these effects to create mournful and haunted soundscapes. It is telling that Burial’s “Come Down To Us” (from 2014’s Rival Dealer EP) is used in the first two minutes of Adam Curtis’s 2015 film Bitter Lake about the US, UK and Soviet Union’s involvement in Afghanistan. One of the key moments in the film involves a Russian veteran in a wheelchair on a subway train shouting, “We’ve brought back Mujahideen ghosts.”
Kibwe Tavares’s remarkable science-fiction short film Robots of Brixton (2011) also draws on dub hauntology, featuring proletarian robots that battle police robots, sound bites of mainstream racist reportage of the 1981 conflict in Brixton, and ending with Karl Marx’s famous statement that “history repeats itself, not as tragedy, but as farce.” Mourad Bennacer’s sound design for the film is a turbulent mix that includes a DJ Hiatus dub with a re-recording of dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “Insurrection” which documented the events of 1981. The film had a timely release in the same year that rioting broke out in several British cities following the police shooting of Mark Duggan on 4 August.
Static, white noise, hums, drones, electronic signals and buzzes in the productions of The Bug and Burial draw upon the musique concrète of Jamaican dub. The analogue sampling and collage of police sirens, animal roars, cars, babies crying and media sources in dub albums such as Joe Gibbs’ famous series African Dub All Mighty Volumes 1-4 (1975-1979) and Lee Perry and the Upsetters’ Revolution Dub (1975) have influenced punk and electronic music genres.
Mixing audio from television, radio and film with dance rhythms is one point of convergence between dub and industrial music. News broadcasts are sprinkled across dance records that address political issues. At the intersection of dub and post-punk industrial noise in the 1980s On-U Sound and its house producer Adrian Sherwood were responsible for an extensive catalogue, including the reggae styles of Dub Syndicate, Creation Rebel, African Headcharge and Prince Far-I, but also the more dissonant cut-up aesthetics of The Voice of Authority, Tackhead, Mark Stewart and the Maffia. Sheffield group Cabaret Voltaire developed its sound in the 1970s and 80s, influenced by dub, industrial tape culture and synthesizer music. Inspired by Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Conversation (1974), surveillance remained a theme in their work. Albums such as The Voice of America (1980), Red Mecca (1981) and The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord (1985) sampled the speeches of politicians, policemen and televangelists, and addressed conflicts between the United States and the Islamic world, and the growth of religious fundamentalism.
Hip hop and DJ culture have made audio collage ubiquitous. Some of the most common examples of sampling voices in dance music involve the direct citation of Jamaican DJs from dub recordings. Hip hop, jungle, drum ’n’ bass and dubstep, and the jingles and samples for radio stations pay homage to these oral hooks. For example, several samples from Mikey Dread’s “Operator’s Choice” from his African Anthem (The Mikey Dread Show Dubwise) (1979) are peppered across hundreds of recordings, radio mixes and podcasts, far beyond the bursting forth of the words “Riddim fulla culture” around the 30-second mark of Public Enemy’s “Welcome to the Terrordome” on Fear of a Black Planet (Def Jam, 1990).
What happens to war modes in electronic music when the bass culture of dub and club sound systems is increasingly mediated in what Wayne Marshall (2014) terms “treble culture”? Today’s listening privileges the tinnier sounds of cellphones, laptops, pads and game consoles with in-built or blue-tooth speakers, as well as the bass and sub-bass of large sound systems. Production styles have changed to suit smaller playback technologies, even as mobile devices and accessories have enhanced their bass output.
Video games and their war simulations have influenced the sound and look of music genres that draw on dub aesthetics. Grime emerged in the early 2000s with a generation of producers and pirate radio DJs shaped by Sega, Nintendo and the Sony Playstation, and games often adapted from kung fu films and Japanese anime. Fighting games gel with the battle culture of MCs and producers.
The Japanese music of many video games has informed grime and orientalist electronic music (Sinogrime, for example), which has a more pointillist sound with glacial synth melodies and washes over booming bass lines. Song titles and imagery in a growing number of tracks with this sound often refer to war from the skies. For example, the LA duo Nguzunguzu (its name taken from Jamaican DJ Yellowman’s dancehall hit “Zunguzunguzung”) produced videos and artwork for its Skycell EP (2011) that dramatize global conflict as it appears in video games and sci-fi films. Fatima Al Qadiri’s “Vatican Vibes” (2011) presents a helicopter raid in a pastiche of a trailer for a new video game.
References to flight in recordings with soaring synths yet menacing low-end frequencies play on the idea of war from the air as the “technological sublime,” those “experiences of awe and wonder, often tinged with an element of terror” as David Nye describes the concept (1994: xvi). A large number of post-dubstep and techno records mention drones in their titles. Mumdance and Logos, for example, the producers of “Border Drone” (2015) define their sound and that of other simpatico producers as “weightless,” an emergent sub-genre.
The immersive three-dimensional spaces and processed beats of all of these dub-inflected recordings reveal several different modes of articulating the affects of war—from sonic dominance, through cut-up and collage for ironic and polemical purposes, to the technological sublime of flight troubled by the terror of bombing. These particular clusters of musical affect have to be theorized in relation to the broader circulation of mediated war affects. But they demonstrate the force, adaptability and continuing resonances of dub sound and culture for processing the wars in our midst.
Nabeel Zuberi is Senior Lecturer in Media, Film and Television at the University of Auckland. His publications include Sounds English: Transnational Popular Music (2001) and Black Popular Music in Britain since 1945 (co-edited with Jon Stratton, 2014). He has co-hosted The Basement, a weekly music show on BASE 107.3 FM Auckland since 2004.
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