Versions, Dubs and Riddims: Dub and the Transient Dynamics of Jamaican Music

Authors

  • Thomas Vendryes Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne, ENS Cachan, CNRS, Universite Paris Saclay, 61 avenue du President Wilson, 94230 Cachan. Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne, Universite Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne.

Keywords:

dub, versions, Jamaica, riddim, sound technology, audio-engineer

Abstract

Dub emerged in Jamaica in the early 1970s, and, for a decade, it became a prolific and intensely innovative dimension of Jamaican popular music. Yet, during the mid-1980s, while dub flourished at the international level, influencing popular music in general, the genre of dub declined in popularity in Jamaica. How could this musical innovation, so evidently associated with Jamaica, expand and develop internationally while at the same time decline in Jamaica itself? In this paper, I explore the modalities and evolution of Jamaican music production and consumption. Through a description of the Jamaican music industry context, with reference to individual artists’ paths and a summary of Jamaican dub production, I show that even as the Jamaican music milieu was highly favorable to the emergence of dub, dub proliferated as a genre only by developing ties to a diaspora of international audiences and practitioners. 

Author Biography

Thomas Vendryes, Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne, ENS Cachan, CNRS, Universite Paris Saclay, 61 avenue du President Wilson, 94230 Cachan. Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne, Universite Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne.

Thomas Vendryes is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences of the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan and researcher at the Centre d’Économie de la Sorbonne (France). His research focuses on socio-economic change in developing countries.

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Published

03-Nov-2015

Issue

Vol. 7 No. 2 (2015): Echoes from the Dub Diaspora

Section

Feature Articles

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